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Polanyi’s Paradox
- abiro 7y agoThis paradox is pretty well explained by Kahneman’s two systems I think. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow
- mannykannot 7y agoThose seem to be categories of action, rather than knowledge. Many of the examples of both types depend on tacit knowledge, and are distinguished by type 2 requiring some explicit mental intervention to initiate or sustain (e.g. sustain a higher than normal walking rate.)
- unixhero 7y agoPoliany was central to my social science master degree thesis. How do you transfer tacit knowledge across international cultural borders?
- xaedes 7y agoI would think by working together face-to-face. Learning by doing from a "master" knowing his stuff. Like an apprenticeship. What answer did you find?
- unixhero 7y agoWell it was like what you mention. Tacit knowledge must be transferred by showing, hands on learning, but was surprisingly little affected by culture and borders in global companies which was a dimension I was investigating. After all the work of putting together a thesis on the subject, it all boils down to the example of how to you train a new chef to be as good as his "master". This is still a hot topic amongst those who continue to research the Social science around Innovation, economics, sociological, management studies and so on. I enjoyed the topic, but being chained to a laptop for 6 months of thesis writing not do much.
- pedro1976 7y agoI prefer Slavoj Zizek classification into knowns and unknowns. - Known-Knowns: things we know that we know - Known-Unknowns: things that we know we don’t know - Unkown-Unknowns: things we don’t know we don’t know - Unknown-Knowns: “The things we don’t know that we know-which is precisely, the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself,” as Lacan used to say. “. This is better known as culture.
- pdpi 7y agoPolanyi's paradox isn't an alternative to that classification — rather, it explicitly states that a surprisingly large amount of knowledge falls into the "unknown knowns" classification, in areas that defy your "this is better known as culture" description.
- heavenlyblue 7y agoYeah, “unknown knowns” is better known as “the weirdo over there who just sat at the piano and started playing it perfectly having never played it before”. The parent is taking it too meta.
- zeckalpha 7y agoIs that Slavoj Zizek? I thought it was Johari.
- wastedhours 7y agoYeah, I've always known it as "the Johari Window".
- zoren 7y agoJoseph Luft and Harrington Ingham apparently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johari_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johari_window
- tw1010 7y agoI thought it was Rumsfeld. (Not joking.)
- H8crilA 7y agoNext time someone asks me how does a modern artificial neural network really work - I'll just ask them "how do you know that my face does indeed look like mine?". Or "how do you recognize people by their voices?". Or this creepy one: "can you consciously stop decoding the English I'm speaking now?". This Wikipedia page can serve as an extension of the argument.
- Simon_says 7y agoThose are all great to think about but seem rather lacking as an answer to the question.
- psychoslave 7y agoWell, I would say that to my mind we are not there. That is, despite the label of neural network, we do have a bottom up explanation of how it works (although it doesn't guaranties that this model is "what really happens out there"). On the other hand, despite the advances in neurosciences, as far as I know we don't have such a consensual bottom up model for human behaviors.
- Retric 7y agoWe have a bottom up model for very simple animals. But, even a fruit fly has 250,000 neurons that’s a lot of complexity. So, saying we understand some reflexive human behaviors from the ground up is actually a lot of progress. We are even applying that knowledge in many useful ways.
- naringas 7y ago
- SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago> activities based on tacit knowledge include recognizing a face, driving a car, riding a bike As far as I know, there are different classes of tacit knowledge here: Driving a car, riding a bike etc are learned behaviour, recent in evolutionary time, and might also in a few generations not commonly learned any more, as e.g. riding a horse is uncommon now. But recognising a face (or not being good at it) is innate in human brain structure, and not recent in evolutionary time.
- mr_crankypants 7y agoOne that might bridge that gap is learning a language. It's almost certainly much more recent than recognizing a face, but still something humans have been doing for a long time, and is a near-universal human behavior. Like the others, though, it needs to be learned, has a strong cultural component, and tends to happen with the help of others. It's also interesting because there's an entire academic field devoted to its study, and, at least from my peripheral perspective, they seem to be constantly bumping up against Polanyi's Paradox. I've seen more than one academic argue that the set of grammatical rules that we can accurately describe is a subset of the grammatical rules that we use when communicating. Which, if true, is pretty interesting, since language is a social construct - the implication is that we can fabricate and reliably transmit information that we can't actually express.
- SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago> the set of grammatical rules that we can accurately describe is a subset of the grammatical rules that we use when communicating Although rules do move from one camp to the other. For instance, people (myself included) find this article fascinating because it makes conscious a rule that English-speakers use unconsciously https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/sentence-order-adjectives-rule-elements-of-eloquence-dictionary https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/senten...
- beaconstudios 7y agoI've been reading Alan Watts' "the way of Zen" recently and this point forms a strong central pillar of his explanation. What we think of as our mind or our self, the conscious mind, seems to be basically a paper thin director on top of all the real functionality which is much more powerful and evolutionarily much older. Relatedly, our use of language to describe and identify things and phenomena falls prey to the map-territory relation in a way that can warp our thinking. But I can't do his explanations justice, I can only recommend picking up the book if you're interested in these kinds of cognitive paradoxes.
- sdenton4 7y agoConsciousness is a tiny aperture through which the universe looks at itself... (Watts is great.)
- lisper 7y agoI don't understand why this is a paradox. Isn't it just obvious that no system can contain a complete model of itself? That would be an infinite regress and hence would require infinite information.
- natosaichek 7y agoA human contains code that can recreate a complete model of that human.... Maybe you're saying that a human can't fit into a human? I agree it's not a paradox, but not for the reasons you seem to be implying.
- naringas 7y agowhat code are you refering to? if you mean DNA, then humans do not "speak" (nor think in) this code, heck... teams of people with post-docs don't even really understand it.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoFurther, most of the 'program' is in the cellular mechanics. DNA does nothing just sitting on a table. It must have a machine to 'execute on', and the cellular machinery is a whopper. I liken DNA to a paper tape with two punches: one for 'man' and one for 'mouse'. You run it through an enormous machine, and depending on which hole is punched you get a man or a mouse. But the paper tape is an almost trivial part of the process.
- lisper 7y ago> A human contains code that can recreate a complete model of that human That's true, but irrelevant. We're talking about modeling a system here, not reproducing one. Those are not the same thing.
- SilasX 7y agoSufficiently advanced modeling is indistinguishable from reproduction.
- rossdavidh 7y agoMy most important lesson in working with clients as a programmer, is that asking them how they want their program to work is like asking a native speaker to tell you the rules of grammar in their language. They have often lived with the rules of how their business process works for so long, it is intuitive, and no longer available to their conscious understanding, if it ever was. Show them a scenario, though ("X, Y, and Z happen, so the program does A and B") and they can usually immediately tell you if that's the wrong or right thing for the program to do. I have the impression that programmers, as a group, are mostly not great at understanding this, and it is a source of frustration for many of us when we program exactly what they told us to, and then it's "wrong". It is wrong. Like a linguist talking to a native speaker of another language, you often have to ask them about scenarios and piece together the actual business rules yourself. The worst part is when the customer _thinks_ they know the rules, and then don't (consciously), and you have to help them through that cognitive dissonance of realizing that the business rules they "know" aren't actually the same as the ones they know.
- stcredzero 7y agoThe worst part is when the customer _thinks_ they know the rules, and then don't (consciously), and you have to help them through that cognitive dissonance of realizing that the business rules they "know" aren't actually the same as the ones they know. A coworker of mine used to term this, "Applied Philosophy." There was a post on HN a few years ago, where a game developer had a game where all of the users were asking for an Undo key. This would have completely broken the game! So he looked into his data, and figured out that what people were mad about was moving into a stream tile and taking damage or dying. So instead, he made it impossible to move onto a stream tile, and the problem was solved.
- rossdavidh 7y agoThey knew _that_ there was a problem, but not necessarily what the problem really was, or how it should be (programmatically) solved. Sounds similar. The answer bubbles up from the subconscious ('system 1' as some put it).
- hackme1234 7y agoThis has been discussed in the past on Hacker News. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8419734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8419734
- jarmitage 7y agoHarry Collins developed a more nuanced framework for discussing tacit knowledge which I find quite provocative and useful: https://i.imgur.com/tp3eLb4.png https://i.imgur.com/tp3eLb4.png https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo8461024.html https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo84...
- axilmar 7y agoWhy is this named 'paradox' since it doesn't express a paradox?
- dlkf 7y agoThe article discusses the argument that statistical machine learning is a resolution to the paradox - as it shows that an agent can learn something without being given explicit instruction. I think this is basically a sound argument, and I find Polanyi pretty unconvincing. It's worth noting that a similar argument (albeit without a demonstration as concrete as modern ML) was actually advanced in the 1960s by Wilfrid Sellars. [0] > There is all the difference in the world between knowing how to ride a bicycle and knowing that a steady pressure by the legs of a balanced person on the pedals would result in forward motion ...It can be argued that anything which can be properly called 'knowing how to do something' presupposes a body of knowledge that; or, to put it differently, knowledge of truth or facts. If this were so, then the statement that 'ducks know how to swim' would be as metaphorical as the statement that they know that water supports them. [0] Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man - Wilfrid Sellars http://www.ditext.com/sellars/psim.html http://www.ditext.com/sellars/psim.html