Grok

This article is about the word Grok. For the chatbot by xAI, seeGrok (chatbot).For other uses, seeGrok (disambiguation).

"Grokking" redirects here. For the explanation of the word/phrase in machine learning, seeGrokking (machine learning).

Grok(/ˈɡrɒk/) is aneologismcoined by American writerRobert A. Heinleinfor his 1961science fictionnovelStranger in a Strange Land.While theOxford English Dictionarysummarizes the meaning ofgrokas "to understand intuitively or by empathy, to establish rapport with" and "to empathize or communicate sympathetically (with); also, to experience enjoyment",Heinlein's concept is far more nuanced, with critic Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. observing that "the book's major theme can be seen as an extended definition of the term."The concept ofgrokgarnered significant critical scrutiny in the years after the book's initial publication. The term and aspects of the underlying concept have become part of communities such ascomputer science.

Descriptions inStranger in a Strange Land

Critic David E. Wright Sr. points out that in the 1991 "uncut" edition ofStranger,the wordgrok"was used firstwithout any explicit definitionon page 22 "and continued to be used without being explicitly defined until page 253 (emphasis in original).He notes that this firstintensional definitionis simply "to drink", but that this is only a metaphor "much as English 'I see' often means the same as 'I understand'".Critics have bridged this absence of explicit definition by citing passages fromStrangerthat illustrate the term. A selection of these passages follows:

Grokmeans "to understand", of course, but Dr. Mahmoud, who might be termed the leading Terran expert on Martians, explains that it also means, "to drink" and "a hundred other English words, words which we think of as antithetical concepts. 'Grok' meansallof these. It means 'fear', it means 'love', it means 'hate' – proper hate, for by the Martian 'map' you cannot hate anything unless you grok it, understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you – then you can hate it. By hating yourself. But this implies that you love it, too, and cherish it and would not have it otherwise. Then you canhate– and (I think) Martian hate is an emotion so black that the nearest human equivalent could only be called mild distaste.

Grokmeans "identically equal". The human cliché "This hurts me worse than it does you" has a distinctly Martian flavor. The Martian seems to know instinctively what we learned painfully from modern physics, that observer acts with observed through the process of observation.Grokmeans to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed – to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science and it means as little to us as color does to a blind man.

The Martian Race had encountered the people of the fifth planet, grokked them completely, and had taken action; asteroid ruins were all that remained, save that the Martians continued to praise and cherish the people they had destroyed.

All that groks is God.

Etymology

Robert A. Heinlein originallycoinedthe termgrokin his 1961 novelStranger in a Strange Landas aMartianword that could not be defined in Earthling terms, but can be associated with various literal meanings such as "water", "to drink", "to relate", "life", or "to live", and had a much more profound figurative meaning that is hard for terrestrial culture to understand because of its assumption of a singular reality.

According to the book, drinking water is a central focus onMars, where it is scarce.Martians use the merging of their bodies with water as a simple example or symbol of how two entities can combine to create a new reality greater than the sum of its parts. The water becomes part of the drinker, and the drinker part of the water. Bothgrokeach other. Things that once had separate realities become entangled in the same experiences, goals, history, and purpose. Within the book, the statement ofdivineimmanenceverbalized among the main characters, "thou art God", is logically derived from the concept inherent in the termgrok.

Heinlein describes Martian words as "guttural" and "jarring". Martian speech is described as sounding "like a bullfrog fighting a cat". Accordingly,grokis generally pronounced as a gutturalgrterminated by a sharpkwith very little or no vowel sound (a narrowIPAtranscription might be[ɡɹ̩kʰ]).William Tennsuggests Heinlein in creating the word might have been influenced by Tenn's very similar concept ofgriggo,earlier introduced in Tenn's storyVenus and the Seven Sexes(published in 1949). In his later afterword to the story, Tenn says Heinlein considered such influence "very possible".

Adoption and modern usage

In computer programmer culture

Uses of the word in the decades after the 1960s are more concentrated incomputer culture,such as anInfoWorldcolumnist in 1984 imagining a computer saying, "There isn't any software! Only different internal states of hardware. It's all hardware! It's a shame programmers don't grok that better."

TheJargon File,which describes itself as "The Hacker's Dictionary" and has been published under that name three times, putsgrokin a programming context:

When you claim to "grok" some knowledge or technique, you are asserting that you have not merely learned it in a detached instrumental way but that it has become part of you, part of your identity. For example, to say that you "know"Lispis simply to assert that you can code in it if necessary – but to say you "grok" Lisp is to claim that you have deeply entered the world-view and spirit of the language, with the implication that it has transformed your view of programming. Contrastzen,which is a similar supernatural understanding experienced as a single brief flash.

The entry existed in the very earliest forms of the Jargon File in the early 1980s. A typical tech usage from theLinux Bible, 2005characterizes theUnixsoftware developmentphilosophy as "one that can make your life a lot simpler once you grok the idea".

The bookPerl Best Practicesdefinesgrokas understanding a portion of computer code in a profound way. It goes on to suggest that tore-grokcode is to reload the intricacies of that portion of code into one's memory after some time has passed and all the details of it are no longer remembered. In that sense,to grokmeans to load everything into memory for immediate use. It is analogous to the way a processorcachesmemory for short term use, but the only implication by this reference was that it was something a human (or perhaps a Martian) would do.

The main web page forcURL,an open source tool and programming library, describes the function of cURL as "cURL groks URLs".

The bookCyberiacovers its use in this subculture extensively:

This is all latter day usage, the original derivation was from an early text processing utility from so long ago that no one remembers but, grok was the output when it understood the file.K&Rwould remember.

Thekeystroke loggingsoftware used by the NSA for its remote intelligence gathering operations is named GROK.

One of the most powerful parsing filters used inElasticsearchsoftware's logstash component is namedgrok.

A reference book by Carey Bunks on the use of the GNU Image Manipulation Program is titledGrokking the GIMP.

In counterculture

See also:Counterculture of the 1960s

• Tom Wolfe,in his bookThe Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test(1968), describes a character's thoughts during anacid trip:"He looks down, two bare legs, a torso rising up at him and like he is just noticing them for the first time... he has never seen any of this flesh before, this stranger. He groks over that... "

• In his countercultureVolkswagenrepair manual,How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot(1969), dropout aerospace engineerJohn Muirinstructs prospective used VW buyers to "grok the car" before buying.

• The word was used numerous times byRobert Anton Wilsonin his worksThe Illuminatus! TrilogyandSchrödinger's Cat Trilogy.For instance, inThe Eye in the Pyramid,volume one ofIlluminatus:

I caught the references to Aristotle, the old man of the tribe with his unfortunate epistemological paresis, and also to that feisty little lady I always imagine is really the lost Anastasia, but I still didn’t grok. “What do you mean?” I asked (...)

• And inThe Trick Top Hat,volume two ofSchrödinger's Cat:

Williams went on. "You've got to think of time ripples, as well as space ripples, to grok the quantum world...."

See also

• (in German)Anschauung– related "sense-perception" concept inKantian philosophy
• Appropriation (sociology)– Assimilation of concepts into a governing framework
• Being-in-the-world– a term in the existentialist philosophy ofMartin Heidegger,aimed at deconstructing the subject–object distinction
• Grokking (machine learning)- a transition togeneralizationthat occurs many training iterations after theinterpolation threshold,after many iterations of seemingly little progress
• Introjection vs assimilationin Fritz and Laura Perls' gestalt therapy – analogous to memorizing vs grokking
• Knowledge by acquaintanceand knowledge by description – a distinction in philosophy between familiarity with a person, place, or thing and knowledge of facts
• Logos– a term in Western philosophy that has been used to describe various forms of knowledge and reasoning
• Phenomenology (psychology)– the study of subjective experience
• Qi– Vital force in traditional Chinese philosophy

External links

• "Grok".TheJargon File(version 4.4.7).Retrieved9 September2013.
• SF citations for grokgathered for theOxford English DictionarybyJesse Sheidlowerof theHistorical Dictionary of Science Fiction
• Lee, Charles (February 2002)."Grok and the Vanguard of Science".Groks Science Radio Show and Podcast.Retrieved2 August2022.
• "grok".Merriam-Webster Dictionary.Merriam-Webster, Incorporated.Retrieved2 August2022.
• "grok".The Free Dictionary.Farlex, Incorporated.Retrieved2 August2022.
• WikiQuote onStranger in a Strange Landincludes many uses ofgrok