
Douglas Adams was right–knowledge without understanding is meaningless - pseudolus
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/24/douglas-adams-was-right-knowledge-without-understanding-is-meaningless
======
jdietrich
Counterpoint: The mechanism of action of a large proportion of very important
drugs is a stone-cold mystery. If you have major surgery, you'll probably be
anaesthetised with a drug that induces unconsciousness for _no known reason_.
We know that the drug will render you unconscious, we know that the
overwhelming majority of patients will remain unconscious for the duration of
the procedure, we know that the overwhelming majority of patients will regain
consciousness with no ill effects after the procedure, but we only have vague
educated guesses as to why.

We don't know why acetaminophen relieves pain, we don't know why lithium
stabilises mood in people with bipolar, we don't know how antidepressants
actually relieve depression. Would we like to know how these drugs work?
Certainly, as it might help us to develop better drugs. Do we _need_ to know
how these drugs work? Absolutely not - given a choice between a mystery drug
and having surgery without anaesthesia, I'm choosing the mystery drug every
time.

Human beings are black-box algorithms; we can concoct plausible explanations
for our behaviour, but there is abundant evidence that we don't actually know
our own minds. I think our discomfort with black-box algorithms is essentially
a reflection of our discomfort at the unknowability of the human mind. These
algorithms work, but we don't really know what's happening on the inside, just
like _literally everyone you 've ever met_.

~~~
hhs
You write: “Human beings are black-box algorithms; we can concoct plausible
explanations for our behaviour, but there is abundant evidence that we don't
actually know our own minds. I think our discomfort with black-box algorithms
is essentially a reflection of our discomfort at the unknowability of the
human mind.”

I tend to agree, and if you look from a species perspective there are
boundaries to what other animals can also do. For instance, an ant can only do
so much; they can do basic thinking and processing but they lack complex
physiological structures and reasoning abilities, as far as we know, to
concoct plausible explanations for their behavior. Humans can come up with
explanations but it’s still hard for them to tap in deeper and ask those why
questions.

On a scale of species reasoning ability complexity, I’m curious if there are
other animals that have the capacity to engage with nuanced why questions. Any
zoologists out there?

~~~
deanCommie
I think that question inherently requires us to identify some subjectively
fuzzy definitions for what are "why questions".

It would be similar to how we have been adjusting our definition of what it
means to feel pain. (particularly in the context of claims that entire animal
species do not feel it, so there are no qualms about preparing them as food in
ways that would be considered inhumanely cruel with others - see lobsters,
crabs)

Chimps recognize themselves in the mirror. So they have some theory of mind.

Dogs don't, but unlike chimps, can follow pointing directions. So they have
some theory of OUR mind.

My dog is stubborn and doesn't follow some directions right away. I will
sometimes see her pause, consider, and ignore the command. If I then remind
her in a generic way that I am serious (like a stern generic "hey"), she will
then come back and do the command. So it's more complex than a direct cause
and effect.

That also sounds like a "why" question that has gone through her head...

~~~
hhs
Good to think about, thanks.

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sdenton4
Once upon a time, I worked in an area of mathematics called Algebraic
Combinatorics, which dealt constantly with questions of 'how' and 'why.'

The combinatorics provided a 'how': Given a problem in algebra, we could make
up some combinatorics that describe the system, and then prove some theorems
that tell you precisely how to manipulate the system to get the answer you
want. But this 'how' doesn't necessarily say much about 'why' such a solution
must exist.

On the other end, we had representation theory, which gave a sort of algebraic
reason for the solution to exist, but would give you no help in how to
actually construct the solution.

It was extremely common for interesting problems to have difficulty on one
side or the other. You've got a 'how' and spend dozens of grad-student-years
(GSYs) trying to discover the 'why', or the reverse.

Likewise, ML is giving us relatively cheap answers to the 'how' question. How
do proteins fold? Well, now we have better answers. And those answers,
carefully studied, should help with the 'why'. Now, instead of having just a
start structure and an end structure, you /should/ be getting an explicit
sequence of moves from the neural network. Studying /why/ some moves are
better than others should yield progress on the overall why question.

Along the way, getting answers to 'why' should help constrain the search space
for AlphaFold, and allow it to come up with better answers faster.

This basic question going forward is 'how do we distill crystallized knowledge
from this black box algorithm?' It's going to be an important question in a
range of sciences, basically anywhere that data >> knowledge. Finding answers
won't be easy, but, hey, no one said good science has to be easy...

~~~
natalyarostova
'Why' presupposes there is an answer that a human can understand. Why do self-
driving cars work? Because there exists some function that maps raw inputs to
outputs that correctly interact with reality. Why? Because the neural network
fit the right curves.

~~~
commandlinefan
Well, you’re still not going to get to hand-wave away the “why” question. I’ve
been working on recommender systems for the past 5 or so years, and I end up
spending a lot of my time trying to work backwards to explain why the
recommender recommended something that seemed counterintuitive (sometimes
because of a bug, sometimes because of the model, sometimes for reasonable
reasons). If you work on self driving cars, you’ll similarly be researching
and explaining “why” this one drove into a lake this one time.

~~~
natalyarostova
Yeah that's a reasonable counter point to my example, you're right. I guess I
used a poor example to try and make a more general point that there will and
may already be a time when the black boxes we use exceed our ability to
understand the causal mechanisms.

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ukj
Which begs a whole lot of other questions:

* What is understanding?

* How do I know that I understand?

Sooner or later you realise that all theories of knowledge have one
fundamental flaw - the problem of criterion[1]. And if you so choose you can
dismantle any argument with the Münchhausen trilemma[2]. Socrate's favourite
trick.

I like Feynman's answer best: "What I cannot create, I do not understand.",
because in a round-about way it lands us squarely at the Turing test.

Could we ever know what Consciousness is unless we create it?

1\. [https://www.iep.utm.edu/criterio/](https://www.iep.utm.edu/criterio/)

2\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchhausen_trilemma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchhausen_trilemma)

~~~
raverbashing
Well you can understand a lot of things without being able to create it

Though ability to "act upon it" might be slightly better

Knowledge is knowing there are icebergs in the water, comprehension is knowing
you should slow down

~~~
ukj
Without resorting to actually playing the silly philosophical word-games, here
is how one debate might play out:

Me: Why is "there is an iceberg in the water" knowledge?

You: "because it corresponds to reality".

Me: That makes it a fact, not knowledge.

~~~
tlb
This subject has been thoroughly discussed by generations of philosophers, and
there is a large body of literature about it. If you want to dig into it, you
could start at: [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-
analysis/#KnowJ...](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-
analysis/#KnowJustTrueBeli)

~~~
ukj
I am well aware and require no introduction. That it has been debated for
thousands of years is a fact.

That it is yet unsettled as of 2019 is also a fact.

Even worse than the Gettier problem, the proposition "Tomorrow I may or may
not die." satisfies JTB, rendering it useless.

Lets just say that I don't know what knowledge is, but if it's not useful -
it's not knowledge.

All Philosophical debates are a form of Kobayashi Maru[1]. There is no "right"
answer by design. The purpose is to make you conceptually understand the
problem.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobayashi_Maru](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobayashi_Maru)

~~~
tlb
Perhaps you should use the term "useful knowledge" instead of re-using a term
that most people think means something else.

Auden used it:

    
    
      And when he occupies a college,
      Truth is replaced by Useful Knowledge;

~~~
ukj
I calibrate my language in real time to that of my interlocutors.

Some times drawing the distinction is necessary, some times it's not.

Conceptually (for one's own intellectual benefit), recognising the distinction
between know-what, know-why and know-how is important.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know-how](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know-
how)

------
coldtea
Douglas Adams?

This is the millennia old diasctintion between knowledge and understanding (or
"wisdom"). I'm pretty sure you could already find it in Homer, the Bible,
Mahabharata, and the Epic of Gilgamesh...

~~~
vanderZwan
None of the other examples involved a computer generating an answer for you,
hence are a slightly worse fit for an analogy here.

~~~
rjf72
This [1] is what Socrates had to say of writing, at least as written by Plato:

"He who thinks, then, that he has left behind him any art in writing, and he
who receives it in the belief that anything in writing will be clear and
certain, would be an utterly simple person, and in truth ignorant of the
prophecy of Ammon, if he thinks written words are of any use except to remind
him who knows the matter about which they are written.

Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting; for
the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a
question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words; you
might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them,
wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same
thing. And every word, when once it is written, is bandied about, alike among
those who understand and those who have no interest in it, and it knows not to
whom to speak or not to speak; when ill-treated or unjustly reviled it always
needs its father to help it; for it has no power to protect or help itself."

The irony of my being able to present this only due to the nature of writing
cannot be overstated. At the same time it's the exact scenario described here.
The nature of understanding vs the nature of knowing, simply replacing
'computer' with 'one who genuinely knows.' The writings of Socrates/Plato
really are quite remarkable.

[1] -
[http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...](http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0174%3Atext%3DPhaedrus%3Apage%3D275)

------
reaperducer
Haven't we had countless movies, books, episodes of Star Trek that basically
say just this.

It's like the tech industry likes sci-fi stories, but doesn't learn from any
of their morals.

------
hyperman1
Is 'understanding' it is root not an efficient compression of knowledge.

We have understanding of gravity, as Newton's laws explain the behaviour of
everything that falls to anything else. That's compression: You don't need a
long list of measurements of falling things, you just need a much shorter list
of starting conditions. Newtons laws will then decompress the long list of
measurements from it.

So what does it mean for protein folding? We need more compression so the
knowledge is understandable on the human scale? Or AI needs less compression,
so it is reasoning in a better way for this problem. Isn't that just a more
abstract way for saying AI is smarter than we are.

~~~
abdullahkhalids
There is definitely more to understanding than compression of knowledge. Here
is one thing. Knowledge is often represented as graph, where the links
represent facts that are related in some way - perhaps causally, perhaps
because they are analogs in two different scenarios etc. Understanding would
include your ability to quickly traverse this graph so you can point out
connections between facts which are more than one link apart.

~~~
hyperman1
I can think of multiple graphs representing the same knowledge, some smaller
than others as irrelevant nodes are pruned, paths are shorter, etc.. The
smaller ones encode that same knowledge with better understanding.

~~~
abdullahkhalids
Let's consider understanding a mathematical theory - say linear algebra. In
principle, the entirety of the knowledge of LA is contained in it's axioms and
the standard rules of propositional logic (i.e. can be compressed into them).
If you just know those, you can recover any theorem or statement of LA. But
this is not how human understanding operates at all.

Usually one understands LA when one has memorized many different theorems of
LA, have perhaps memorized how to derive some from others, or even the same
theorem in several different ways. That doesn't even begin to cover
establishing links between LA and other branches of mathematics, all of which
a proficient mathematician memorizes individually, and memorizes connections
between the links. The mathematicians mental knowledge graph is compressed,
but not that much.

~~~
hyperman1
That's a fair point and an interesting view.

I would consider the axioms as necessary but incomplete knowledge. You need
more knowledge to apply these axioms.

A bit like the axioms are the parts of a car. You can use the car schematic
and the parts to create a car. Or you can generate the missing knowledge of
the schematic by spending lots of time combining random parts.

I am a bit out of my depth here, but maths can be reformulated. I presume like
Minkowski did with Einstein's relativity. Or Riemann with integration. The
result of the reorganized knowledge is deeper understanding.

There is both compression and correction going on, and even correction can be
seen as compression by removal of special cases.

------
dorkwood
While this isn’t at all what the article is about, I think phrases like
“knowledge without understanding is meaningless” are a bit dangerous out of
context, because they imply that rote learning is bad.

Furnishing your brain with a library of facts on a subject means it now has
more items to make connections between, which is what allows understanding to
develop.

These days, when I’m learning something new, I’ll try to accumulate as many
basic facts as possible. Subjects that seem impenetrable can often be
conquered in this way. The more connections you can make, the faster you can
develop an understanding, and the more creative you can eventually become.

------
big_chungus
Please edit the title to "right - knowledge" rather than "right-knowledge".
Maybe I'm still waking up, but I read "right-knowledge" as one word.

------
onemoresoop
_Fans of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy treasure the bit
where a group of hyper-dimensional beings demand that a supercomputer tells
them the secret to life, the universe and everything. The machine, which has
been constructed specifically for this purpose, takes 7.5m years to compute
the answer, which famously comes out as 42._

------
adolph
_Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have
lost in information?_

[http://www4.westminster.edu/staff/brennie/wisdoms/eliot1.htm](http://www4.westminster.edu/staff/brennie/wisdoms/eliot1.htm)

------
bobosha
Knowledge without understanding is, well just information.

~~~
willis936
Let’s not let this fact lower how much we value information. You can have
knowledge without understanding, but you cannot have understanding without
knowledge.

~~~
pdpi
You can, however, get understanding from much less knowledge than many would
have you believe. This is basically the sales pitch for every data driven
company out there — if you’re not collecting and analysing every last bit of
data you can (through our tools, natch) you dont really understand your users,
you have zero understanding of the impact of your marketing...

------
tarkin2
Understanding and knowledge are, to me, the what and the why.

I understand the US president must stand down after two terms. I know this
happens because of my knowledge of the US constitution.

I also understand the US constitution is a set of rules. And I know the vague
historical reasons why they were formed.

Understanding and knowledge are, to me, in a constant cat-mouse chase: "okay,
this happened - but why? Ah, it's because this happened - but why did that
happen? Ad infinitum".

It's cause and effect until you lose interest and are happy saying 'just
because it's like that'.

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RobertRoberts
What is "right-knowledge"?

Edit: Can the editor tweak the title? It's not just a little confusing to me,
others here have mentioned the same issue.

------
Koshkin
‘Meaningless’ does not mean ‘useless.’ You do not, for example, “really
understand” math if you are not well-versed in category theory. And much of
the high-school and engineering math is taught without any attempts to explain
the reason why things are the way they are. You may not realize this, but
people learn mostly by getting used to things.

~~~
seagullz
Not disagreeing with you. But two complementary points:

The other ill of much of high-school and some engineering math teaching is not
having adequate focus on "how to apply" the math in modeling real world
problems. That, in turn, exacerbates further stages of learning the deeper
"why" questions.

Besides, "getting used to" part is apparently inescapable, at least at some
point. After all, as great a mathematician as John von Neumann said _" Young
man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them."_

------
preommr
Slightly off topic but this goes to show how poorly hyphens/dashes are
implemented in modern typography.

Idk if its because I've been reading the word "right-wing" a lot or what it is
but when I saw "right-knowledge" I thought it was a specific term when it
seems like they're using it as an em-dash even though the unicode for the
character is for en-dash.

I get that its harder to type a dash, but c'mon, for an official online
publication their publication software should have some easy shortcut for it.

~~~
Yver
The original article uses a spaced en dash: "Douglas Adams was right –
knowledge without understanding is meaningless"

Not as distinguishable as an em dash but much better than an en dash with no
spaces.

------
floki999
True, and this places a fundamental limit on the extent and types of problems
which can effectively be tackled by machine learning and AI, generally.

~~~
reedwolf
Could you elaborate on which problems you believe are forever out of reach of
AI?

~~~
floki999
I am thinking of highly dimensional and complex systems subject to significant
noise, and operating over many time scales e.g. real-world economics and
financial systems. Also, I’m talking about real-world, practical AI, which can
be implemented to generate whatever output over a practical time-frame (as
opposed to a theoretical AI given infinite data and time). I have no evidence
to back this up, just my educated guess.

------
dblotsky
Isn’t gathering data (knowledge) literally how science works, and develops
theories (understanding)?

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BucketSort
Billions of neurons and we think we can reduce the nuances of our complex
system into words such as "knowledge" and "understanding." To me, those terms
are so vague, they don't mean anything.

------
badrabbit
And they're both dangerous without wisdom!

