The Fourth Quadrant of Knowledge | Hacker News Reader

The Fourth Quadrant of Knowledge

lyonhe.art

51 pointsspeckx16 comments

> The thing about subject matter experts is that they’re so good at their subject, they often aren’t aware of what they know.

It isn't quite the same thing, but "tacit knowledge"[1] is similar to this concept.

The difference is that the author is talking about things you don't know you know, where tacit knowledge is for things you know that you may have self-awareness but have difficulty conveying.

My favorite example of tacit knowledge is knife sharpening. Even with hundreds of 4k videos of it on YouTube, it's still very hard to teach because so much of the skill rests on the sense of pressure while you're sharpening, which can't be conveyed in video.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge

the author might be talking about "expert embarassment", which is very different than tacit knowledge.

The expert knows that there is a hole in his domain knowledge, but is exasperated because he can't say for sure what it is! That's quite a legit unknown unknown. Even an expert needs the Beginner-Mind to deal with such situations (as author hints towards end of TFA)

Polanyi's work "The Tacit Dimension" is one of my favorites! You can teach calligraphy fundamentals, the principles of hardness and grinding, but it's hard to tell someone how to use a pencil to write. You never think of how you use it while writing, it becomes an extension of the body like a cane allows the blind to feel the world. Maybe Video Games in a genre also feel like they have a bit of this quality, where familiar interfaces allow hard to explain expertise. What virtual tools give the same opportunity for depth of understanding? For me, the old Photoshop UI and VI come to mind.

“'There are unknown unknowns', and while the idea has been around a while, it doesn’t seem to have a name."

There is a name for it. It's called "radical ignorance".

Not according to the people that coined the phrase "radical ignorance".

"While there are different types of knowledge and many ways to make it visible, there are also several types of ignorance and different ways in which it might escape the subject's consciousness. For example, while many instances of ignorance fall into the category of unknown unknowns, where an agent is not only ignorant about something but also about her/his state of ignorance, other instances of ignorance fall into the category of ignorance in disguise, where an agent is not only ignorant about her/his ignorance, but also mistakes his/her misbeliefs for valid knowledge, i.e. the ignorance is disguised by misbeliefs accounted as knowledge. Radical ignorance is exactly a phenomenon of this last type. It is very difficult to explore radical ignorance; nevertheless, the so-called Dunning-Kruger effect (Kruger and Dunning 1999) is an example of how such a phenomenon might manifest itself in everyday life."

One of us experiencing irony...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342250736_A_working...

It appears that the phrase has multiple uses/meanings, with priority of definition going to Dunning & Kruger as far as I can find.

This is the earliest clear definition in the sense I was recalling that I can dig up:

"In its place would be substituted the concept of partial radical ignorance. The adjective “radical” is here meant to distinguish this kind of ignorance from the neoclassical concept of rational ignorance, which refers to a state of affairs in which knowledge exists that would improve our situation but that the expected cost of acquiring it exceeds the expected benefit. We thus choose not to know what is not in our interests to know. In contrast, radical ignorance refers to our unawareness of even the existence of relevant knowledge that we could know at zero cost."

https://departments.gmu.edu/rae/archives/VOL16_1_2003/4_Iked... (digital reader page 5)

I'll concede that this usage is highly niche and lesser known, but I'll have you know that I'm wholly incapable of appreciating irony and will never fully acknowledge my error.

I'm waiting for the 5th quadrant reveal: Things AI knows that we don't. That better fits the quadrant of Unknown Knowledge.

I wager that both your AI-confidence and my AI-shyness mentioned above are contained in the boundary of 4th quadrant (which, kinda by definition, is made of unobtanium)

Then there's AI-shy-confidence and AI-confident-shyness, which are even more interesting

The whole AI paradigm is shifting the tide towards known unknown from unknown unknowns. At least, it feels like it.

The question is how many of those "knowns" are hallucinated

There are also things that you don’t know that you know—muscle memory, habit, trauma—you know how to walk but you don’t remember how you figured it out for the first time.

Cognition is like an iceberg and the unconscious is the part that is under the surface—it has vast and unseen depths.

Zizek also puts ideology in that realm of unknown knowns.

Yeah, I was going to say that but I wasn't sure how receptive HN would be to such a direct reference to psychoanalytic thought when I could express it without that reference.

This is called the curse of knowledge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

Is it really 2026 already?

Thats an unknown, unknown.

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