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Comment by kaycebasques | Hacker News Reader

I've been exploring data / information / knowledge / wisdom management a lot over the last couple months. I was surprised to discover how little consensus there is over the meaning of each of those terms. Or rather, subfields seem to have different takes on the meanings. "Data" and "information" I can kinda pin down. "Knowledge" and "wisdom" much less. Hayek in this article for instance does not seem to ever define what he means by "knowledge". Reading between the lines, he seems to think of it as being able to use data and information to make effective / economical decisions.

It's especially unfortunate that writers assume everyone is on the same page about what "knowledge" means because the meaning of the term seems to have changed a lot over the last few hundred years.

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I’ve refrained from commenting on this one precisely because (I assume) his definition of “rational economic order” and his justification for “best”, in the first two paragraphs, are context a reader of this journal is expected to already have, since he doesn’t elaborate on them, and lacking that the rest of the paper’s basically pointless (though his protest that in 1945 it was widely denied that there is any knowledge but scientific knowledge seems deeply silly per se and exactly the kind of thing you often see from people trying to push a “rebel” image for marketing reasons…)

But yes the definitions of several other terms seem slippery and to change from one use to the next, including knowledge.

> (though his protest that in 1945 it was widely denied that there is any knowledge but scientific knowledge seems deeply silly per se and exactly the kind of thing you often see from people trying to push a “rebel” image for marketing reasons…

Look up "logical positivism" as a philosophical system. It became the dominant academic philosophy for a while (including around 1945). It asserted almost exactly that - that there was no knowledge apart from scientific knowledge (although I believe it did accept direct sensory input as knowledge, and also the operations of pure logic).

It's difficult now to see the water that he was swimming in then.

I guess I see this as an attempt or yearning to discredit him, but following in the work that sprung from Hayek and friends, the motivation for his work is clearly curiosity and wonder about how does anything get done in the world without coordination, never mind the wondrously complex things that are created nowadays.

His conclusion is that knowledge is dispersed, represented in prices that arise from markets which is simply understood as cooperation. Knowledge may frankly be expressed as whatever enables and motivates someone to offer something on the market. If that's too vague for your taste, too bad.

The wonder is that uncoordinated, independent cooperation gives rise to such abundant and sophisticated products. Not only that it's in a system that expresses everyone's individual preferences and competing interests. Central planning fails spectacularly to do this, and there's no reason to believe that it ever will even with fantastic computational power.

Definitely not trying to discredit him. I have no horse in that economic ideology race. I'm just honestly curious about what the heck we mean when we talk about knowledge. The background is that I'm a technical writer (TW), and a lot of us TWs are recognizing that knowledge management is becoming even more important than it already was before (and we already knew it was an important part of our role). So naturally as I begin this journey I am looking deeply into the meaning of the term and finding many different definitions. Your synthesis of this article for example gave me yet another new perspective on it.

Ah got it. I think the idea of knowledge management is maybe misguided when applied to economics.

Knowledge in economic terms is much less definite because prices reflect subjective value.

Once you start on the path of semantics, it's often turtles all the way down. So, unless you want to be rigorous, it's best to go with the generally accepted best bet.

For sure, I know comments about semantics often don't go down well on HN. Was just sharing something I'm intellectually curious about. The act of trying to pin down a rigorous definition has exposed me to 5-10 different interpretations and each has given me different perspective on how to manage this nebulous thing we call knowledge.

"Generally accepted" is nearly impossible to discern from an individual standpoint. I prefer Wittgenstein's stance that you should essentially accept uncertainty that you refer to the same world/concepts/knowledge that others do and engage in good faith efforts to communicate the best you can. This amounts to the same thing but it's not weighted towards some (likely wildly incorrect) subjective viewpoint of the general population.

I think I agree. Oddly, the one place where the terms gained some level of settling appears to be corporate, but I can't tell if it is due to the nature of corporations, cross-pollination or some other unknown factors.

What I personally find very interesting is the age of that paper and the fact that, the discrepancy between model most commonly presented in school ( in my case, variant of perfectly rational individual ) and real life has been voiced nearly eight decades ago and is not seriously discussed as foundational knowledge when it comes to economics.

Isn't it precisely what makes knowledge and its management interesting? Just as the diversity of PKM solutions it has given rise to?

Its definition being difficult to pin down is a feature--not a single knowledge, but a multitude of (in)compatible knowledges and messy knowledge-making processes, and the many different interests that arise from it.

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