Imagine a person listening to a lecture or presentation on a difficult topic outside their field repeatedly. They do this so often in fact that they memorize all the words. Moreover, they do that so well that they eventually volunteer to give that presentation themself.
What is their relationship to the knowledge conveyed in the words?
Here is an anecdote that Charlie Munger relayed during at least one of his speeches.
By the way, there’s a famous story about Max Planck that is apocryphal: After he won his prize, he was invited to lecture everywhere, and he has his chauffeur who drove him around to give public lectures all through Germany. And the chauffeur memorized the lecture, so one day he said, “Gee, Professor Planck, why don’t you let me try it by switching places?” So he got up and gave the lecture. At the end of it, some physicist stood up and posed a question of extreme difficulty. But the chauffeur was up for it. “Well,” he said, “I’m surprised that a citizen of an advanced city like Munich is asking so elementary a question, so I’m going to ask my chauffeur to respond.”
Poor Charlie’s Almanack, page 251.
Apocryphal indeed, this almost certainly did not happen that way, though similar stories have been told about other people, as well.
It is an entertaining story though and the notion of chauffeur knowledge is interesting.
There is an important difference between reciting a presentation and successfully creating that presentation in the first place. For the latter, you have to understand the material.
Memorizing words and phrases gives you vocabulary and its arrangement, but not understanding. The circle of competence serves as useful model here again and the chauffeur’s belief they can just give the lecture perhaps betrays an illusion, or inflated belief in their own competence.
Because questions will come and the more and harder the questions are that you can withstand, the more clearly you are acting within your circle of competence. The questions are an important tool in that respect, helping probe your understanding and its boundaries.
Now imagine our person who memorized the presentation again. This time, they have an earpiece. Whenever they receive a question from the audience, someone else whispers an answer into their ear that they in turn then say out loud.
In The Art of Thinking Clearly, Rolf Dobelli cautioned in 2013:
Unfortunately, it is increasingly difficult to separate true knowledge from chauffeur knowledge. […]
With journalists […] Some have acquired true knowledge. […] The majority of journalists, however, fall into the category of chauffeur.
The Art of Thinking Clearly, page 46.
Given Internet connectivity, a cellphone in your hand or a laptop in front of you, a lot of information is readily accessible.
More so now, with generative artificial intelligence, you can prompt engineer your way to answers in real time. That is convenient, it is helpful, and it can also make it much more difficult to tell whether you understand or just recite. That is the decoupling of output from competence, discussed here and elsewhere.
The earpiece and outside support make them more convincing, but repeating the answer someone else provided does not fundamentally change our person’s understanding or their circle of competence.
It does make it much harder to tell for the outside observer.