marx and the domains of ignorance

The domains of ignorance:

• Known unknowns: All the things you know you don't know
• Unknown unknowns: All the things you don't know you don't know
• Errors: All the things you think you know but don't
• Unknown knowns: All the things you don't know you know
• Taboos: Dangerous, polluting or forbidden knowledge
• Denials: All the things too painful to know, so you don't

The domains of ignorance are relevant to Marx. Some people don't read him because it is taboo. Some people read him and think they understand but they don't. Some people have a superficial knowledge of Marx and think that is good enough. But none of that really explains the extent of the marginalisation of Marx. I think the main issue is that he is difficult to understand. The thing missing from the domains of ignorance is contradictory knowledge.

Isaac Deutscher provides an anecdote about the knowledge of Marx in that era (the 1930s):

"Capital is a tough nut to crack, opined Ignacy Daszyński, one of the best known socialist "people's tribunes" around the turn of the 20th century, but anyhow he had not read it. But, he said, Karl Kautsky had read it, and written a popular summary of the first volume. He hadn't read this either, but Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz, the party theoretician, had read Kautsky's pamphlet and summarised it. He also had not read Kelles-Krauz's text, but the financial expert of the party, Hermann Diamand, had read it and had told him, i.e. Daszynski, everything about it"
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism

Marx's critique of political economy is old knowledge, forbidden or marginalised knowledge and difficult to understand knowledge. Because it was written 150 years ago many think it is no longer relevant. Because communism is believed to have been tried and found wanting many who want change think it could not provide the answers we want. Because Marxism is an insignificant part of mainstream education and in particular often not taught in the economics faculty then it is only going to be accessed by those who think outside of the mainstream. Finally, the many volumes of Capital are difficult to understand for a variety of reasons.

Conceptually the work is very rich and it is difficult to keep the whole of fit in your head. Marx uses a method of investigation (his adaptation of Hegelian dialectics) that is unfamiliar to moderns. Much of the language he uses is unfamiliar and this issue is exacerbated through a variety of translations. The prose is dense. Marx established a precise, strict terminology, eg. use value, exchange value, value, relative and absolute surplus value and then uses it rigorously for hundreds of pages. Therefore you must pay close attention, otherwise you are lost. He frequently uses French and Latin quotations. He also employs fascinating, tangential footnotes, which must be read.

The economic crisis which began in 2007 created an intellectual crisis, which did already exist, but was not so obvious as before the crisis. For much of time following WW2 economic crisis was absent, the capitalists had appeared to work out how to stabilise an unstable system. That assumption has now been shown to be false.

My contention is that to understand the inner workings of capitalism you have to understand Marx. Although this will not provide any magic solution to the current issues of ongoing economic crisis it will provide a deep appreciation of the inner contradictions of capitalism that make it forever an unstable and unpredictable system.

To understand value theory you have to read the original Marx. My goal here is to describe some of the hurdles I encountered along the way and answers I found to those problems. I called these AHA moments. I'm writing it as a series of confusions or sticking points followed by breakthroughs which were then followed by more confusions, etc.

The Value concept is central to Marx's whole argument. To understand capitalism, how it works from the inside, requires an understanding of Value. It is this broad view that has motivated me to persevere in reading Marx, whose writings are difficult, and various interpretations.

(part one, to be continued)

an effective critique

The blogosphere is full of helpful and interesting people, as this recent email I received testifies:

I just found your site with some interesting javascript.... but i cant beleive you post a photo as bad as it is...

So just for fun i correct it !... use it if you like it is better... i did it just to see if i could recover it..

Heh, that's the best way yet that I've been told that I'm a crappy photographer!! LOL (and thanks)

error in chess and life

For me, competitive chess is sometimes the best way for becoming self aware of my own potential to make idiotic decisions.

That is good for me. Although, that particular way may not work for you, I would argue in general that it's important for everyone to become aware of their potential for idiocy. Unless of course you are one of those people who don't make idiotic mistakes.

In chess you win, lose or draw and so there is objective measure of performance. (cf. "real life" where stupid decisions can continue to be disputed for years, sometimes even centuries.)

Over the board competitive chess is public - other players watch your games and observe your brilliance or stupidity, as the case may be. Chess has a touch move rule so mistakes cannot be withdrawn even if you see them after you move and before your opponent has replied. Your mistakes are irreversible, your guts lay on the floor and everyone can see them. In chess you can make a whole series of good moves and then wreck it all with a single bad move, perhaps when tired and under time pressure from the clock.

Although this is not "real life", there are enough similarities for the learning process to transfer into real life. Many chess players do assert this. As in real life there are different types of errors, such as: incorrect evaluation of the whole position (you think it is better for you but it is really better for your opponent); tactical calculation errors (you miss your opponents killer move after a 3 move deep sequence); atrocious blindness when tired or in time pressure ("how on earth could I have been so stupid as to miss that?").

Unlike the colour of the pieces this process is far from black and white. In many chess positions there are a handful of "good" moves (not just one good move) surrounded by many poor moves. This means that chess players can have style as well, eg. "positional", "aggressive", "closed", "open", "Nimzovitchian, etc."

Competitive chess players develop acute sensibilities with respect to error and the potential for error. This develops in a significant way for serious players who go through their games afterwards to identify at least some of their errors. This can take the form of an immediate postmortem. In my experience nearly all serious players accept the invitation to go through the game immediately after it is finished (time permitting). For players into improving their game further this is followed up by an analysis at home with annotations and running positions through a computer program such as Fritz, for further enlightenment.

It's best to look hardest at your losses, which can be (is) a painful experience. I know of many chess players who confess to sleepless nights after a painful loss. At the highest level this has even become life threatening in exteme cases. Karpov lost 10 kg and was hospitalised several times in his famous 1984 match against Kasparov (reference). This is the way that good players improve - by intimate dissection of their own stupid errors in an attempt to reduce errors in the future.

This chess process seems to me to be quite similar to the development of scientific knowledge - the public process of hypothesising, experimenting, making knowledge claims publicly and then arguing about those claims. This process of casting away illusions about ones own competence and becoming involved in a sometimes painful process of internal struggle with ones ignorance is central to both individual development and our development as a society.

Elaborations from other fields:

1) Marvin Minsky coins the phrase "negative expertise" in part as a critique of the behaviourist approach ("who trained themselves to think only about the physical actions that people do, while ignoring questions about what people do not do") but also because "negative expertise ... is a very large part of every person's precious collection of common sense knowledge ... much of what we come to know is based on learning from our mistakes" (The Emotion Machine, section 3.5, p. 81)

2) John Lienhard in his historical review of how books changed the world:

.... what principles should the adults, who currently control things, follow, in shaping a future we cannot predict? Lienhard recommends:

1. Seek out our own ignorance, that wisdom is having some awareness of our ignorance

3) Alan Kay's views on system design, summarised by John Maxwell:

The problem with both a user centred approach to design and a designer centred approach is that both assume that we know in advance what the system will be like. So, the starting point for designing a children's machine ought to acknowledge ignorance, that we don't know the endpoint.

How do we build a system that can grow into something yet unforseen by either its users or designers?

It ought to be more like paper or clay than a finished device like a car or a TV.

One metaphor here is cell biology. One kind of building block which can differentiate into all the needed building blocks. You need an evolutionary approach.

Late binding (Etoys, References) allows a fluid approach to change, the opposite of hard wired instrumentalism.
- alan kay's educational vision

4) the domains of ignorance

Known unknowns: All the things you know you don't know
Unknown unknowns: All the things you don't know you don't know
Errors: All the things you think you know but don't
Unknown knowns: All the things you don't know you know
Taboos: Dangerous, polluting or forbidden knowledge
Denials: All the things too painful to know, so you don't
- from The Domains of Ignorance

5) five orders of ignorance

from Philip Armour's "Of Jet Planes and Zeppelins"

• 0th Order Ignorance: Lack of Ignorance
  • I (probably) know something
• 1th Order Ignorance: Lack of Knowledge
  • I do not know something
• 2nd Order Ignorance: Lack of Awareness
  • I do not know that I do not know something
• 3rd Order Ignorance: Lack of Process
  • I do not know a (suitably effective) way to find out that I don't know something
• 4th Order Ignorance: Meta-Ignorance
  • I do not know about the FiveOrdersOfIgnorance

Philip goes onto explain that you can only have a process for something you already know how to do.

And the corollary: you can't have a process for something you've never done.