Archive for January, 2012

Chauffeur knowledge

Thursday, January 26th, 2012

I read an interesting little story (it’s truth may be doubted) in some places recently:

“After winning the Nobel Prize, Planck toured around giving a speech. The chauffeur memorized the speech and asked if he could give it for him, pretending to be Planck, in Munich and Planck would pretend to be the chauffeur. Planck let him do it and after the speech someone asked a tough question. The real chauffeur said that he couldn’t believe someone in such an advanced city like Munich would ask such an elementary question and as such, he was going to ask his chauffeur (Planck) to reply].

In this world we have two kinds of knowledge. One is Planck knowledge, the people who really know. They’ve paid the dues, they have the aptitude. And then we’ve got chauffeur knowledge. They have learned the talk. They may have a big head of hair, they may have fine temper in the voice, they’ll make a hell of an impression. But in the end, all they have is chauffeur knowledge“

Source: Charlie Munger – USC School of Law Commencement – May 13, 2007

(here quoted from http://gregspeicher.com/?p=1982)

I like how the “chauffeur knowledge” gives us an easy way to refer to this phenomenon. I would actually define it further as the knowledge of the kind of techniques that can be used to make the impression of actually having the background knowledge; for example, the genius conversational trick of the chauffeur of refering this question further to the one who knew, Planck, without revealing that he himself doesn’t. Fun fact: I first read this in one of those life-enhancing advice books (can’t remember the title, it was in German and I did not buy the book…), so among a collection of “chauffeur techniques”, where it was a quantum mechanics lecture that the chauffeur held for Planck.

But as a scientist, I am actually more skeptical about the supposed “Planck knowledge”. What is the difference between Planck and the chauffeur in terms of giving the lecture? Presumably the chauffeur knew everything that was in the lecture. Well, from a superficial point of view, we could say that Planck had a lot more background knowledge, as he also knew everything that lead to the supposedly mature statements he gave in his quantum mechanics lecture. But would the chauffeur necessarily have been any wiser if he had read all the papers leading to the “facts” presented in the lecture?

I think not. The key is that the difference between Planck and the chauffeur is not only knowledge of “facts”, but “know-how”. Well, in a way, that is knowledge to, but not the kind you can put into an encyclopedia. Planck might not even have known all the little experimental facts and intermediate steps that lead to the conclusions in his lecture (although he did certainly know a lot about them, being one of the key people in the development of quantum mechanics), but he did know the scientific processes in experimental and theoretical physics as well as mathematics that lead there. That is the key difference between him and his chauffeur — as far as the lecture on quantum mechanics is concerned.

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Anti-capitalism in the history of computing

Monday, January 16th, 2012

Somehow, today, I stumbled (again) over the ancient DOS-function 0x09h. That is the DOS function to print a string. With one amazing quirk: The string is not terminated not by a null character or any of the obvious candidates, but by a ‘$’ sign.

This makes it impossible to use this function to print any string containing a dollar sign. This must be one of the coolest pranks in programming ever, I wonder what the sales people though when they tried to use the function and it would always say ‘The price of the product is ‘!

(I have no idea why it actually is, but this is the best explanation I could think of :) there is probably one person in the world who knew, Gary Kildall (now deceased), but at least I can base this explanation on an anonymous forum post)

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Intellectual Self-Defense

Monday, January 9th, 2012

“My personal feeling is that citizens of the democratic societies should undertake a course of intellectual self-defense to protect themselves from manipulation and control, and to lay the basis for more meaningful democracy.” Noam Chomsky framed the idea of intellectual self-defense. At the CdE Winterakademie, Rainer Engelken and myself tried to hold such a course.
What should a course on intellectual self-defense teach? While it is impossible to include everything that one could possibly use to detect the lies of a propaganda system, we have focused on six subjects which we found particularly useful:

1. Logic and argumentation: What constitutes a valid argument in a discourse, and what kind of arguments should not have any influence on our opinion?

2. Psychology; here our focus was on the psychology of influence and the theory of cognitive dissonance.

3. Language. In George Orwell’s 1984, a new language is developed to make critical thinking impossible. While my impression is that language has evolved on a very different path than Orwell thought in 1948, there are many battles on words going on trying to give a subject a more positive or negative spin.

4. Numeracy. How to quickly become more familiar with numbers by using the technique of “Guesstimation”. Also, one should be well acquainted with the possible manipulations of statistics and opinion polls.

5. Philosophy of Science. Science is nowadays the highest authority in many fields. But who decides what science is?

6. Media and democracy. This is mainly about propaganda. Wait a minute, “propaganda”? Isn’t that the thing they have in North Korea? According to Noam Chomsky, even a free press can serve as a propaganda machine for a democratic government, and his “propaganda model” explains why.

A highly recommendable book that covers many of these aspects is Normand Baillargeon’s “Short Course in Intellectual Self-Defense“. However, we have made a collection of many more sources, many of which are also fun to read (or watch). I will post a little summary of each of the subjects covered in the next couple of weeks.

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