A theory of knowledge

Over the last three years, we’ve experienced a grand experiment in the use of AI—what it can do, what it can’t do. Everyone has a theory, but I’m convinced that the Great AI Apocalypse, which is supposed to cause mass unemployment, will never happen. Perhaps swathes of the workforce will indeed be laid off, but my hunch is many of those employers will rebuild their rosters once they realize how embedded humanity has become in their operations.

The reason for this hunch is based on a theory of knowledge. There are many types of knowledge, the vast majority of which is inarticulable. You can tell a lot about someone by the way they dress or walk or speak. They say 80% of human communication is nonverbal, but I’d venture to say 80% of all that can be known is nonverbal.

In-groups can immediately tell an outsider, whether it’s a group of wealthy investors or skaters or fans of a sports team. The claim “poser” is real and is easily observed, often before the person even opens their mouths. Spy craft must be incredibly difficult for this reason.

Similarly, you can pick out a face in a crowd, but you can’t convey that knowledge to another person to pick out that face in a crowd. You can ride a bike, but you can’t translate how to do so to another person—it must be learned in one’s body.

As a result of this understanding, I’m flying more to see clients in person to learn new things about them that help me be a better marketer and business owner and partner to help them grow their businesses. I want to see more of my team in person—cue the return-to-office debates. It turns out there’s some merit to being around each other more often, even if just to build a cultural topsoil through BSing with each other.

This theory also gives me a new appreciation for poetry, performing what T. S. Eliot said are “raids on the inarticulate.”

It provides to me a whole new paradigm to interpret politics, economics, and my own life. For example, the distinction between “educated” voters or leaders with a high IQ or EQ don’t make as much sense when you think that their human capital has been formed in such a way that they can receive and aspire to certain kinds of knowledge that are frankly unavailable to others from other backgrounds for no fault of their own. That’s a newsletter for another day.

In short, I have come to this realization and found the material below rather liberating since I’m the kind of person who wants to know everything about everything before doing anything.

With that, here are some preliminary thoughts around my theory of knowledge, each paragraph of which can be its own post or series of posts, perhaps its own book or library of books.

Reality contains order. Call it moral order or cosmic order, even the clockmaker analogy fits. But it’s clear that there is a particular way to live or run a business such that by doing so one can live a long and healthy life or career. Violating that path leads to disorder, whether in relationships, our bodies, or our finances. There is a wide and easy path in contrast to the narrow gate. This is not to say that reality doesn’t contain chaos—it does—but that there is or is supposed to be some order as to what we are doing here on planet earth.

This ordered reality contains multiple, irreducible aspects. The philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd argued for fifteen aspects, like the physical, economic, or juridical. Each has its own laws or internal order. For example, the physical aspect must be respected on its own terms—economics can’t argue with the laws of physics—as does the quantitative aspect, and so on. This accounts for the unity and diversity of our experience.

Knowledge about this reality is dispersed and fragmented. This is the crucial point. The economist Friedrich Hayek made this clear in his essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” work that eventually earned him a Nobel prize. Thomas Sowell picked up this work in his book Knowledge and Decisions. He wrote, “In reality, knowledge can be enormously costly, and is often widely scattered in uneven fragments, too small to be individually usable in decision making. The communication and coordination of these scattered fragments of knowledge is one of the basic problems—perhaps the basic problem—of any society, as well as of its constituent institutions and relationships.” He goes on to describe economic trade-offs, old boys’ clubs, and more as attempts to reduce this coordination cost.

Different types of knowledge exist. There is explicit knowledge, like my writing this to you. But there is also tacit knowledge, like how to ride a bike or pick out a face in a crowd. It cannot be explained—it is only observed, felt, experienced. Michael Polanyi said we know more than we can say. Philosophers like Aristotle have argued for even more types of knowledge, like nous, episteme, techne, phronesis, sophia. The practice of apprenticeship or craftsmanship helps us to learn the inarticulable knowledge, the kind that must be, well, practiced. This is the place of judgment and experience.

We know by becoming. In many ways, we know certain things only by becoming the kind of person that is able to receive them. For example, a temperate person knows temperance only by becoming the kind of person who can actually be temperate. This knowledge cannot be transferred to another person. Aquinas called this connaturality, which has led to domains like virtue ethics.

Love orders our knowing. To become the kind of person who can receive certain knowledge, like temperance, we have to love rightly. Augustine called this ordo amoris, rightly ordered loves. We love the correct object first, then we become the kind of person that can act rightly. That’s what he meant by the famous phrase credo ut intelligam, faith seeking understanding. We can distort this love through actions or our perspective, and as a result distort our knowledge about reality. Some philosophers call these noetic distortions, how systems and institutions, and even our very thinking processes themselves, are distorted and broken. 

Our imaginations form knowledge in our bodies, relationships, cultures, and habits. Philosopher James K. A. Smith picked up the previous point in his Cultural Liturgies project, arguing that our very imaginations must be restored. This is why apprenticeship is so important—we are being trained in a way that is inarticulable, to value certain things, to hone the craft, where our hands gain muscle memory and our brain gains wisdom through judgment and experience.

Over time, our shared imaginations create a local culture. Wendell Berry wrote in “The Work of Local Culture” about the importance of relationships and storytelling, which “insures [the community] by trust, by good faith and good will, by mutual help.” The inarticulate knowledge builds up slowly over time, like humus in an old bucket. We learn through stories, songs, rhythms, gossip. It cannot be rushed or skipped or automated. It is not efficient. It cannot be captured in HRISs or chatbots or knowledge bases. It must be lived and experienced in community with others over time. Our attempts to isolate knowledge away from others will fail. Modern technique, productivity tools, devices, and institutions cannot replace the embodied community and its ability to transmit knowledge over time. Traditions play a key role here.

Systems handle only explicit knowledge, the smallest portion of what humans know. Since most information transmits nonverbally, in our bodies, over time, in community, AI and other software systems are incapable of accurately representing the human experience. They can explain how to ride a bike, but that explanation is useless when your feet touch the pedals. This captures why so many have criticized AI, arguing that these tools cannot replace human judgment. It comes down to our epistemology, our anthropology, the very fabric of what can be known and experienced about reality itself.

Dishonoring these facts leads to violence. Call it what you will, but it is not good when a person is laid off without regard for his situation, his humanity. The economic aspect was placed above the juridical aspect, or the social, emotional, or pistic aspects. You might call this modal reduction, what philosopher-economist Bob Goudzwaard called idolatry. He argued for an “economy of enough,” of sufficiency and contentment. We often idolize one aspect of reality over another to great harm. When the technique, the technology, or the spreadsheet is overly authoritative, many other important aspects suffer.

Wisdom, then, respects the limits of knowledge. Many philosophers over the centuries have argued for the middle way, the golden mean, and other ways of saying that wisdom knows when to stop, to reflect, to apply certain knowledge in certain situations. Additionally, values like gratitude, humility, and sufficiency counter common false stories of techno-optimism, economism, even in some ways our modern idols of growth and efficiency. 

To be clear, businesses, like children, do need to grow, to develop, to adapt and evolve. They need to be good stewards of their resources, to find community, to seek better ways of doing things, to meet their goals or objectives, even their mission or purpose in life. 

To do so, we all need to use the best tools available to us, including AI. I’m learning, however, that AI and any assortment of techniques and technologies are merely that—tools—and should be treated as such, like a hammer or spreadsheet. Useful, but to a point. 

On a recent podcast called The Knowledge Project, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather Rory Sutherland described the “doorman fallacy,” which is a succinct example of what I’m learning:

A consultancy comes in and defines a hotel doorman’s job as “opening doors,” and advises that the hotel replace them with an automatic sensor.

They take credit for the immediate cost savings. Two years later, the hotel is struggling. It turns out that the doorman was doing a dozen things no one could capture on a spreadsheet: security, hailing taxis, recognizing regulars and overall providing a sense of welcome and status.

The costs were visible. The value was invisible.

Rory argues this is happening everywhere, and is even accelerating. The world is optimizing for visible metrics while destroying the human elements that actually create trust, loyalty and long-term value.

His advice? “Any idiot can cut costs. What takes real skill is cutting costs in a way that doesn’t destroy value.”

These tools and techniques will not be the saviors of our problems. We are each other’s help in a time of need. That’s just how reality is and was and ever will be.

The question is what value do consultants and marketers bring to businesses in the age of AI? We’ll talk about that next time.

Thanks for reading.