s19e11: Your Model is Naive and it’s Not The Territory

0.0 Context Setting

Friday, May 30, at the Code for America Summit in a hotel in Washington, D.C.

I am in, fittingly, a hallway. I am also jetlagged. There is hotel carpet underneath me.

0.1 Events

At the time of pressing send, Hallway Track 12 The Thing About COBOL is full. I think you can check back every so often if there happen to be cancellations. There isn’t a great way for me to let people know about spaces opening up because of cancellations with Calendly.

1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

Just one thing today that I needed to vomit out through my fingers.

1.1 Your Model is Naive and it’s Not The Territory

In his piece What DOGE gets wrong about tech and government1, Don Moynihan has successfully nerd-sniped me into writing about DOGE again. For anyone who’s not interested in that, or by now is tired of it, I am very sorry. You can just skip this one?

I think DOGE ran into a The Map Is Not The Territory problem2. This is the whole thing where you want to make a map of something (duh) and then at some point you make a more accurate map because your map is missing something, and you keep doing that