QC

Jargon like seed/A/B, ‘liquidation preference’, ‘convertible debt’, ‘pari passu’ etc is structural knowledge. It doesn’t decay but is useless without SA. SA: Knowing what they map to in a given year: ranges, which parts are flush versus starved, which firms are leading etc.

Generalizing, vocabulary elements are knowledge. Proper names, numbers, rankings are situation awareness. They co-evolve. New jargon might emerge (“pre-seed”), universe might expand (Kickstarter). Stuff might go from SA to knowledge if institutionalized, like regulation (GDPR).

Another example is climate change/action. “Duck curve” is knowledge Is a 3000 MW grid storage battery replacing a canceled gas peaked knowledge routine stuff or a significant thing? Being able to judge that is SA.

SA is easily recovered if lost. But knowledge decay (pipes rusting and leaking) is not. If you’re out of a game for 3y you can get back in with a few weeks of catching up at most. If you’re out for 10, it might take years to get back in or be impossible. Too much pipe change.

If you can understand and judge news for important you have K+SA. If you can understand but not judge what’s important, you have K but not SA.

If you struggle to understand it at all, and too many concepts are new or being used in ways that seem “ungrammatical” with respect to your old mental models, knowledge has decayed. Either K nor SA. To complete the 2x2: is there a SA without K condition? Yes!

This is how scenesters, wantapreneurs, Trump, PUA types etc operate. They have situation awareness without knowledge, in the form of pure behavior response maps. And it works sorta like a triage. 80% of the time, the blind, blackbox response to a situational stimulus is correct.