Active knowledge

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/

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".

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?

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.

> "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.

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.

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.