4 ms·

Active knowledge

43 points by azhenley 3y ago

Hextinium 3y ago
I have been thinking about this quite intently lately, most things are inherently so complex that you by doing almost anything hit unknown unknowns, things that you don't know you don't know. But you don't need to know. You don't need to know what metallurgical structure a knife is in. It's just a knife. I think the ability to make something that requires less domain knowledge to use than to make it is in fact the primary thing that moves us along as a species. And that the complexity that we hit when things go wrong is just the manifestation is the principal "there is a long was down to the bottom".
- zikzak 3y ago
  If technology is culture, the relationship between the maker and user is that link which creates what we think of as a social fabric. The most fundamental aspect of that is simply cooperation (hunting together, agreeing not to horde resources when others don't have enough, etc).
LeonB 3y ago
Interesting article, from my pov anyway. The argument put forward is a little like those between "descriptivists" and "prescriptivists" in the realm of grammar arguments. I was expecting to see this Alfred North Whitehead Quote pop up -- "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them." Whitehead making the point that not knowing how it works is part of the magic of the whole thing! If every layer of abstraction "needed" to be understood by everybody: the layers would not be serving any purpose. Whitehead said other things too that were clever and pithy.
- defrost 3y ago
  eg: "From this proposition it will follow, when arithmetical addition has been defined, that 1 + 1 = 2." ~ Alfred North Whitehead (& Bertie R.) Volume I, Principia Mathematica https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=umhistmath&cc=umhistmath&idno=aat3201.0001.001&frm=frameset&view=image&seq=401 https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=umhis...
  - LeonB 3y ago
    Yeh - it’s a bit of a slow boiler that one. Takes, what, 379 pages to establish that 1 + 1 = 2. Still, Orwell took longer to arrive at 2 + 2 = 5. (Edited to include actual page number since you linked directly to it above, thank you!!)
    - defrost 3y ago
      To be fair there's a lot of preamble to lift by the bootstraps from the concept of object, not object, set of objects. Recdep nowdate: 2 + 2 = 3
- TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
  > "descriptivists" and "prescriptivists" in the realm of grammar arguments In terms of working academic linguists, this is not a debate. "Prescriptivism" belongs in style guides, not in linguistic texts. All linguists are "descriptivists".
LeonB 3y ago
Also notable for its absence was any link to "the cube rule" of food identification, which is, I believe a vital work in this field: https://cuberule.com/ https://cuberule.com/
trabant00 3y ago
Philosophers have been arguing about what it really means to know something for millennia so I don't think we can make any significant progress there. But what about practical purposes? How do you decide if a mechanic knows enough to fix your car, a dietitian to help you lose weight? A possible life partner how to build a healthy relationship, a friend to give the right life advice? My current rule of thumb is very similar to "knowing how something works = knowing how to work it", meaning one really only knows something if he's already done it in the past. Preferably multiple times. This rule tells you that nobody knows some things, for example things that did not exist in the past so nobody could have done them. How will AI impact our world? What will happen if we rewrite Linux in Rust? What will be the outcome of a new social or economic policy?
svilen_dobrev 3y ago
> "knowledge is verb" reminded me of Pirsig's hint about "good is a noun" . maybe the only difference between animals and us, is that we might be able to dig deep and find "how/why it works" (disassemble, reverse engineer, analyze, etc - in order to repair it, or better it, or make/invent another use of it ) - thus propelling ourselves into new fields. sadly that find-out-how to-the-bottom attitude is slowly disappearing around.
abrax3141 3y ago
The thing that is a verb isn’t “knowledge”, it’s “explanation”. Giving an appropriate explanation (or, more generally, answering a question appropriately) is a problem to be solved. Problem solving (whether one is expecting explicit goal seeking or fluently generating from an LLM that encodes “knowledge”, or some other method) is always an interACTIVE process.
satisfice 3y ago
A hot dog is a sandwich. The only reason people say it isn’t is that they are embarrassed that they had to be told the obvious. When it was suggested to me that a hot dog is a sandwich, my reaction was “oh, huh. I guess it technically is.” But I guess some people bring Wittgenstein back from the dead.
- StrictDabbler 3y ago
  It was originally called a "Hot Dog Sandwich", "Frankfurter Sandwich" or "sausage sandwich" around the turn of the 20th century. This was the straight-forward terminology. Nobody has to go back and prove it from first principles. Dropping "sandwich" from our descriptors over time for convenience didn't change what it is.

43 points by azhenley 3y ago

I have been thinking about this quite intently lately, most things are inherently so complex that you by doing almost anything hit unknown unknowns, things that you don't know you don't know. But you don't need to know. You don't need to know what metallurgical structure a knife is in. It's just a knife. I think the ability to make something that requires less domain knowledge to use than to make it is in fact the primary thing that moves us along as a species. And that the complexity that we hit when things go wrong is just the manifestation is the principal "there is a long was down to the bottom".

zikzak 3y ago
If technology is culture, the relationship between the maker and user is that link which creates what we think of as a social fabric. The most fundamental aspect of that is simply cooperation (hunting together, agreeing not to horde resources when others don't have enough, etc).

LeonB 3y ago

Interesting article, from my pov anyway. The argument put forward is a little like those between "descriptivists" and "prescriptivists" in the realm of grammar arguments. I was expecting to see this Alfred North Whitehead Quote pop up -- "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them." Whitehead making the point that not knowing how it works is part of the magic of the whole thing! If every layer of abstraction "needed" to be understood by everybody: the layers would not be serving any purpose. Whitehead said other things too that were clever and pithy.

defrost 3y ago
eg: "From this proposition it will follow, when arithmetical addition has been defined, that 1 + 1 = 2." ~ Alfred North Whitehead (& Bertie R.) Volume I, Principia Mathematica https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=umhistmath&cc=umhistmath&idno=aat3201.0001.001&frm=frameset&view=image&seq=401 https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=umhis...
- LeonB 3y ago
  Yeh - it’s a bit of a slow boiler that one. Takes, what, 379 pages to establish that 1 + 1 = 2. Still, Orwell took longer to arrive at 2 + 2 = 5. (Edited to include actual page number since you linked directly to it above, thank you!!)
  - defrost 3y ago
    To be fair there's a lot of preamble to lift by the bootstraps from the concept of object, not object, set of objects. Recdep nowdate: 2 + 2 = 3
TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
> "descriptivists" and "prescriptivists" in the realm of grammar arguments In terms of working academic linguists, this is not a debate. "Prescriptivism" belongs in style guides, not in linguistic texts. All linguists are "descriptivists".

LeonB 3y ago

Also notable for its absence was any link to "the cube rule" of food identification, which is, I believe a vital work in this field: https://cuberule.com/ https://cuberule.com/

trabant00 3y ago

Philosophers have been arguing about what it really means to know something for millennia so I don't think we can make any significant progress there. But what about practical purposes? How do you decide if a mechanic knows enough to fix your car, a dietitian to help you lose weight? A possible life partner how to build a healthy relationship, a friend to give the right life advice? My current rule of thumb is very similar to "knowing how something works = knowing how to work it", meaning one really only knows something if he's already done it in the past. Preferably multiple times. This rule tells you that nobody knows some things, for example things that did not exist in the past so nobody could have done them. How will AI impact our world? What will happen if we rewrite Linux in Rust? What will be the outcome of a new social or economic policy?

svilen_dobrev 3y ago

> "knowledge is verb" reminded me of Pirsig's hint about "good is a noun" . maybe the only difference between animals and us, is that we might be able to dig deep and find "how/why it works" (disassemble, reverse engineer, analyze, etc - in order to repair it, or better it, or make/invent another use of it ) - thus propelling ourselves into new fields. sadly that find-out-how to-the-bottom attitude is slowly disappearing around.

abrax3141 3y ago

The thing that is a verb isn’t “knowledge”, it’s “explanation”. Giving an appropriate explanation (or, more generally, answering a question appropriately) is a problem to be solved. Problem solving (whether one is expecting explicit goal seeking or fluently generating from an LLM that encodes “knowledge”, or some other method) is always an interACTIVE process.

satisfice 3y ago

A hot dog is a sandwich. The only reason people say it isn’t is that they are embarrassed that they had to be told the obvious. When it was suggested to me that a hot dog is a sandwich, my reaction was “oh, huh. I guess it technically is.” But I guess some people bring Wittgenstein back from the dead.

StrictDabbler 3y ago
It was originally called a "Hot Dog Sandwich", "Frankfurter Sandwich" or "sausage sandwich" around the turn of the 20th century. This was the straight-forward terminology. Nobody has to go back and prove it from first principles. Dropping "sandwich" from our descriptors over time for convenience didn't change what it is.