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Comment by pedro1976 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Polanyi's paradox isn't an alternative to that classification — rather, it explicitly states that a surprisingly large amount of knowledge falls into the "unknown knowns" classification, in areas that defy your "this is better known as culture" description.

Yeah, “unknown knowns” is better known as “the weirdo over there who just sat at the piano and started playing it perfectly having never played it before”. The parent is taking it too meta.

Well he was mocking Rumsfeld there a bit, and added "Unknown-Knowns" to fill in the last quadrant of the 4x4 matrix, basically saying it is the ideology or subconscious at work.

But I think the idea is a bit different in that Polanyi's paradox is at a higher level of awareness. Say if someone can play chess but may not able to effectively teach it. Or the linked article in the wiki has jigsaw puzzles as an example.

Žižek was talking about deeper processes. Things like people acting according to say Christian ethics while rationally disavowing them and saying they oppose them. His traditional joke about is Niels Bohr with his horseshoe above the door: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTAp3KZwYl0

I think it's more like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence

We are be born with some functions at level 4, as well as acquire new skills without going through stages 1-3, otherwise there's no possible bootstrapping mechanism.

At bottom, the reason is always "because the structures in my brain create a signal pattern". Understanding that is really the ultimate knowledge.

Is that Slavoj Zizek? I thought it was Johari.

Yeah, I've always known it as "the Johari Window".

Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham apparently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johari_window

I thought it was Rumsfeld. (Not joking.)

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.)

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