Nassim Taleb on Knowledge

Nassim Taleb – Fooled by Rationalism; Lecturing Birds How to Fly:

“The greatest problem in knowledge is the “lecturing birds how to fly” effect. Let us call it the error of rationalism. In Fat Tony’s language, it would be what makes us the suckers of all suckers. Consider two types of knowledge. The first type is not exactly “knowledge”; its ambiguous character prevents us from calling it exactly knowledge. It a way of doing thing that we cannot really express in clear language, but that we do nevertheless, and do well. The second type is more like what we call “knowledge”; it is what you acquire in school, can get grades for, can codify, what can be explainable, academizable, rationalizable, formalizable, theoretizable, codifiable, Sovietizable, bureaucratizable, Harvardifiable, provable, etc.

To make things simple, just look at the second type of knowledge as something so stripped of ambiguity that an autistic person (a high functioning autistic person, that is) can easily understand it.

The error of rationalism is, simply, overestimating the role and necessity of the second type, the academic knowledge, in human affairs. It is a severe error because not only much of our knowledge is not explainable, academizable, rationalizable, formalizable, theoretizable, codifiable, Sovietizable, bureaucratizable, Harvardifiable, etc., but, further, that such knowledge plays such a minor life that it is not even funny.

We are very likely to believe that skills and ideas that we actually acquired by doing, or that came naturally to us (as we already knew by our innate biological instinct) came from books, ideas, and reasoning. We get blinded by it; there may even be something in our brains that makes us suckers for the point…”

As footnote to Nassim, I have a minor variance. What Nassim calls knowledge I call the field of play. It is the mental gymnastics, the eternal geek game. It really makes the difference, it is the science, the art, dance, even sports. And it’s in the “flying birds” category because for people who are consumed and obsessed by it, it comes as natural as a step. The problem is the entire super-culture that feeds off it. This reminds me the sports stats industry, especially in America. Athletes play games but stats are meticulously preserved and give the fodder for endless commentary, forever talking about the flying birds instead of flying. But Nassim is right that this knowledge super-structure is pretty stupid.