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It seems as if I've been using a different definition of deliberate practice to the author. They seem to imply that deliberate practice requires a regimented study program, but I've always seen it as "identify the things you are weak at and drill those things, rather than repeating tasks you are already comfortable with". Is there a name for the type of practice I've been doing?
When I finally learned how to ride a bike, I was annoyed that nobody had told me "to keep the bike balanced, if you start to fall to one side, turn the steering wheel in that direction". --- It's a good exercise to frequently try to verbalize your tacit knowledge. The alternative is to constantly be appealing to your own authority. Lots of people have faulty tacit knowledge.
Its hard to describe physical movements. When I was a kid people tried to teach me how to punch by saying "use your body, keep your arm relaxed". And I was like, wtf does that mean??? I only learned how to punch after a lot of experimentation on my own, and a few "a-ha" moments.
It also doesn't actually do much to explain that thesis, dismissing delivered practice with the quick an for shallowly-addressed claim that it only works in field with established pedagogy, which may be the case, but most of the fields that it dismisses deliberate practice for on this basis have established pedagogy (with, sure, some pedagogical controversies, but that's true if the field that it acknowledges have the requisite established pedagogy for deliberate practice, too, so it's not at all clear what, if anything, the distinction being drawn is), and doesn't actually do much to establish that NDM methods are particularly useful for developing tacit knowledge. Basically, the piece is an extended discussion of the idea of tacit knowledge, with the whole primary argument, to which most of the piece is only tangentially relevant, rushed through at the end as if it were an afterthought.
So many amazing thoughts in this article that apply to the world of software engineering. If tacit knowledge is as important as the author makes out, then hiring "young guns" is always going to have a cost over hiring people that have done it before. As an older developer, that's interesting to me. A contrary point, however, is that maybe all businesses are new domains of exploration, so you might as well pay the che…
You'll always pay for acquiring the applied domain knowledge, you can save on paying for the software engineering knowledge acquisition.
If you're smart, you have both a senior and a junior engineer so you can transfer the software domain knowledge, because acquiring tacit knowledge by working under a knowledgable expert is... not free, but close to it.
Don't talk about it, be about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Ryle or if you are so inclined
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-how/
Note: if you have a computer and it can be "told" once and forever remember it, then converting know-that into know-how by teaching it 100s of if-then rules was, at one point, considered a worthy research program.
Tacit knowledge is the lowest rung of understanding. It's the understanding that cats and dogs form, unable to talk but able to listen and consider. The main difficulty is that, because one cannot express tacit knowledge, one cannot reform or improve it. Part of why operationalization is so important in the hard sciences is because it gives us access to otherwise-inacessible things, including tacit knowledge. The onl…
> only knowledge that is tacit for the typical person is the knowledge of how to move muscles. Thats's not really true. If you are a native English speaker, it might surprise you to learn that English adjectives have a default order. We normally say "the big red ball" but "the red big ball" sounds decidedly odd unless there's an explicit contrast ("No, not the blue one. I want the red big ball"). This is apparently t…
I gather that part of the tacit-knowledge movement is to talk about knowledge that cannot be put into words. The example of how to move a muscle is extremely instructive: There is no sequence of words that will allow a person to examine and select the correct bundles of nerves for moving a muscle, and instead a person simply must learn to do it somehow. Even then, if somebody does something like isolating grouped muscle movements, they might be able to explain in words how to fine-tune control over some muscles.
In thinking about it, it seems an important part of teaching tacit knowledge is to establish, or cause, conditions that encourage the learning — the experiencing — of the specific things you want to teach.
Thinking back, I realize my own example of successfully teaching tacit knowledge was when I taught my son the first part of how to drive a car with a manual transmission: getting the car moving without killing the engine or burning up the clutch. I took him to a large level area, a huge parking lot, and told him he can do whatever he wants as long as he never touches the throttle. It only took a couple of hours before he had mastered knowing exactly how to modulate the clutch "bite" so that he could get the car moving without stalling, even with the engine at idle. That the car was an older Toyota Corolla with very little torque only helped him better master the finesse required to release the clutch exactly as needed.
We then moved on to modulating the throttle and clutch together, shifting, starting out on hills and all that but, by then, he already knew how to deal with the dark art of the clutch.
Does anyone know of a service or website that matches mentors with apprentices? I know there is https://www.apprenticeship.gov/ but I am thinking something more informal and online, e.g. a marketplace where you can match and pay $X/30 min. of quick and focused Q&A.
I've used it a couple times to get help with roadblocks and such..
Getting a second pair of eyes on your code is nice!