https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=J_Lo8_aSc7Y
So nice to see you again. And one of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about is what’s been going wrong with our sense making. What are the assumptions that we’re making that aren’t helping us to understand the world or getting in actively getting in the way of us sort of understanding what’s going on today. And I think one of those things that’s sort of embedded in the culture that’s been there for a while that sort of people are acting as if is this idea that knowledge is power and therefore more knowledge is always better. Which I think you know the second part is fair if the first part is true but as I’ve pointed out in previous videos so you know particularly my my video on power power isn’t what you think it doesn’t work the way people sort of couch it and we’ll have to dig in a little bit to what is knowledge and what can knowledge do and what is knowledge not able to do for us. What are the things that we say if we have knowledge we can’t do with it or the things that we assume that knowledge sort of inherently gives us. And so today I’d like to talk a little bit about knowledge. Now these are going to be my definitions to some extent right but I’m again I’m trying to draw on things like how people use words what they mean when they say words. Those might be two different things by the way and then what they’re intending to convey to you and maybe what the words actually mean. Right so sometimes we get information and we make different assumptions out of it. But again these are sort of my conceptions and and my terminology of my definitions if you like it cool use it I’ll never know. If you don’t like it cool don’t use it I’ll never know. Or better yet modify it to suit your own needs. So the problem with knowledge is that knowledge isn’t one thing and it’s sort of hard to identify and then John Vervecki talks a lot about the four P’s of knowing which are propositional. I make a statement you know the sky is blue that’s propositional knowledge I’ve given it to you you’ve taken the proposition or maybe not you don’t have to take propositions. That’s one type of knowledge. Procedural which in John Vervecki’s scheme is skills and skill sets and things like that. Then there’s participatory the knowledge of how you participate with other people and then his last one is perspectival which is sort of your take on the situation where you’re coming from your understanding of that framing. My conception of this is a little bit different but I don’t think it matters to some extent right because the important part is there’s more than one way in which we know something there’s more than one type of understanding we have of things in the world per se. So well you might say well wow that’s confusing it can be and you know what good is this. So the type of knowledge you have while riding a bike while you can translate it using language into say procedural and propositions like you know keep your balance and pedal your feet and hold on to the handlebars and turn when you want to turn right. You can make that into propositional knowledge but actually riding the bike is participatory. You know how to do it because you participate in it and that gives you the idea of how it works right and then but it’s very embodied obviously like you can’t ride a bike in your head the same way you ride a bike in reality. With propositions though you can sort of just state things and a lot of our knowledge is propositional a lot of what we think of as knowledge is propositional and then we equate that to power and the problem is as I pointed out in my power video power doesn’t work the way people say it does they use power a lot of different ways and it’s just it’s a ridiculous conception and so one thing knowledge doesn’t give us at all is any conception of power whatsoever like knowing more things doesn’t actually help you in the world necessarily. It can but it doesn’t and that’s why you see weird things that don’t make any sense under the knowledge is power paradigm right so if you’re thinking the world is knowledge is power and that’s a like a rule or a formula or a reality that we’re stuck with then consider this most of the self-made millionaires in the United States didn’t graduate college some of them never went in fact almost half of them I believe never even went to a college so if you think wealthy people are powerful and half of them didn’t go to college then that would kind of destroy the knowledge is power theory right there just all by itself done done if we’re using science the scientific method and that one fact boom you’re done there are other reasons why knowledge is in power it’s an odd thing not you know maybe maybe not a lot of people know this but if you engage with farming at all you’ll realize very quickly in talking to actual farmers or in talking to people who know farmers the things they write in books and talk about in classrooms about farming will not help you farm correctly at all when they make these proclamations they are typically horrifically incorrect because it turns out farming is very participatory and you have to learn how to do it by doing it experiencing it and knowing things about nature because it turns out apparently unbeknownst to anybody who works in a lab or goes to a school that where you farm makes all the difference in the world so you couldn’t say here’s a farming technique a and you can use this to farm because farming is drastically different say in the hills of the Andes where they actually did farm by the way which we couldn’t figure out for years because we science that knowledge doesn’t really tell us what we think it tells us is different from the plains which is different from anywhere in the US and all the different parts of the US farming is different so there’s all sorts of uses for land and ways to use land and raising cattle in New England is not like raising cattle in the Midwest and different parts of the Midwest aren’t like raising cattle and the other parts of the Midwest it’s very confusing and I’m not saying there isn’t knowledge there and you can’t get it but because of this idea that there’s this knowledge and it’s universal and when we know it you know we’ll have we’ll have some control which is usually what they mean when they say knowledge is power knowledge is control over the over something that’s deeply wrong most of the time now where knowledge works is in very specific controlled circumstances which is what science specializes in science specializes in controlled circumstances in science if you’re implementing the scientific method properly what you end up with is you’re going to control for as many variables as possible and change as few variables as you can and you know including controlling time right or rate of change over time which is roughly the same thing not exactly but pretty close and so yet knowledge is useful there unfortunately that can’t be brought out of the lab at all some of the lessons learned from it can be helpful outside of the lab but that’s not the same thing in one instance you have control and you’re gaining knowledge through the use of control in the other instance if you’re saying knowledge is control or like I said they’re using power they mean control knowledge is control then you’re wrong it’s not outside of the lab and it’s the control that gets you the knowledge not the other way around which isn’t to say you can’t use knowledge to get control of things you can but those are different slightly different statements and that’s the problem if you assume that once you have knowledge you have control you’re wrong knowledge doesn’t give you anything at all roughly speaking because knowledge is useless unless and until enacted so in other words the man who knows everything but does nothing has no impact on the world and dies not having added any value to the universe that’s kind of important to know but the man who does random things will eventually stumble across something good and those good things will go here and be better and and even if everything they do is bad at least you’ll be able to see that their things don’t work they’ve added a lot more value to the world now that’s an extreme case it’s not real I get it but it points to a deep asymmetry and you should pay attention to asymmetry not seem to lab talks about this a lot read all those books I say it all the time read all those books full by randomness great black swan wonderful what’s the next one anti-fragile skin in the game Oh read bed of Procrustes great stuff aphorisms which are maxims all great stuff read all that stuff these asymmetries point us in a direction right so you’ve got the asymmetry of having knowledge versus doing things without knowledge doing things without knowledge turns out to be valuable but only having knowledge turns out to not have any value and so that points us in the direction right it says look well why are these uneducated people becoming millionaires because it doesn’t take the type of knowledge they teach in schools it may take some knowledge it doesn’t take the type that’s taught in schools to become a millionaire obviously otherwise it couldn’t be that way so fair enough what does that mean well there’s lots of types of knowledge one way to get knowledge and maybe you can’t talk about this kind of knowledge again is participation in things that when you do things you learn things when you farm you learn things you farm year after year after year you learn things those things you may not be able to articulate may not be knowledge that you can pass on at all most likely you can pass it on to some people there’s a long long tradition of this in the East still today but somewhat in the West as well where the master is doing something the student comes in they don’t talk why well because talking communicating knowledge through reading talking writing you know any of these methods can be detrimental to learning by watching learning by mimicking right the mirror neurons I see what you’re doing I do what you’re doing that kind of learning has very little overlap with learning that you do by speaking and they activate different parts of the brain this is in the cog sigh right I’m not making anything up this is all stuff I’ve read about in the cog sigh and it’s and it’s well accepted to the best of my knowledge so there’s different ways of of of having this knowledge and having knowledge that you get by watching somebody by mimicking someone’s behavior is much more powerful because that’s how you learn how to ride a bike better as you watch somebody ride a bike especially somebody new who’s a little unsteady and then you see that it can be done and that gives you confidence that if they can do it you can do it right and you get an idea for what it is they’re doing because if you watch closely enough you can see somebody balance on a bicycle I can’t describe to you how to balance I can use the word balance but like that’s not sufficient like balance now do it that doesn’t make any sense and it doesn’t work not to say it isn’t helpful but it doesn’t work it gets not a reliable consistent result that that that we can use you know it has some value it just doesn’t have enough value it doesn’t have enough power by itself if you want to phrase it that way the knowledge of doing it is is more interesting is more significant and then there’s different types of knowledge we can’t convey them all the same way so that’s already problematic for knowledge is power and more knowledge should be better because knowledge is control power or control except that’s not true either the problem with knowledge is that you have to keep track of it and it has to be useful in a context that you’re in so for example if I have heavy knowledge of computers and I’m flying a plane that’s not as useful as you might think most of the things you need to know to fly the plane have nothing to do with how to program a computer not to say how learning how to program a computer is not helpful it is especially if you’re going to do it but it won’t help you as much with flying a plane as say knowledge of how to fly a plane and so I still have to track these pieces of knowledge and they still have to work in the conditions that I’m in and the more knowledge I have the harder it is to track I don’t care how good your memory is eventually like your memories gonna run out or it’s gonna take longer to remember things or whatever so that’s not necessarily helpful what you want to have is the most important knowledge for the situations you’re most likely to be part of and any situation where there’s like an emergency thing you need to know like you should know the Heimlich maneuver right you should know the signs of a heart attack you should know the signs of a stroke you should know the signs of deep vein thrombosis these are important things to know you know there’s a bunch of little things right that are just sort of like general oh we need to know you should know that if all the water at the beach pulls out very suddenly you need to get the hell out of the off the beach right there are little things you need to know and if you don’t know those things you can run into trouble but you know what you’re not gonna know all them all anyway but what you can’t know is all the physics all of chemistry all of computers all of how to fly all right you can’t know all the knowledge and all the domains and so your power or control in those limited domains in those domains is going to be limited but that’s also okay like we need to be okay with the ambiguity with not having all this knowledge because when we conflate knowledge and control or knowledge and power we want more and we can’t track it all and then we get confused and we get easily hijacked people can confuse us they can say look at all this wonderful knowledge I have and now let me tell you about this other thing that maybe I know nothing about but I’ve spun you a good story and bang you’re in just like that oh this guy knows physics so he must know something about how to fly a plane yeah maybe not maybe but that would be independent of the knowledge of physics and there’s lots of instances of physicists actually trying to fly and not actually being able to and they can’t even agree on physics so let’s be realistic how knowledgeable are you if you know your field doesn’t cohere enough to agree on on you know some of these important more important aspects of it not not that I use that as a measure but science does and the idea that knowledge is power certainly uses that because once you start questioning well what’s good knowledge versus what’s bad knowledge now you’re in a mess and I don’t want to go into that but I’ve mentioned it now you’re in a mess good knowledge bad knowledge I don’t know could be hard to say now we’re in the judgment game that always gets messy so these are things you have to watch out for when thinking about knowledge and this assumption that knowledge is somehow power that knowledge gives us immunity and that more knowledge is better is so baked in we don’t even notice it so there’s a lot of instances that I hear where people go well like I know something about psychology and therefore I’m not prone to that type of psychology or psychological trick or cognitive bias a lot of people go oh yeah I know about that cognitive bias as though once you know about it you’re protected from ever having it or something like it’s it’s not a virus that is repelled by your information in your head right so like fact that you know something doesn’t mean much necessarily because you your knowledge could be wrong you could be using it in the wrong way it could just not apply but you’re mistaken about applying it and you could say well the knowledge of how to apply knowledge is also knowledge and how we could get into that crazy game but I don’t see the point you could still be wrong about both types of knowledge and that would have the same effect as what I said which is wrong about when to apply it so there’s lots of ways that this idea sort of grabs us the number of people that I hear talk about oh well I’m I’m well aware of hindsight bias and you know I do my best to avoid it then you ask them what they do to avoid it and they have no answer and that’s because they don’t avoid it they just know about it and they think that knowing about it allows them to be immune from it but that isn’t how the world works sad for them sad for me sad for you sad for all of us knowledge doesn’t give us the type of control self-control or otherwise that we’d like to think and this is why a lot of people will engage with something like buddhas with old buddhas and meditation good and then they’ll learn to meditate well I know how to meditate and then they’re done they never meditate again this happens a lot sounds a lot feel like oh okay well I know the thing now and and for some people that’s because they get bored once they know something can be done and for other people it’s because they have this idea that knowledge is immunity from something whereas knowledge plus action maybe and not all the time not reliably not consistently knowledge plus action maybe but a lot of cases knowledge needs to be put into action a lot right you need to keep doing things meditation in particular you keep meditating and the number of people that will keep meditating every day is not high it’s a very low percentage but it turns out the number of people that will keep doing the same thing day after day even if they know it helps them or believe that it helps them is fairly low it’s very depressing it makes me cry it’s just that but it’s true and we need to understand that knowledge is not the key to these things not saying knowledge is bad I’m not saying knowledge isn’t helpful I’m not saying don’t go seek knowledge I’m saying be careful what knowledge you seek be careful how much you get be sure that if you have knowledge that it’s useful to you because there’s a limited amount of knowledge you can hold it’s a limited amount of knowledge I can hold that goes up and down based on how well I’m feeling in the given moment not just in the given day you know how close is it to lunch well-known right like oh talk to people after lunch they’re happier yes they also have better memories there’s all these little things that knowledge isn’t helping us with that we’re a kind of assuming baked into the culture it is and then we get fooled right we look at somebody to go that guy’s wicked knowledgeable look at all the stuff he knows and therefore I should listen more to his stuff maybe not first of all again how do you know their knowledge is any good at all it might be they might be bullshitting you that can happen how do you know you’re not bullshitting yourself about how smart they are that happens all the time too how do you know that they gave you knowledge because a lot of times charlatans will sound smart but they’re not smart they’re saying things that don’t make sense but if you’re not sharp enough to catch it and fair enough maybe you’re not like maybe I’m not that happens all the time you’ll get fooled and that’s no good and once you assume knowledge is power if you see somebody knowledgeable you assume they have this power this control whatever it is what if they don’t like that’s not good you don’t want to be in that situation and so this knowledge is power assumption is deeply baked in it’s deeply baked in we’ve got to really watch for it and try every day you know to figure out like data am I making this mistake am I looking at knowledge is power did I see somebody smart and then assume they had some control or some ability that maybe they don’t have or shouldn’t have or it makes no sense for them to have because this happens all the time and it’s a big problem too because the people that do this get caught up in their own celebrity right and the next thing you know they think they’re smarter than they are and that’s just bad for everybody and they try to do things in the world and those things fail because inevitably knowledge doesn’t sustain things succeeding in the world knowledge can only get you so far and it’s not very it can set you up for success but it’s the participation it’s the doing it’s the pragmatic side that makes success that makes things work that makes things go right that gives you immunity from things or if not immunity the ability to see them and correct right and correction of your knowledge or correction of your perceived knowledge is an important bias right that’s that’s a well-known effect right where the gal the gal-nan effect where people think they’re much smarter than they are I think that’s what it’s called and and they’re just not right people aren’t that smart or at least they’re not as smart as they’d like to be I know I’m not thank goodness it’s good it’s good to have new things to learn and and that’s what’s important you don’t you don’t want to get fooled by by these people because you’ll fool them too and you’ll both believe the lie then you’ll both be in a bad situation so look out for knowledge is power knowledge is not power knowledge is not control knowledge is not even as significant as you think more knowledge is not better necessarily it can be but not usually usually it’s just more garbage filling up your brain that you need and can use for better things lots of knowledge you can’t get from a book you can’t get from a person you can’t get from an explanation you can’t get from a conversation right you can only get this kind of knowledge by doing things in the world actively and there’s lots of types of knowledge like that like conversing with somebody is a skill and a type of knowledge maybe right or involves types of knowledge but I can’t give it to you in a book it doesn’t work very well I’m not saying you know it’s not useful I’m saying that it doesn’t have that whopping outlier effect that we think it should like oh I’m gonna read a book on conversation I’m gonna have great conversations people know you’re not what you need to do is watch lots of conversations with people and then try to have lots of conversations with people to adjust your own you know way of doing things you’ll hear people say this a lot like oh I got in this conversation and then I thought I was making a point and the other person didn’t understand at all yeah most people are inarticulate that happens most people are inarticulate completely inarticulate most people that’s not bad it just means they need to figure it out and talk through things more that’s why I tend to let people talk when I can when they’re not saying something obviously wrong right when I don’t think they’re off track but they’re just confused and working things through you gotta let them talk right they may use 20 words to say one word and that happens but they need the time right to think about things and that’s why even if you have the knowledge if you can’t convey the knowledge it certainly has less utility it’s less valuable so just having knowledge isn’t as good as having knowledge and being able to articulate that knowledge and embodied knowledge like that participatory knowledge may not be easily or even practically articulable at all that’s why we need to do things that’s why pragmatism is good and pragmatism teaches you why things don’t work when you implement them because every idea in your head is awesome every idea in your head will work why things in our head we have total control over the things in the real world we do not with limited control over the material world we have infinite control over the imaginal imaginary world that’s what we have infinite control everything works as an idea everything in the real world most ideas fail completely and quickly if you’re willing to see it and that’s another bias we think because we know something when the outcome isn’t what we expect that it wasn’t that what we knew was wrong but sometimes when the outcome isn’t what you expect it’s because what you know is wrong and that’s good to know and the most important thing to know at least for my purposes in this video is that you’ve made it all the way through the video and that you’ve given me the thing that I am most grateful for which is your time and attention