Are we all (just) cartographers now?

I wanted to write about the lens that each of us tend to predominantly use to view the world. My thought is that it is enough that we are limited to our five senses in how we perceive the world; do we need to restrict our minds as well, with biased lenses?

I. Introduction

I thought I would apply the Kiviat Diagram (aka Spider Chart) as a tool to expand how we might view the world. First a quick introductory note on the Spider Chart, typically used in a business setting. Imagine 6 axes each emanating from a center point. Label each axis: i) Customer ii) Employees iii) Shareholders iv) Risk v) Products vi) Geography. I have made these categories up for illustration sake. The center point has value 0. The outer most point of the axis has, let us say, a value of 10. You now have a budget of 30 total points.

The objective is to use these 30 points along the six axes. For example, in the above illustration, you can give 10 points to customers, 8 points to employees, 6 points to geography and 6 points to products. This means that the other axes get 0 points. Anyway, spend the budget of 30 points like this and then connect the dots. What you will see is a perceptual map that looks like a spider's web. Hence the name spider-chart. This is a way of quickly checking whether your managerial emphasis is balanced or skewed towards one or the other dimensions. There is a lot more to this chart. But for the purposes of analogy the above description is sufficient.

II. Application

How do we view the world and how can we expand our view of the world to be more balanced. For example your dominant lens on the world could be left-right (i.e. political). Mine, I think is personal vs abstract (i.e. Philosophical). We could create a spider diagram with five or six axes, Left-right, Personal-abstract, quantitative vs subjective, concrete vs ambiguous, success vs happiness etc. And then connect the dots across the 6 axes to see the map of our propensity.

It might force is to use other lenses to examine the world. Here is one way of thinking about these axes and identifying our propensities that emerged from some recent conversations with a friend of mine:


- Realism vs Subjectivism: How limited is our mental construction of our world due to our brains being largely the artifact of its evolution to survive in the African savannah v something like Turing's Universal Computing Machine able to objectively compute maximized utility and quickly analyze everything via logic tables?

- Determinism vs Free Will: To what degree do we conceive of ourselves as machines following Newtonian mechanics (therefore happiness is a function answering physical needs) v a conception of human consciousness as an emergent phenomenon which has in turn allowed for `agency' to emerge with resulting conception of happiness increasingly becoming a result of what Maslow called `self-actualization' – or what the ancient Greek philosophers termed living the virtuous life?

- Rational/Analytical vs Non-Rational/Holistic: Related to realism v subjectivism, to what degree does one believe they can understand hyper-complexity or predict emergence v accepting indeterminacy, incompleteness, and uncertainty and therefore favoring the mythopoetic over the mathematical?

- Command and Control vs Emergence/Self-Organization: How much does one believe they or civil leaders can maintain control over hyper-complexity and manage emergence v allowing for diversity of thought and freedom of action?

- Collectivism vs Individualism: To what degree does one believe happiness is the result of group identity and unity of purpose v self actualization?

My friend had two thoughts about these: 1) the dangerous ground is that found at either extreme, 2) where one finds oneself at any given time is not only a function of one's `metaphysics' but also a function of the state of affairs at the time.

My submission is that we have all unwittingly been swept up in a world view that measures everything and experiences nothing (admittedly a dramatization of the current state of affairs) and that with some reflection we can bring some ying in our lives to balance the yang.
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ps - no offense to Cartographers or Cartography intended!