Teaching Birds How to Fly?

Nassim Taleb, best selling author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan, has a new entry on his amazingly eclectic and often bizarre blog. Taleb, in the mold of thinkers like Malcolm Gladwell, is one of those rare people in life you must study. If nothing else, his thoughts will make you think about your thoughts.

His latest post is about knowledge, how we acquire and use it, and the error of rationalism:

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's 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. Let us see how.

TYPE 1	TYPE 2
Know how	Know what
Fat Tony wisdom, Aristotelian phronesis	Aristotelian logic
Implicit , Tacit	Explicit
Nondemonstrative knowledge	Demonstrative knowledge
Tëchnë	Epistemë
Experiential knowledge	Epistemic base
Heuristic	Propositional knowledge
Figurative	Literal
Tinkering	Directed research
Bricolage	Targeted activity
Empiricism	Rationalism
Practice	Scholarship
Engineering	Mathematics
Tinkering, stochastic tinkering	Directed search
Epilogism (Menodotus of Nicomedia and the school of empirical medicine)	Inductive knowledge
Historia a sensate cognitio	Causative historiography
Autopsia	Diagnostic
Austrian economics	Neoclassical economics
Bottom up libertarianism	Central Planner
Spirit of the Law	Letter of the Law
Customs	Ideas
Brooklyn, Amioun	Cambridge, MA, and UK
Accident, trial and error	Design
Nonautistic	Autistic
Random	Deterministic
Ecological uncertainty, not tractable in textbook	Ludic probability, statistics textbooks
Embedded	Abstract
Parallel processing	Serial processing
Off-model	On-model, model based
Side effect of a drug	National Institute of Health
Nominalism	Realism