There are many things to take from this story -- about beginner's mind, the diversity of human experience, and the interoperability of language. But what stood out to me most was two opposing lessons about shared protocols and modularity. Tomás' experiment failed. It failed because each amateur cartographer injected their own methodology and process, resulting in incompatible maps. But in another sense, Tomás succeeded. Sure, maybe this collection of artifacts would be useless for military strategy or commerce, but on the other hand... LOOK AT THESE MAPS, THESE MAPS RULE. Imagining a world in which Tomás successfully imposed a protocol and stripped these maps of their individuality feels... tragic? Dystopian?
I'm obsessed with this story because it gets at a dynamic embedded within everything designed that we rarely think about. Once you notice it, it is present in almost every conversation, at every aperture and zoom level: modularity is inversely correlated to expressiveness.
There's more discussion in the Hacker News thread. By the way, the original piece says "18th century" which I changed to "1700s" because Let's stop counting centuries.
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