Last time, I introduced the information science department's WizKID epistemic framework and listed a few advantages it has over the philosophy department's JTB model of knowledge. Today I'll be talking for a somewhat long time about some theoretical weirdness that comes up from the structure of the framework, and then for a considerably shorter time about some practical consequences and what they mean for our own knowledge construction.
Theoretical Consequences:
Why Pyramids Are Made of Lies
So we have all these components of our framework: data, info, knowledge, & wisdom. People like to arrange 'em in a pyramid with data at the bottom, because hey, we're just swimming in data, and only so much of that is useful information, and so on with the pyramid narrowing near the top. I like the "data at the bottom" approach, but I also prefer to read it downward, which is why I get "WizKID" instead of "DIKW pyramid" like they have right now on Wikipedia:
You have so many options - WKID, WiKID,
WiKnInDa, WizKID - and you go with DIKW.
But I don't like that. I mean, wisdom on top, for sure - but why is there less wisdom than data? "Well, there's so much data around, and each level up gets rarer and more valuable, so of course there's only so much wisdom that can be distilled from any amount of data." But that's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.
OK, so we know that there are infinite numbers, because however many numbers you decide to count up to, you can always go one higher. Moreover, there's an infinite number of numbers between any two numbers, because you can always add more decimal places. This means that there's an infinite amount of possible data, because data is naked numbers and we can have as many of those as we like.
But information is data plus context, and context is also infinite. Context is basically "[number] of something," and as we keep inventing nouns for that something to be, we keep adding contexts - we can do this as much as we like, not only a finite number of times. So sure, there's infinite possible data, but each individual datum has infinite possible contexts, so instead of a narrowing as we go up, we get an explosion.
The same holds when we go from information to knowledge: there are infinite possible contexts to give to infinite possible numbers, and those can be related to each other in infinite possible ways. Sure, one gallon of milk can relate to American dollars by cost - but how many American dollars does one gallon of milk weigh? How many American dollars are needed to wrap around a gallon of milk, or take up the same volume - and are they bills or coins? Moreover, some of these relationships change through time and space - you'll get different answers if you're asking about 1890 dollars or 1990 dollars (their dimensions and value are all different!), Galveston or Guadalajara (oh God, exchange rates). So not only are there infinite ways to relate our pieces of information to each other (as there were infinite contexts to give to our data), but those relationships can change according to other variables which are also infinite. So we don't just have another explosion here, we have an infinitely bigger one.
And the same thing happens again when we go from knowledge to wisdom, and not only because there's infinite knowledge to distill: this gallon of milk right in front of you costs three dollars, but is that a good price? You could compare it to the grocery down the street, or the six nearest, or the range of prices in the whole state, or the mean/median/mode thereof - not only is there an infinite possible amount of knowledge to compare, you can cast your net infinitely wide or narrow in making the comparison. Moreover, since these things change over time, there's an infinite time-range to consider as well: if you tracked milk prices in a large enough area, over a long enough period of time, I'm certain that you'd find some kind of counterintuitive behavioral prescription that would save you a bit of money in the long run. So this means that not only is there infinite possible wisdom, but we can construct it in infinite possible ways by choosing what other items of knowledge we include in our distillation process, which all could change the outcome of whether $3 USD is a good or bad price for milk. Thus, our explosions not only explode, and not only is each explosion is more explodey than the last, and in a way that's even more explodey than the previous explodey-splo- wait. Let me try that again: our "explosion curve" doesn't just have speed or acceleration, it has jerk.
And that possible consideration is just over the price of milk! Imagine the complex knowledge webs and distillation procedures needed to decide, say, the historical importance and impact of the Magna Carta.
Now, you may be saying, "Wait a sec - sure, there's infinitely more possible stuff at each level, but we actually reduce them whenever we go up." In the first place, you're talking practicalities, which is the next section. But in the second place, do we really? Consider: any piece of data can be given more than one context (consider a toddler enumerating, "3 apples, and 3 oranges, and 3 cars..."); any bit of information can be related to more than one other (consider the weird correlations coming out of Big Data); and every item of knowledge can be used in more than one wisdom distillation (GasBuddy could help you decide where to get gas from the same set of known locations over multiple days). In fact, this very fecundity is one major purpose of secondary education: to teach you to make connections between the same set of information pieces in multiple ways. Total knowledge increases, while total amount of information stays the same. Or anyone who sits and thinks up something usefully wise from an armchair: wisdom increases, but knowledge stays the same.
In fact, I'd argue that wisdom isn't any rarer than raw data in our heads, since we can have wisdom that clarifies or contradicts other wisdom ("the nail that stands out gets pounded down," but "the squeaky wheel gets the grease," and "context is everything"), and numbers can't contradict each other. At any given time, I think we've actually got much more distilled wisdom in our heads than raw numbers - we're terrible at memorizing numbers, and only keep a few of 'em on hand: driver's license, license plate, model year of car, approximate mileage, debit & credit card (along with expiration & CVV), bank routing & account number, social security number, a handful of phone numbers and street addresses, approximate bank account balance and amount of bills, time of day, date, year, first six digits of pi, a couple key conversion factors (2.54cm in an inch, 5km=3.2mi, 454g=1lb, etc.), and maybe a few miscellaneous favorites (summit of Longs Peak = 14,255ft, girlfriend's clothing sizes for gifts, how many people are in my Fallout Shelter, etc.) - at least, I think those are all the numbers I have memorized. They're all I can think of right now, at any rate. (And yes, I know that what the number represents is itself information and not "real data," but I'm not telling you my credit card number, because that would be dumb.) Anyway, the point is, I only need a few actual numbers to get by in life - I need much more wisdom, as I could probably rattle off as many actionable maxims just for driving as that entire pile of numbers, and I've got a pile equally as big for almost any field of knowledge you'd care to mention (at least, physics, chemistry, biology, neurology, psychology, sociology, politics, art, literature, feminism, information science... I could go on...), and the piles for the things I really care about (like sex & video games) are even bigger.
"No, but I mean the actual numbers there are in the world are way higher in count than the actual instances of wisdom. Bottom of the pyramid's bigger." Eh, I don't buy it - how many of those numbers are actually the same small set of numbers, just cleverly rearranged? There are only two bits of information (0 & 1), and only 16 possible bytes of information (eight bits each), and computers talk in bytes rather than in actual giant numbers. We found a way to keep data manageable while staying information-, knowledge-, and wisdom-heavy.
"Yeah, but listen, the numbers one through a million all exist, they're all distinct numbers, and you can't come up with a million maxims. Top of the pyramid's narrower." I mean, sure, but do we really use all those numbers? Do we ever really instantiate them to the extent that we do our maxims? You're relying on theoretical potential again, in which case things still explode going upward.
"No, dammit, I'm telling you it's a pyramid!" Meh, I remain unconvinced. (Although I'm actually now very interested in finding a way to prove that you can get by with a certain amount of wisdom, all of which can be validly distilled from a smaller set of knowledge items, all of which can be related from a smaller set of information, all of which relies on a pretty small set of data - I can think of ways to prove toy cases, but not anything actually practical.) But we can agree to disagree, because I want to wrap up with...
Practical Consequences:
Everything You Know Is Made Up
So there are infinite possible things to know, but we need to check them because we only want to believe the true ones. I dig it: "one gallon of milk costs three dollars American" and "one gallon of milk costs over nine thousand dollars American" are equally valid knowledge relationships, but we care about what's going to correspond to real-life observations, not just what's merely a valid relationship. I am with you, hundo-P.
So... where do we start? With milk prices? Or housing markets? Do we sort out biology before or after we sort out politics? Is global warming a big enough threat to worry about, and how much time do we have to decide? Is there a god? Or life on other planets? Who is Spain? Why is Hitler? When is right? Are traps gay?
Valid knowledge relationships are infinite, but our time is not. We have to prioritize. Moreover, how should we prioritize - what should our highest priorities be? And what constitutes a good enough reasons to question or reevaluate those priorities?
Uh-oh.
If you don't see the glaring problem, let me spell it out for you: we can't do this prioritizing a priori (or "in a vacuum," for any non-philosophers who wandered in), because while we don't come pre-loaded with any knowledge except how to cry and flail and breastfeed, we've already taken on a bunch of unverified knowledge before we've even thought to question it. Like, sure, some of the knowledge is firsthand - things fall down not up, people treat me a certain way, I've got legs - but lots of that firsthand knowledge doesn't hold up to scrutiny - Earth looks flat, air is empty, swans are all white - and while this experiential knowledge is at least firsthand, most of the stuff we get is shit our parents say, which comes preloaded with whatever cultural baggage they got from their parents.
In short, once we start questioning our knowledge, we find out pretty quickly that it's turtles all the way down: how do you even start questioning, when any basis or framework for investigating is also going to be something just as questionable in its own right? Some French guy named René Descartes was literally sitting in his armchair one night when he figuratively stumbled on exactly this problem: "Sometimes I'm mistaken and don't realize it until later, so how do I know I'm not seriously mistaken about everything right now? Waaaaiiiit a second... how do I even know I exist at all?" (I'm paraphrasing.)
He then produced a rather brilliant piece of reasoning called the cogito, which goes something like-a-dis: "Wait, right now I'm doubting my existence, and that's some kind of experience - and while I can't be sure of the nature, content, or reliability of my experience, I know sure as dammit that I'm having some kind of experience, even if it's only to doubt my own existence. And to doubt my existence, I must first exist to have the doubt, because nonexistent things can't have experiences or doubts in the first place. In summary: I have thoughts, and therefore I exist."
But then he went and ruined it by saying, basically, "As for the rest, I can be sure enough unless I run into cause to think otherwise, because God wouldn't let reality be such a topsy-turvy place where we could be mistaken in our thoughts like all the time." Dammit, René, you were this close! It took until David Hume to figure out that no we can't really know anything else with 100% certainty, because pretty much everything that matters relies on inductive reasoning and cause & effect, and we don't know those are real they just seem to make lots of sense. Then it took Immanuel Kant to rigorously point out that there's a crowbar separation between things themselves and our ideas of those things, with the former being all outside our heads and the latter being all inside our heads, and never the two shall meet.
So, back to our problem of trying to think for ourselves once we realize that it's all subject to question: we can never really get out of that state, because the very act of questioning is going to require language of some kind which is a cultural construct despite being super-useful for thinking. We can be as rigorous and thorough as we like, but that questionability never goes away: once we've got a socially constructed mind, there's no going back, because our fresh-out-the-box brains change based on whether we use language or not. I've read accounts of feral children who had neural abnormalities due to growing up without language, and whoah screw that I just found the story of a man who grew up in civilization but without language and it's the coolest fucking thing you'll read all month! (Shit, what am I doing here, then?)
The point here is that there's no escaping the socially-constructed mindset when we're in it, because all our knowledge was constructed within this social environment, and continues to be. Even if you left this day to live alone on a desert island, you'd still take your socially-constructed mind with you and let's be real, you'd be way worse off without language and all your socially-constructed thought patterns than you are with them. Grr, I'm still not happy with how that came out. Let's try it from the reverse angle.
The WizKID model, in showing how knowledge is constructed in the particulars, reveals the fact that it's constructed at all. All knowledge is made, not found. And who made it? We did. Every single one of us, in taking in experiences (whether through words or deeds or observations), constructs in our heads all the knowledge and wisdom we ever use. Not all at once, duh. But this is how modern pedagogy works (at least according to Yale, but I mean, they're just a bunch of guys), and it's actually a lot more effective than trying to get kids to memorize ever-increasing lists of JTB facts by rote (a.k.a. "drill and kill").
So yeah: everything we know is made up, in the sense that there's no knowledge without making it. Knowledge is, quite frankly, an invention - a useful one, like language, or the rules of a board game, or a computer program (which, come to think of it, those are all basically language too) - but an invention nonetheless. But this means that there's no such thing as "objective knowledge," or "knowledge without bias," or any of that nonsense, and there's especially no such thing as "final knowledge." You might ask, "Wait - if knowledge is all invented, does that include the knowledge that knowledge is invented? So isn't that self-defeating?" And that seems a fair point, until you realize that we're not "proving" knowledge is invented so much as "being honest about" how we invented it. So, sorry: no loophole here. You're stuck. The End.
So... where do we start? With milk prices? Or housing markets? Do we sort out biology before or after we sort out politics? Is global warming a big enough threat to worry about, and how much time do we have to decide? Is there a god? Or life on other planets? Who is Spain? Why is Hitler? When is right? Are traps gay?
Valid knowledge relationships are infinite, but our time is not. We have to prioritize. Moreover, how should we prioritize - what should our highest priorities be? And what constitutes a good enough reasons to question or reevaluate those priorities?
Uh-oh.
If you don't see the glaring problem, let me spell it out for you: we can't do this prioritizing a priori (or "in a vacuum," for any non-philosophers who wandered in), because while we don't come pre-loaded with any knowledge except how to cry and flail and breastfeed, we've already taken on a bunch of unverified knowledge before we've even thought to question it. Like, sure, some of the knowledge is firsthand - things fall down not up, people treat me a certain way, I've got legs - but lots of that firsthand knowledge doesn't hold up to scrutiny - Earth looks flat, air is empty, swans are all white - and while this experiential knowledge is at least firsthand, most of the stuff we get is shit our parents say, which comes preloaded with whatever cultural baggage they got from their parents.
In short, once we start questioning our knowledge, we find out pretty quickly that it's turtles all the way down: how do you even start questioning, when any basis or framework for investigating is also going to be something just as questionable in its own right? Some French guy named René Descartes was literally sitting in his armchair one night when he figuratively stumbled on exactly this problem: "Sometimes I'm mistaken and don't realize it until later, so how do I know I'm not seriously mistaken about everything right now? Waaaaiiiit a second... how do I even know I exist at all?" (I'm paraphrasing.)
He then produced a rather brilliant piece of reasoning called the cogito, which goes something like-a-dis: "Wait, right now I'm doubting my existence, and that's some kind of experience - and while I can't be sure of the nature, content, or reliability of my experience, I know sure as dammit that I'm having some kind of experience, even if it's only to doubt my own existence. And to doubt my existence, I must first exist to have the doubt, because nonexistent things can't have experiences or doubts in the first place. In summary: I have thoughts, and therefore I exist."
But then he went and ruined it by saying, basically, "As for the rest, I can be sure enough unless I run into cause to think otherwise, because God wouldn't let reality be such a topsy-turvy place where we could be mistaken in our thoughts like all the time." Dammit, René, you were this close! It took until David Hume to figure out that no we can't really know anything else with 100% certainty, because pretty much everything that matters relies on inductive reasoning and cause & effect, and we don't know those are real they just seem to make lots of sense. Then it took Immanuel Kant to rigorously point out that there's a crowbar separation between things themselves and our ideas of those things, with the former being all outside our heads and the latter being all inside our heads, and never the two shall meet.
So, back to our problem of trying to think for ourselves once we realize that it's all subject to question: we can never really get out of that state, because the very act of questioning is going to require language of some kind which is a cultural construct despite being super-useful for thinking. We can be as rigorous and thorough as we like, but that questionability never goes away: once we've got a socially constructed mind, there's no going back, because our fresh-out-the-box brains change based on whether we use language or not. I've read accounts of feral children who had neural abnormalities due to growing up without language, and whoah screw that I just found the story of a man who grew up in civilization but without language and it's the coolest fucking thing you'll read all month! (Shit, what am I doing here, then?)
The point here is that there's no escaping the socially-constructed mindset when we're in it, because all our knowledge was constructed within this social environment, and continues to be. Even if you left this day to live alone on a desert island, you'd still take your socially-constructed mind with you and let's be real, you'd be way worse off without language and all your socially-constructed thought patterns than you are with them. Grr, I'm still not happy with how that came out. Let's try it from the reverse angle.
The WizKID model, in showing how knowledge is constructed in the particulars, reveals the fact that it's constructed at all. All knowledge is made, not found. And who made it? We did. Every single one of us, in taking in experiences (whether through words or deeds or observations), constructs in our heads all the knowledge and wisdom we ever use. Not all at once, duh. But this is how modern pedagogy works (at least according to Yale, but I mean, they're just a bunch of guys), and it's actually a lot more effective than trying to get kids to memorize ever-increasing lists of JTB facts by rote (a.k.a. "drill and kill").
So yeah: everything we know is made up, in the sense that there's no knowledge without making it. Knowledge is, quite frankly, an invention - a useful one, like language, or the rules of a board game, or a computer program (which, come to think of it, those are all basically language too) - but an invention nonetheless. But this means that there's no such thing as "objective knowledge," or "knowledge without bias," or any of that nonsense, and there's especially no such thing as "final knowledge." You might ask, "Wait - if knowledge is all invented, does that include the knowledge that knowledge is invented? So isn't that self-defeating?" And that seems a fair point, until you realize that we're not "proving" knowledge is invented so much as "being honest about" how we invented it. So, sorry: no loophole here. You're stuck. The End.
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