The Difference Between Understanding(knowledge) and Use (craft)

October 8th, 2018 2:28 PM

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN UNDERSTANDING(KNOWLEDGE) AND USE (CRAFT)

I just thought of a good analogy.

Mathematicians do amazing things without having any idea why their craft performs as it does. Then we have this nonsense of the contortions of the logical foundations of mathematics, that once you understand them, are ridiculous. Not false, just ridiculous – because the foundations of mathematics are TRIVIAL.

But the whole host of nonsense we call mathematics doesn’t stop us from using the CRAFT of mathematics, any more than adding ancestor’s bones to a crucible of iron doesn’t explain why the extra carbon can produce low grade steel. It didn’t stop people from making steel.

The same is true of the LAW. People conflate the ethical, moral, legal, and necessary law (natural law) all the time as what they intuit as ‘wrong’. Yet a minority of laws, moral norms, social norms, customs, traditions are in fact ethical, and moral under natural law because our various polities, groups, cultures, and civilizations used different portfolios of rights and obligations to preserve the social order regardless of its morality – survival is not a moral question.

So we just habituate all sorts of means of calculating, from math and logic to laws, and norms, we produce vocabularies that help us do what we do in the context that we do it in, and we lose, if we ever new, which mostly we don’t, the ‘science’ and ‘logic’ in the rich weave of normative rules that we use on a day to day basis.

It’s a small minority of us that must learn, recall, use, persist, and evolve those fundamental ideas that allow us to manufacture those normative ideas in useful form.

Goods, Services, and Information are all products. The thing is, that goods are easy to charge for, services less so, and information hardly useful at all except in dispute resolution.