From ...no straight lines... comes Another definition of "Knowledge Worker"
A knowledge worker is someone that makes it up as they go along.
Right on. Knowledge workers are the people who are given difficult problems (or go looking for them) and have to figure out how to solve them with the tools they've developed/found over the course of their lives. They go spelunking into their old textbooks, poke around on the web, riffle through their contacts, and hunt through their library services in an effort to find answers or reframe the question in a way that they can answer. Each question leads down a different path, and frequently leads to new ways to solve the problem the next time it arise. We make it up indeed.