An Example (Recall):
You are at a bar with some friends. You are talking about movies and you’re trying to remember that one movie from the 1960s about a court case. You feel like you really know it, but you just can’t find it in your head. You are also struggling to recall characters and other ways to signal to others what movie you are seaching for. You snap your fingers, look up the the ceiling, let out some “umms and ahhs” as you feel yourself getting frustrated. Then your friend tries to lend a hand. “Is it Inherit The Wind?” You immediately dismiss this suggestion since you know its not what you were looking for.
We are very accustomed to these types of situations, but there is something conceptually rich happening here. We don’t remember what the movie we are thinking about is, but we know it definitely isn’t that movie. Notice, however, that if we truly didn’t know the movie we were searching for then we wouldn’t have this ability to disregard the suggestion. We’d instead have to look at the criteria objectively: (1). Inherit The Wind is a movie, (2). made in 1960 and (3). is about a court case. Therefore if we actually didn’t know we’d have to rationally accept it could be the movie we are thinking of.
Instead, we know with near certainty that this isn’t the movie we were thinking of. This means that we do know the movie, but we just can’t recall it name or anything meaningful or communicable about it. This is already a conceptually bizarre state of affairs, but it gets a little more loaded.
Next, your friend spits out, “Oh! Is it To Kill A Mockingbird?”
Then you fireback, “Ah Yes! To Kill A Mockingbird!”. That’s exactly the movie I was thinking of. Then suddenly your mind snaps into a state of equilibrium you remember the characters, the actors, the scenes and it is crystal clear.
What is even more crazy about this is that while you were not able to recall the name or anything substantial about the movie, you could effectively act as verifier. What allows us to do that? In a typical set of circumstances you either know something or you don’t. (Who was the 22nd President?) You either remember or you don’t. (What did you eat for dinner on your 7th birthday?) But in this case, and those like this, you seem to be in a weak position about your own knowledge. Where you don’t know on a cold start, but with a little help from a friend you quickly can confirm.
Another Example (Jogging Memory):
Think about all those times you ever played trivia? Where an answer seems on the tip of your tongue only to have you facepalm when you hear the answer read aloud. There is something importantly different that occurs when you hear an answer that surprises you and one that doesn’t. The feeling of “Oh of course that was the answer, how did I miss that”, vs. “Wow I had no idea, how could anyone even got that”. There are also moments where you don’t even think you know the answer. Where you may throw up your hands and give up. Confidently pronouncing, “who could possibly know this?” only to have the answer read out loud moments later and you shift to “oh wow I guess I did know that”. Something weird here is happening with memory and knowledge. This is a lot like what we saw before above. But consider your friend who blurts out an answer suggestion which is wrong, but weirdly points your mind in the right direction. This is a valid strategy you can use in trivia. Where if the question is: Which president is the Washington D.C. airport named after? Listing, without a clear direction, names of presidents may turn over or rejuvenate stale thought patterns.
This same effect takes place on many exams. Suppose a question asked you,
What the elemental symbol for Gold?
You may be unable to get the question correct. But if 4 choices are provided:
What the elemental symbol for Gold?
A) Au
B) Ag
C) Fe
D) Cu
Seeing these answers may “jog” your memory and you suddenly it may stick out to you that the correct answer was A) Au. In this circumstance we see how multiple choice answers help us recognize the right answer. (This isn’t always the case. In mathematics, where answers don’t carry the same semantic richness we don’t see the same benefit for recollection.)
I want to encapsulate these phenomenon under a common phrase: “You Know It When You See It”. In these cases, the person may not know what they are searching for, they may not recall the correct answer. But upon seeing it they can with great accuracy endorse the answer. They may not know it off the top of their head, but they Know It When They See It.
This is not the same as having something on the Tip-Of-Your-Tongue (TOT). In these cases its not that you know the thing you are looking for deeply and are just failing at retrieving the word. It often is a piece of knowledge which you have seem to forgotten but are refreshed upon hearing more. Consider the multiple choice question about the elemental sign of gold. In this case it is entirely possible you have no idea what the answer is. You might even believe it has a G in it like Gd, but upon seeing Au you rememeber. You could even be prompted with Gd as a possible answer. But upon seeing Au something is set off in your head where you realize oh it was never Gd, it was always Au.
Yet Another Example (Discovery):
You and your spouse are trying to figure out what to food to order in tonight. He says that he doesn’t have any strong preferences and doesn’t know what he wants. So you suggest the local chinese take-out place. To which he replies, “Hmm, not really what I am in the mood for”. Then you suggest, “Ok what about the italian place around the corner?”. Again they reply, “No, not feeling that either.” This may continue for a while. A volley of idea and rejection of that idea. We have likely been both of these people at one point or another. If you have ever been the spouse in this example, what you often begin to realize is that you in-fact may not “know” what you want, but with each added suggestion you begin to realize you actually seem to have preferences somewhere deep down. Preferences which are so strong in-fact that you couldn’t possibily bear ordering from the chinese place to end this interpersonal hell. This seems to imply that these preferences are coming from somewhere. Somewhere within your head is an amorphus ideal of what you want to eat tonight and you may not be able to access it, but can discover how well each suggestion adheres to it.
Rolling This All Together
Across these three examples we can see that we seem to often know things implicitly, but have difficulty accessing them. In the first example, we knew vague contours and had a strong feeling this demonstrated a failure of knowledge recall. In the second example, we saw how similar examples around an idea could help jog our cognitive processes to recall. This demonstrated the interconnectivity of concepts. Last, the final example demonstrated that even personal knowledge and preferences can be kept obsecured to us. Our minds function in such a way that the content of our memories, knowledge, and preferences can be hidden or translucent. We saw stunningly that even when these things are hidden we still have some access to them from our ability to act as a reliable verifier about them. This seems to represent a paradox of knowing without knowing.
You could end here and enjoy the rest of your life with these ideas and concepts fully theoretically introduced. What follows next is much more about where the application of this concept intersects with the real world. This section is less argued for and more pointed at. So do with that as you will.
Creativity
One of the key qualities to be expert at many this is your ability to judge ideas. For instance, to be a great employee at a record label in A&R (artists and repitoire) you need an atuned ear for good music (taste). In a platonic way, if you asked an employee what makes music good they could probably could draw some principles for you. But, ultimately the answer is that they know good music when they see it. Play me 10 songs and I can pick out the good ones by hearing it. The same thing can happen to movie critics. A critic or filmmaker, of course, could go line by line about the importance of pacing, cinematography, acting, but ultimately these principles are often just ad-hoc rationalizations of their “knowing it when they see it” instinct. How can I say this confidently? Well, one could imagine a song or movie which breaks many previous conventions, defying principles, but still is recognized as good, upending the principles we thought we knew. It would be bizzare for people to say, this feels like a great movie, but because it violated this principle of filmmaking it must not be so! This demonstrates, at least in some way, that we have an instinct or apprehension of knowledge which comes before our reasoning capabilities.
In a twist (!), this comes across in all domains not just the arts. Suppose you are a executive officer at a company. Two of your best employees come and propose a new product strategy. You as the executive may not have any preconcieved ideas when it comes to what your company should do. But upon seeing the strategies you quickly realize the second employees strategy is vastly superior. Importantly, since these are best employees, both strategies are well supported with data and market research. It’s just that driven by differences in creativity one went left while the other went right.
Don’t get confused, not everyone will have these abilities across all domains. There could be a bad executive who just makes the wrong decision on strategy. In the same way there could be a record label employee who consistently hires artists who which other’s do not like, and thus are unsuccessful.
Regardless if you are an expert at discerning, we as humans are all pretty decent at figuring out which ideas are prima facie good and which are bad.
- Introducing a four-day work week
- Replacing all grass lawns with artificial turf
- Implementing a universal basic income
- Make cars illegal for people who are named Joe
- Ban trans-fats from the food supply
Without much reasoning we can pretty quickly separate the wheat from the chaff. It is not that we can always know the wheat is wheat, but rather we can quickly diagnose bad ideas.
The Value of Drafting:
This capabilitiy can explain why the process of a rough first draft can be so useful. A first pass at something lets you begin to exercise the part of your mind with this verifying capability. It allows you to ask the quesiton “is this anything?” (Seinfeld named his comedy book this), “is this any good?”. The process is akin to your friend shouting movie titles to help you figure out what you were really looking for. Often in the world we typically have an amorphus idea of what we are looking for, but are not really sure what it is. So as you begin to draft your product proposal for your boss it may quickly become clear your idea is not right. Not because your cost benefit analysis is wrong, or not because you made a controversial assumption. It just isn’t what we were all are looking for. In the same way Inherit The Wind satisfied all the criteria put forth, it was clear to you that this suggestion was incorrect. There are ways by which wrong ideas can help jog us in the right direction. In a minimal way, this is definitely what we don’t want. In a less minimial way, this is off, but your incorrect idea made me realize we should focus on X. Suppose your suggestion of Inherit The Wind activated some unconscious yet salient details about movies that keyed me in to another way of thinking about the problem or remembering.
Artificial Intelligence for First Drafting
Large Language Models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are really good at producing content. In fact they can generate incredible amounts of high-quality looking content. Perfect vocabulary and grammar choices, logical syntax structures spew out of these systems effortlessly. However, what they often fail to have is this knowing it when they see it ability. This is where human-in-the-loop have begun to rise as a concept. In most real world applications of AI, there tends to be an AI system which asserts a sequence of ideas and a human reviews and corrects. Let’s say I am brainstorming about a new startup company idea. I feel fairly confident that when I hear a good idea I’ll know. (This is essentially what venture capitalists do, good ones can spot a great idea from bad idea).
So instead of just generating a list of 10 and picking the first one. I can generate a list of 10 and see if any of them strike me as a good business idea.
- AI-powered personal nutrition coach
- Sustainable packaging solutions for e-commerce
- Virtual reality language immersion platform
- Blockchain-based voting system for local elections
- Smart home energy optimization service
- Personalized microbiome testing and supplement recommendations
- Augmented reality navigation app for indoor spaces
- Peer-to-peer skill-sharing marketplace
- AI-driven legal document analysis and drafting tool
- Drone-based reforestation service
Read these over, I am sure your brain will automatically begin to categorize them: some good and some clearly bad. This, to my own eye, seems to separate the facility of coming up with ideas and being able to assess the quality of those ideas.
Generators and Discerners
Creative people are often able to churn out many ideas of all sizes and sorts. Those with very strong judgment skills are good at quickly assessing the value of those ideas. The ideal person would contain both skills. The ability to generate many ideas and also reliably assess the quality of them. However, and I fear this is just a hunch, I think these skills are somewhat mutually exclusive. To allow oneself to generate ideas, especially fresh and innovative ones, requires a brief suspension of crtique. A moment where an idea can develop and breathe before being assessed for its value. Consider the cases we discussed before where discerning good and bad ideas is a job. These people typically are asked to not spend their time coming up the ideas they are uniquely situated to watch, listen and read rather than create. Generative AI seems to do a pretty good job at creating ideas en masse. This demonstrates that generation is different than discernment, but I don’t mean to suggest it could ever replace the vision of creativity of the human. Esepcially in areas of arts, it is unclear that could happen. Creatives and visionaries are the spark that ignites progress in art, science, and business. Yet it’s the discerning eye of executives, critics, and curators that fans these sparks into flames of innovation. Together, generators and discerners form a relationship that propels humanity forward. In a future world where AI can amplify our creative output, it’s the fusion of human ingenuity in both generating and recognizing brilliance that will shape our future. The next great leap in human achievement will come not just from producing more ideas, but from the uniquely human alchemy of inspired creation and insightful selection. This delicate balance of dreaming and discerning is a skill that remains uniquely and powerfully human.