Speaking from personal experience
I find it difficult to understand and use something (most recently gears on a machine) unless I can visualise how it works, or why it does what it does.

But taking other examples, e.g. "we know that the Earth goes round the Sun", it's important to know how we know this, as it is proof that it happens. Otherwise you're just taking someone's word for it, surely?
( spangolin - the odds are good but the goods are odd, Tue 19 May 2009, 12:28, archived)

That's really interesting.
I think it's important for there to be knowledge of how the Earth goes around the sun, but it isn't important for me to have that knowledge.
I think that I do know that the Earth goes around the sun, but I know it because someone told me, and that that person (or someone else further back in the chain) worked it out. And even if I didn't remember being told, I'd still know the fact, but that's a different matter.
Nobody would know it if nobody (including dead people) knew how it happens, but not everybody has to know how it happens for them to know.
( Comma, Tue 19 May 2009, 12:32, archived)

No, it's not especially important for you to know that the Earth goes round the Sun, for everyday life
but now that I know that fact, I couldn't imagine not knowing it. If that makes any sense.

Maybe it's like most people and computers. I don't know how binary, electrical processes within the computer chips, the most basic parts of a computer work, or really how an operating system translates all that. But I can use a computer.
( spangolin - the odds are good but the goods are odd, Tue 19 May 2009, 12:37, archived)

What are you talking about
the earth is flat, everybody knows this, and the sun rises from beneath it every morning, and sets down below it every evening.
( turb0t, Tue 19 May 2009, 12:40, archived)

And it's turtles all the way down.

( nick the greek, Tue 19 May 2009, 12:44, archived)

Soupy and George
My turtles may disagree with you,

They think the world is humans all the way down.

Eplains why they once tried climbing up my bf's trouser leg. "I WANT TO EXPLOOOORE"
(theneet began to cut her hair and long for balls, Tue 19 May 2009, 12:48, archived)

But if you're just taking someone's word for it,
you're only putting faith in others, and as such it constitutes a belief, rather than knowledge, even if it happens to be true as well.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Tue 19 May 2009, 12:47, archived)