The Weird Stuff and 3 Types of Knowledge | Foundations, Part 1
Answering a Fully Anticipated Question
This is part 1 of the Foundations series of Earthly Fortunes. Here I share a broader view of how I make sense of the world, as foundations of specific topics and stories that we will dive into later.
See Part 2 of the Foundations series on the power of negative knowledge, Part 3 on the Vegas-Eden spectrum, Part 4 on the fundamental physical model of our world, Part 5 for my Materialist confessions.
For years, the night sky has not been dark enough, and that's my major gripe against city life, despite its bountiful electricity and illuminations. It may be old-fashioned to sit by the fields and watch the Dipper rotate and mortal enemies Scorpion and Orion chase each other off the sky, as seasons change from plough to grow to harvest; but such early memories are the fountainhead of my later encounters with all the "weird stuff" that I've grown even more fond of.
"Weird stuff" are not my words. Rather, these syllables are uttered by my friends and colleagues, mentors and supervisors, casual acquaintances and associates, in a spirit of startled intrigue and kindly curiosity: "how do you know all this weird stuff?" They’d grown interested in a place they had thought as boring, after I told a story about a ditch in the ground that is actually a meteor crater. They’d alternate between “haha”s and “wow”s, as I recounted those behind-the-scenes, how sausages are made and machines are run. Or, they are simply curious about how I accumulated evidences in my impromptu praises and defences of seemingly unimportant things (e.g. corn stalks, “expired” food) and places (e.g. Iowa, swamps) when someone dissed them as actually unimportant.
They’d assume that I only read about these things in books. All the “weird stuff”, about geography, energy, and industrial society — the blend of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, and geology together, with dashes of history and economics, flavored by social and political elements.
But no, it takes a lot more than reading. As Robin Williams put it in Good Will Hunting, reading a book on Michelangelo is fine, but doesn’t hold a candle to taking a deep breath in the Sistine Chapel. And what does it mean to “know”, anyways?
Fortunately, Aristotle (everyone’s favorite Greek philosopher!) had already thought about “knowing”. To us mere mortals, there are three types of knowledge:
Techne: the hand’s skills, craft, engineering, tools; the blacksmiths and stonemasons; the right ways to do things.
Episteme: the mind’s device, theory, science, books; the metallurgists and architects; the right things to be done.
Phronesis: the wisdom, prudence, sense, life experience; the metal mines and stone quarries; the practical reality of all things.
Then there is heavenly Sophia: the lightning strike of inspirations from on-high; the ever-moving pen of Mozart, the ecstatic joy of St. Teresa.
Ideally, we should possess all three types of knowledge, and to an extent I’ve done fine. For six years and counting, I’ve been reading on average two books a week. I operated machines. I made edible sausages. I visited the meteor crater and the city Nördlingen in it. I lived in different places and worked a hybrid of jobs that allowed me insight into many practical matters.
Why do I do this? As much as I like my job in data science and AI, a hot area for VC money and cushy jobs, I remain the child who stared into the canvas above us: being the absolute master of an uber-focused spot has never appealed to me. I am accustomed to and love looking as far and wide, as my limited human eyes would enable me to survey the field and the sky — to see the unseen, to reveal the hidden. To me, this is a fun quest.
How’s the quest going? I studied thermodynamics and partial differential equations, I also stood close to blasting turbines at the bottom of hydro dams. I crunched data models, I also witnessed industrial fans being taken apart in blades and axials. I read maps and hydrology reports, I also traversed mountains and surveyed rivers with my hands and feet. My quest was aided by gentle souls local to the land, and at some point, stone quarries and copper mines have acquired their own rhythms, corn fields and cattle farms have become animated spirits. It’s apparent that the search for phronesis and techne contributed to my over-active imaginations, Aristotle may be chuckling now.
But you can’t trust me implicitly. My quest for phronesis, episteme, and techne only gets so far: when trustworthy sources contradict each other, it’s hard to determine the truth. Research against research, research against engineering, plans against executions, local source #4 against #5…These conflicts make the truth murkier, like atmospheric turbulence distorts images of stars.
We won’t shut our eyes because the stars blink, and I won’t give up on this quest because the truth eclipses my search. Instead, I will still share with you good stories, about the conflicts, about my attempts at resolving them, and about my understanding of what is most likely to be true and real — unified by techne, episteme, and phronesis.
And by phronesis, in real life, how do I answer this Fully Anticipated Question: How do you know all this weird stuff?
“I’ve been there, seen it, and done that.”
Thank you for reading! If you liked this, please share with your friends. More on geography, energy, industrial society, and The Unseen of society and history coming your way!