[FRIAM] types of knowledge

uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ gepropella at gmail.com
Thu Apr 22 12:50:49 EDT 2021


With millions looking for work, stigmas create a dearth of skilled tradespeople
https://youtu.be/c4s-4fK5r0w

Listening to an interview of this guy <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kehinde_Andrews>, I was glad to hear him address the sterility of the Western philosophy, the ideal, or "pure academy", or whatever, where people value thinking so highly as to get lost in what the thinking is *for*. But in the particular interview, he made a claim that sounded like a gloss over *types* of doing that I didn't like, something like:

 "Black philosophy says the best way to do philosophy, to think, is to be directly involved in trying to change the world." 

While I deeply agree with the position that the best way to think is to be directly involved in the world, to do, to act, to be, the distinction between being *in* the world versus trying to *change* the world is absolutely crucial. The strawmanny self-contradiction is easy to point out. You can't have a clear idea for changing the world without that ideal objective toward which you change the world. So, that type of action-thinking depends fundamentally on the ideal-abstraction, counterfactual pure thinking, he's trying to criticize.

But the less strawmanny criticism is that engineering and science [⛧] are very different things. This disambiguation of types of action-thinking is often missing from my more practical friends, people who spend the overwhelming majority of their time *doing* ... where the overwhelming majority of their thinking is tightly coupled to some form of doing. The ones who grok it seem to get a lot of satisfaction from activities like, just e.g., disassembling a motorcycle just to "clean" it and put it back together again. They're not trying to *fix* the thing so much as bathing in its beauty.

The PBS segment (inadvertently) broaches that type distinction, I think. But I wish it were called out more clearly. It may seem difficult to appreciate the stoic beauty of, say, sewage logistics professionals, all covered in literal sh¡t, butt crack showing, bleeding fingers from stubborn pipes, etc. But if you don't, you're missing an important anatomical part. To entice them into such jobs with money is impoverished. We need to entice them/us into such muck in the same way we entice, say, a field biologist into their (often just as disgusting [⛤]) muck.

[⛧] Not uniquely science, but also Taoist or other forms of being in the world that don't fight the flow.

[⛤] I had a nightmare the other night where all my friends were trying to get me to eat this white fungus. "It's good for you", they said. "It tastes good", they said. Ugh.

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