Showing posts with label the knowledge problem. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the knowledge problem. Show all posts

Off on a Tangent

XKCD illustrates a point we talked about recently.


Thoughts on Some Possible Solutions to the Knowledge / Information Problem

Grim and Cass have brought up some partial solutions, or at least ideas of places to look, and I ran across another today.

In the comments to The Knowledge Problem, Grim brings up the following:

1) Time is short, but art is long. One of the ways in which we approach this problem is to learn what those before us knew. This not only helps us by teaching us how to recognize where they went wrong, but it provides us with a platform from which to criticize our own paradigms. Without an alternative, as you said, we cannot.

2) We have vital decisions to make, but urgency and importance are two different axes. Some decisions are really more vital, but there is time to consider more carefully; others are really more urgent, but not so important. One way of approaching the problem is to make sure we are making this distinction, so we focus the short time on problems that are both urgent and important; then problems that are urgent but somewhat important; and then on problems that are important but not urgent, leaving the unimportant problems generally to slide.

3) All you say in principle 3 is true, but we must still decide and act. One way to act is to learn to recognize areas in which the best available information is more likely to be wrong -- or, areas where being wrong is more likely to be disastrous. I am thinking here of Taleb's "The Fourth Quadrant," which is a typology of problems that lets you know that you can proceed without too much fear in some areas, but need to be very cautious about taking risks in others. So that is an aspect of your problem: developing similar typologies of kinds of problems, and also of kinds of "knowledge" that are more likely to be wrong.

Grim also proposed:

The justification step is disposable, if the relationship to the truth is really there. And that means that knowledge isn't JTB, but (as the externalists say) a relationship with the truth. [1]

Cass also brought intuition into the discussion, and I think intuition might be an important part of the solution.

Then, this morning I ran into the Wikipedia article on bounded rationality, which seems to be addressing the same, or at least similar, ideas.

Bounded rationality is the idea that in decision-making, rationality of individuals is limited by the information they have, the cognitive limitations of their minds, and the finite amount of time they have to make a decision. It was proposed by Herbert A. Simon as an alternative basis for the mathematical modeling of decision making, as used in economics and related disciplines; it complements rationality as optimization, which views decision-making as a fully rational process of finding an optimal choice given the information available. Another way to look at bounded rationality is that, because decision-makers lack the ability and resources to arrive at the optimal solution, they instead apply their rationality only after having greatly simplified the choices available. Thus the decision-maker is a satisficer, one seeking a satisfactory solution rather than the optimal one. Simon used the analogy of a pair of scissors, where one blade is the "cognitive limitations" of actual humans and the other the "structures of the environment"; minds with limited cognitive resources can thus be successful by exploiting pre-existing structure and regularity in the environment.

I will certainly be reading more about this idea.

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1. It seems a bit unfair to only post this much. This was the conclusion to an extended argument Grim made in the comments to the earlier post, and to get the full implications I think the whole argument should be read.

Defining the Problem, Part 2: Knowledge, or Information?

Plato discussed the idea that knowledge is justified true belief (JTB), and historically a lot of philosophers have accepted this definition. With JTB, we only know something if  it is true, we believe it, and we have good reasons for believing it. There are some serious challenges to this idea of knowledge, but generally philosophers agree that a belief must be true to be considered knowledge; there is no such thing as false knowledge.

Information, on the other hand, can be simply a collection of data, whether true or not. Knowledge, then, is information that is true, justified, and believed.

The most recent (though probably not final) formulation of what I have called The Knowledge Problem goes like this:

1. Time is really short.
2. We have vital decisions to make.
3. It is impossible to get enough verified information out of an ocean of unverified data to make the best possible decisions, and sometimes the information we need just isn't available.
4. We need sufficient information that is good enough to allow us to generally make good decisions and to minimize the harm when we make bad decisions.

But is that really a knowledge problem? Or is it an information problem? After discussing the issue in that previous post, I'm beginning to think it's more of an information problem. Building up a body of knowledge is probably one of the answers to the problem.

What do you think? Knowledge Problem, or Information Problem? Naturally, feel free to help refine my four points or bring up related issues.

The Knowledge Problem (Part 1)

If you've waded through How Do You Splint a Broken Paradigm? and Let's Shift That Paradigm a Bit More (God bless you), then I hope you've understood my situation as a specific example of a generalizable and, I believe, common problem. Broadly, I've begun to regard most sources of knowledge as highly questionable.

While I am far, far more skeptical than I used to be, I wouldn't say I've become a true Skeptic. I do believe there are some demonstrable scientific truths. I believe journalists and historians and social scientists get some things right. I believe my lying eyes (ears, nose, etc.), most of the time. I don't believe there's a Big Conspiracy to keep The Truth from us, though there are probably lots of small, unconnected conspiracies to keep certain bits of information from certain people.

In other words, I believe knowledge is possible, and that we can fairly easily get our brains around some of it. The real problem is a bit more treacherous. We are deluged with information from a great variety of sources, but in most cases we don't know which bits of it are to be trusted and which aren't. Worse, we're mortal, and we have many requirements on our  meager allotment of time in this world besides the sifting and sorting of information.

And yet, we must make decisions based on information. Not only the big things like who to support for president, but what to eat for breakfast (low-fat? low-carb? anything -- just hot and now?), whether to take up or remain in a religion, how to know when to devote time and money (and how much) to social or political causes, what to say to our co-workers at lunch when they ask what we think about current events, what advice to give to children and people we mentor, these sorts of things.

The knowledge problem, then, as best as I've been able to define it, goes like this: Time is really short; we have vital decisions to make; we need to get verified information out of an ocean of unverified data; that's very hard.

Are there any changes or refinements to the problem you would like to offer?

UPDATE 8/24/13: Due to the discussion in the comments, I've revised my formulation of the problem. I've given the new formulation in the post, Defining the Problem, Part 2: Knowledge, or Information?

Let's Shift That Paradigm a Bit More

I introduced one line of thought in my previous post, How Do You Splint a Broken Paradigm?, that needs a bit more filling out.

While I wrote almost exclusively about the fall of my anti-religious world view in that post, that event coincided with a number of other worldview issues.

My faith in the academic world was taken down several notches by a list of things: The discoveries that I talked about in my earlier post that historians had repeatedly affirmed falsehoods for more than a century, my increasing awareness of just how politically uniform Western historians and academics in general are, and my occasional run-ins with histories and other academic work written with what seemed to be ideologically-driven (instead of fact-driven) methods.

My faith in journalism, never particularly high, was lowered further by the abysmal coverage of the war during the Bush presidency and increasing evidence that the field of journalism was as politically monolithic as the academy.

Finally, once I realized that the realm of information, both the academy and journalism, were almost completely in the sway of a single ideology, I understood the course of events in America differently. America has flirted with technocracy from the mid-nineteenth century, at least, and we may have finally reached it. Whether we have or not, the university is the high ground; whoever holds it determines the direction of American culture.

The combination of blows to what I thought I knew and the sources that before had seemed more trustworthy really produced severe doubts about what could be known about anything going on in the world. The political domination of the academy and, through it, other institutions, made me doubt that there were very many who would even try to tell the truth if it conflicted with their socio-political goals. (It's quite possible they couldn't see it as the truth; paradigms guide us, but they also give us blind spots.)

Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, wrote that a group of people, such as the members of a scientific community, cannot discard a paradigm, no matter how flawed, until they have a new one to replace it with. Without a guiding paradigm there is no way to accomplish anything, and we can always say we're working out the flaws, even if what we're really doing is changing paradigms entirely.

I'm not sure what new paradigm is shaping up here, but it is one that is far more politically aware, and one that views things through the lens of progressive domination of the university and all of the institutions that rely on it. It is obviously far more skeptical.

Something it isn't is belief in a conspiracy, or a belief that all or most journalists or academics are bad. I believe most of them are just people doing their best in a flawed world. In some ways that makes things easier, but in others harder. But, that is a post for another day.

Gathering up Some Threads

I had to go searching for these today for the next Aristotle post, so I thought I'd put the links all in one convenient spot.

Formal Logic, Part I

Formal Logic, Part II

Formal Logic, Part III

Aristotle's Categories

Negative Capability

More on Negative Capability

Although at this point it may not seem related: Rick Santorum on Art

Because it looks like an interesting tool: Quora.com

Anything else I should add on Aristotle or The Knowledge Problem?

How Do You Splint a Broken Paradigm?

Stories are powerful delivery systems for ways of looking at and interpreting the world. A while ago, Grim posted Terry Jones's explanation that the medievals never believed the earth was flat and that Columbus never proved it was round. What a powerful story that had been; many still believe it. Jones drew heavily on the work of Prof. Jeffrey Burton Russell, whose book Inventing the Flat Earth shattered that myth for me. But Russell went beyond a simple explanation of how the story got started and why we shouldn't believe it today. His real question was why, even though the flat earth myth was repeatedly debunked by a number of historians, it persisted for a century and a half.

Part of the answer is that it was too good a story; it fit too well with what many Americans wanted to believe. There are two aspects to that, religion and progress. From the beginning, the English colonists in the Americas were staunchly anti-Catholic. The flat earth myth catered to this by portraying the Catholic hierarchy as idiots. Similarly, from the beginning the colonists believed in progress, expansion, making things better, what some call "the improvement ethic". From that standpoint, the flat earth myth powerfully differentiated the modern man from the medieval one, not just in knowledge (we know more), but in attitude (we are open to discovery, so we can make progress; they were not, so they couldn't).  For many, of course, both of these aspects were useful in maintaining their world view. Now we know that it was all a big lie.

I was in graduate school in history when I discovered this. I started looking into other anti-religion, anti-faith stories from the past. Galileo and the Scopes Monkey Trial quickly fell; the details of both support very different conclusions than the common anti-religious stories tell. Religion vs. reason? One of the chief charges of the Renaissance humanists against the Roman Catholic Church was that it relied too much on logic. Aristotelian logic was one of the chief epistemological tools of the medieval Church for centuries. Any university-educated medieval bishop could out-logic most modern scientists, I believe. Additionally, most of the famous scientists up into the 19th century were sincerely religious: Kepler, Newton, and many others went so far as to believe science a way of learning about God and saw their scientific discoveries as evidence for God. For them, the practice of science was a religious exercise.

Learning all this initiated a paradigmatic crisis for me. The world obviously did not work the way I thought it did -- religion TOO reasoning? Science and faith supporting each other? All the stories that carried my belief in the science-religion dichotomies clearly lies? I had made some important decisions based on those myths.

It was a kind of insanity, but the evidence was all there. At some point, my world view fell off its shelf and fractured. So far, all of the king's horses and all of the king's men haven't been able to put it together again, not in any coherent form.

I tried out philosophy, but no matter what epistemology I found, it was always flawed. There are some very good systems out there, but at some point you have to step out on faith. In logic, there is that first unreasoned premise. In science, the unprovable premises of ubiquity and parsimony (not to mention scientific naturalism), and of course many scientists reject logic as a method of discovering knowledge. In religion, well, it starts for me with metaphysics.

So here I am, pondering the pieces, nursing my psychological fractures and a Bushmills, neat, wondering, what now?

I hope to flesh out the problem some more as well as make way toward some answers in future posts. Maybe you've had a similar experience, or know something that would help?