César Hidalgo: evaluation

Transcript context

…Just the words in a paper or in a book, they are completely different to the actual physical embodied process. But is there a middle way? Are are you saying only the physical embodied process is a form of knowledge and understanding? Or do you think there exists any type of model or representation which we could say is a form of understanding? The problem of talking about knowledge, and that's something that I addressed in the introduction of the book, is that it's a word that we use to mean vastly different things, you know. And we we kinda like understand that from context, but it's good to classify, you know, those different ideas. And there's people that have done that. So 1 of the ways that you can understand different types of knowledge is by thinking of a detective novel. So a detective novel or a detective TV show, it usually starts in a murder scene, know, and ends in an arrest and it's beautiful because the writer just needs to fill the space in between. And it starts usually at the murder scene when the detectives come in and they start collecting what we call factual knowledge. Yeah? There is a bullet hole in the wall. There was a call at 7PM last evening. Those facts don't tell you about you know the motive of the murder or who was involved, know, any of that stuff. And factual knowledge is knowledge that is very easy to diffuse. You know, I can tell you that Santiago is the capital of Chile and you can remember that, you can transmit that information or that little piece of factual knowledge very easily to someone else and so forth. Then you have conceptual knowledge, which is what usually the the hero of the detective novel would do, which is putting everything together in a story where all of the facts are you know little anchors that can be used to validate that story. Okay? So that story, okay, you know the bullet hole was there because when you know the murderer tried to shoot this person moved to the side and the phone call was placed because someone was trying to warn him and they kinda like figured out the entire story. Now to validate that story, what they need to do is sometimes they need to collect additional evidence that is not factual knowledge, but that is collected through procedural knowledge. So they maybe have a little bit of blood and then need to send that to a DNA lab for sequencing. Now the DNA lab has procedural knowledge because it understands how to perform that procedure to sequence DNA, and that produce another facts that get put into the concept. So when we talk about knowledge, we talk about all of these different things. Now there is another distinction that is extremely important and that I used a story at the beginning of the book to illustrate, is that also especially among academics or people that are highly educated, we talk about knowledge as this sort of truths that have been validated by the scientific method and so forth. And the book is not about the knowledge and in economics knowledge is not just about validated truths that have come, you know, from university scientists or researchers, but there's knowledge in a lot of different things that is much more pedestrian and common. So a car mechanic has knowledge, A baker that has been producing different types of pastries and breads, you know, would have knowledge. ot of different things that is much more pedestrian and common. So a car mechanic has knowledge, A baker that has been producing different types of pastries and breads, you know, would have knowledge. Everyone has knowledge and knowledge is highly specific. It's not necessarily things that are a 100% guaranteed to be true because of the scientific method, but at all of this experience and receive wisdom that people have and that allows the world to work because the world works not because everybody's operating according to a scientific theory, but because you know, car mechanics know what they're doing, because gardeners know what they're doing, because the guy that comes and clean the pool know what they're doing and they have their own experience. Maybe you know, it includes even knowing how to deal with pesky dogs if you are a pool cleaning guy. They have knowledge on how to deal with that. That comes from experience and it's not what you would find in a book. So it's about that more democratic definition of knowledge.…

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