Polanyi’s Paradox
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
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.
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.
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.
(Watts is great.)
- 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.
We are be born with some functions at level 4, as well as acquire new skills without going through stages 1-3, otherwise there's no possible bootstrapping mechanism.
At bottom, the reason is always "because the structures in my brain create a signal pattern". Understanding that is really the ultimate knowledge.
But I think the idea is a bit different in that Polanyi's paradox is at a higher level of awareness. Say if someone can play chess but may not able to effectively teach it. Or the linked article in the wiki has jigsaw puzzles as an example.
Žižek was talking about deeper processes. Things like people acting according to say Christian ethics while rationally disavowing them and saying they oppose them. His traditional joke about is Niels Bohr with his horseshoe above the door: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTAp3KZwYl0
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.
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.
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/senten...
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.
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.
as a speaker of English as a second language this used to happen to me once I was sufficiently tired.
I can almost do it in my native language if I am distracted "just right" (easier if it's being spoken with a different accent)
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
What answer did you find?
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.
https://i.imgur.com/tp3eLb4.png
https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo84...
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.
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.
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.
That's true, but irrelevant. We're talking about modeling a system here, not reproducing one. Those are not the same thing.
If I can fit all the firmware, schematics and silicon mask layouts of a laptop on that laptop's disk, in what sense does it not contain a complete model?
Concretely, consider that the CAD files describing a terabyte of flash are less than a terabyte, because most parts are repeated in a grid. And you can add more terabytes without increasing the size of the model noticeably. So the storage capacity of a system isn't limited to the descriptive complexity of the system. It's probably O(log N) with a huge constant. So you can have as much disk space as you like to store a model.
Well, sure; we're asking for a model, not a copy.