
Polanyi’s Paradox - sonabinu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polanyi%E2%80%99s_paradox
======
rossdavidh
My most important lesson in working with clients as a programmer, is that
asking them how they want their program to work is like asking a native
speaker to tell you the rules of grammar in their language. They have often
lived with the rules of how their business process works for so long, it is
intuitive, and no longer available to their conscious understanding, if it
ever was.

Show them a scenario, though ("X, Y, and Z happen, so the program does A and
B") and they can usually immediately tell you if that's the wrong or right
thing for the program to do.

I have the impression that programmers, as a group, are mostly not great at
understanding this, and it is a source of frustration for many of us when we
program exactly what they told us to, and then it's "wrong". It is wrong. Like
a linguist talking to a native speaker of another language, you often have to
ask them about scenarios and piece together the actual business rules
yourself.

The worst part is when the customer _thinks_ they know the rules, and then
don't (consciously), and you have to help them through that cognitive
dissonance of realizing that the business rules they "know" aren't actually
the same as the ones they know.

~~~
stcredzero
_The worst part is when the customer _thinks_ they know the rules, and then
don 't (consciously), and you have to help them through that cognitive
dissonance of realizing that the business rules they "know" aren't actually
the same as the ones they know._

A coworker of mine used to term this, "Applied Philosophy."

There was a post on HN a few years ago, where a game developer had a game
where all of the users were asking for an Undo key. This would have completely
broken the game! So he looked into his data, and figured out that what people
were mad about was moving into a stream tile and taking damage or dying. So
instead, he made it impossible to move onto a stream tile, and the problem was
solved.

~~~
rossdavidh
They knew _that_ there was a problem, but not necessarily what the problem
really was, or how it should be (programmatically) solved. Sounds similar. The
answer bubbles up from the subconscious ('system 1' as some put it).

------
beaconstudios
I've been reading Alan Watts' "the way of Zen" recently and this point forms a
strong central pillar of his explanation. What we think of as our mind or our
self, the conscious mind, seems to be basically a paper thin director on top
of all the real functionality which is much more powerful and evolutionarily
much older.

Relatedly, our use of language to describe and identify things and phenomena
falls prey to the map-territory relation in a way that can warp our thinking.
But I can't do his explanations justice, I can only recommend picking up the
book if you're interested in these kinds of cognitive paradoxes.

~~~
sdenton4
Consciousness is a tiny aperture through which the universe looks at itself...

(Watts is great.)

------
pedro1976
I prefer Slavoj Zizek classification into knowns and unknowns.

\- Known-Knowns: things we know that we know

\- Known-Unknowns: things that we know we don’t know

\- Unkown-Unknowns: things we don’t know we don’t know

\- Unknown-Knowns: “The things we don’t know that we know-which is precisely,
the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself,” as Lacan
used to say. “. This is better known as culture.

~~~
zeckalpha
Is that Slavoj Zizek? I thought it was Johari.

~~~
tw1010
I thought it was Rumsfeld. (Not joking.)

~~~
lukifer
Rumseld famously classified the difference between known unknowns and unknown
unknowns; Zizek typically uses Rumsfeld as a jumping-off point to elucidate
the concept of unknown knowns. (Though I think Zizek means it more in the
sense of belief systems, norms, and ideology, in the vein of "can't tell a
fish about water"; whereas Polyani seems to refer primarily to genetic
instincts, subconscious cognitive processes, motor skills learned prior to
language, etc.)

------
SideburnsOfDoom
> activities based on tacit knowledge include recognizing a face, driving a
> car, riding a bike

As far as I know, there are different classes of tacit knowledge here:

Driving a car, riding a bike etc are learned behaviour, recent in evolutionary
time, and might also in a few generations not commonly learned any more, as
e.g. riding a horse is uncommon now.

But recognising a face (or not being good at it) is innate in human brain
structure, and not recent in evolutionary time.

~~~
mr_crankypants
One that might bridge that gap is learning a language.

It's almost certainly much more recent than recognizing a face, but still
something humans have been doing for a long time, and is a near-universal
human behavior. Like the others, though, it needs to be learned, has a strong
cultural component, and tends to happen with the help of others.

It's also interesting because there's an entire academic field devoted to its
study, and, at least from my peripheral perspective, they seem to be
constantly bumping up against Polanyi's Paradox. I've seen more than one
academic argue that the set of grammatical rules that we can accurately
describe is a subset of the grammatical rules that we use when communicating.
Which, if true, is pretty interesting, since language is a social construct -
the implication is that we can fabricate and reliably transmit information
that we can't actually express.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
> the set of grammatical rules that we can accurately describe is a subset of
> the grammatical rules that we use when communicating

Although rules do move from one camp to the other. For instance, people
(myself included) find this article fascinating because it makes conscious a
rule that English-speakers use unconsciously

[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/senten...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/sentence-
order-adjectives-rule-elements-of-eloquence-dictionary)

------
H8crilA
Next time someone asks me how does a modern artificial neural network really
work - I'll just ask them "how do you know that my face does indeed look like
mine?". Or "how do you recognize people by their voices?". Or this creepy one:
"can you consciously stop decoding the English I'm speaking now?". This
Wikipedia page can serve as an extension of the argument.

~~~
Simon_says
Those are all great to think about but seem rather lacking as an answer to the
question.

~~~
sidlls
Especially since there isn't any good evidence that modern neural networks
behave anything like our biological ones.

------
unixhero
Poliany was central to my social science master degree thesis. How do you
transfer tacit knowledge across international cultural borders?

~~~
xaedes
I would think by working together face-to-face. Learning by doing from a
"master" knowing his stuff. Like an apprenticeship.

What answer did you find?

~~~
unixhero
Well it was like what you mention. Tacit knowledge must be transferred by
showing, hands on learning, but was surprisingly little affected by culture
and borders in global companies which was a dimension I was investigating.

After all the work of putting together a thesis on the subject, it all boils
down to the example of how to you train a new chef to be as good as his
"master".

This is still a hot topic amongst those who continue to research the Social
science around Innovation, economics, sociological, management studies and so
on. I enjoyed the topic, but being chained to a laptop for 6 months of thesis
writing not do much.

------
abiro
This paradox is pretty well explained by Kahneman’s two systems I think.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow)

~~~
mannykannot
Those seem to be categories of action, rather than knowledge. Many of the
examples of both types depend on tacit knowledge, and are distinguished by
type 2 requiring some explicit mental intervention to initiate or sustain
(e.g. sustain a higher than normal walking rate.)

------
dlkf
The article discusses the argument that statistical machine learning is a
resolution to the paradox - as it shows that an agent can learn something
without being given explicit instruction. I think this is basically a sound
argument, and I find Polanyi pretty unconvincing.

It's worth noting that a similar argument (albeit without a demonstration as
concrete as modern ML) was actually advanced in the 1960s by Wilfrid Sellars.
[0]

> There is all the difference in the world between knowing how to ride a
> bicycle and knowing that a steady pressure by the legs of a balanced person
> on the pedals would result in forward motion ...It can be argued that
> anything which can be properly called 'knowing how to do something'
> presupposes a body of knowledge that; or, to put it differently, knowledge
> of truth or facts. If this were so, then the statement that 'ducks know how
> to swim' would be as metaphorical as the statement that they know that water
> supports them.

[0] Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man - Wilfrid Sellars
[http://www.ditext.com/sellars/psim.html](http://www.ditext.com/sellars/psim.html)

------
jarmitage
Harry Collins developed a more nuanced framework for discussing tacit
knowledge which I find quite provocative and useful:

[https://i.imgur.com/tp3eLb4.png](https://i.imgur.com/tp3eLb4.png)

[https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo84...](https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo8461024.html)

------
lisper
I don't understand why this is a paradox. Isn't it just obvious that no system
can contain a complete model of itself? That would be an infinite regress and
hence would require infinite information.

~~~
natosaichek
A human contains code that can recreate a complete model of that human....

Maybe you're saying that a human can't fit into a human? I agree it's not a
paradox, but not for the reasons you seem to be implying.

~~~
lisper
> A human contains code that can recreate a complete model of that human

That's true, but irrelevant. We're talking about _modeling_ a system here, not
_reproducing_ one. Those are not the same thing.

~~~
SilasX
Sufficiently advanced modeling is indistinguishable from reproduction.

~~~
joyeuse6701
Wouldn't that be more like, infinitely advanced modeling is indistinguishable
from reproduction?

------
axilmar
Why is this named 'paradox' since it doesn't express a paradox?

