I like the way it kinda works regardless of if the punchline is about biological or computer science trees
You can’t have 1st and 2nd without the 3rd kind
I think the comic is about types of published articles with the 3rd being “we collated and collected a bunch of data to make this database that other researchers will find useful”-type papers. So you don’t need to rely on the map of every tree if you just map some trees yourself.
#3 is not about making observations in general but about making a map of every tree. This is a common mistake of scientists, wanting to have a complete set of data on their topic. I myself have to remind myself of this as well when designing projects. But in reality you cannot make a map of every tree and even if you could, what’s it worth? You need abstractions to understand anything and models are just that. To design a good research study you need to balance how many observations are necessary vs how much effort they take.
The map from the third is the “circumstances” of the first two. Or the “results”. First two just theorists, I guess.
