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How do you know that?

Article Excerpt
After four decades in business with a degree of success, Ben had some strong opinions. His views were often the results of research of some sort, though sometimes his research was not that sound. As he sat in the American-oriented Hong Kong hotel dining room in 1970, his adult grandsons looked across the water and wondered how far it was from the peninsula to the city's island. To answer this question, Ben asked the nearest native he could find, the bus boy, who said it was "about a kilometer." Like many U.S. travelers of the time, Ben did not understand how to translate this measurement to more familiar units, so he loudly said, "What's a kilometer? You mean a mile?" Probably not knowing the conversion of metric measure to miles, the bus boy politely nodded his head before making his escape from yet another weird American guest. But for the following days, anyone in the tour group who speculated that the island and mainland were a bit over a half mile apart was strongly corrected by Ben who now was certain that it was a exactly one mile.

A U.S. immigrant who arrived in the early twentieth century, Ben's formal education ended in the eighth grade. English was learned in his early teens. A self-trained businessman, he often consulted his library of business textbooks, though he had no way of assessing the validity of some things those books claimed as true (itself a dubious point of trust, see Rotfeld 2000), but he tried to work from information. He usually knew the...

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