Common knowledge

In broader terms, common knowledge is used to refer to information that a reader would accept as valid, such as information that many users may know. As an example, this type of information may include the temperature in which water freezes or boils. To determine if information should be considered common knowledge, you can ask yourself who your audience is, are you able to assume they already have some familiarity with the topic, or will the information’s credibility come into question.

Specific and general knowledge

 We define specific knowledge as knowledge that is costly to transfer among agents and general knowledge as knowledge that is inexpensive to transmit. Because it is costly to transfer, getting specific knowledge used in decision-making requires decentralizing many decision rights in both the economy and in firms.

General Knowledge

General knowledge is information that has been accumulated over time through various mediums. It excludes specialized learning that can only be obtained with extensive training and information confined to a single medium. General knowledge is an essential component of crystallized intelligence. It is strongly associated with general intelligence and with openness to experience.

General knowledge is also moderately associated with verbal ability, though only weakly or not at all with numerical and spatial ability.^[3] As with crystallized intelligence, general knowledge  is information that has been accumulated over time through various mediums.^[12]

Specific knowledge can be found by pursuing your genuine curiosity

Very often specific knowledge is at the edge of knowledge. It’s also stuff that’s just being figured out or is really hard to figure out.

So, very often, it’s not something you sit down and then you reason about, it’s more found by observation.