Blog posts are like youtube videos, you have to skip the first 30% to see the "actual" start.
Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
31–40 of 136 posts
Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
#32Deliberate practice builds tacit knowledge. Uninformative article.
Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
#33Nice article! I guess it's obvious in retrospect, but I hadn't known of all the systematized study devoted to this topic. I'm happy to learn about it because I've found myself thinking about effective teaching and learning pretty often (I'm an academic), and what to do about "the stuff where, when you try to explain it concretely to someone else, your explanation doesn't really make sense unless the other person already knows what you're talking about".
In subjects I've tried to learn and teach, my experience is that talking to someone with a lot of such knowledge really only gives you an idea of the sub-topics and considerations you should try to understand better on your own. It is helpful in narrowing down what you should prioritize and maybe giving you a useful point of view to organize your thoughts from, but that doesn't save you from doing the thinking and understanding for yourself.
I agree that emulation helps somewhat by forcing you to make choices that are reasonable even if, as a beginner, you lack the knowledge to choose wisely yourself. But if the ultimate goal is to come up with new ideas using the knowledge, I think there's such a thing as too much emulation. You don't want to become a carbon copy of your mentor either.
I agree that deliberate practice and acquiring tacit knowledge are not the same thing. To me, deliberate practice is about repeating a certain activity -- one that you typically can describe in words to someone who doesn't already know it -- enough times that it's available to you as a tool, eg playing scales as a musician, times tables in elementary school math. Tacit knowledge has more to do with how you decide to apply those skills to best effect.
But my experience has been that they have kind of a symbiotic relationship. If you didn't have some tacit knowledge to begin with, you wouldn't know what to practice, or when you had practiced enough to be good. At the same time, it may not be possible to acquire enough tacit knowledge to become an expert if you don't have an immediate command of certain skills developed through deliberate practice. I.e. there's feedback -- more tacit knowledge should make your deliberate practice more effective, and better skills make it easier for you to acquire tacit knowledge.
Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
#34I wrote my master's degree on innovation management. Tacit knowledge was termed by Michael Polyani and Nonaka and exploded this sub genre of knowledge management and innovation management. I recommend reading their seminal papers.
But it's all down to the type of knowledge involved in skills you have acquired such as biking or walking, and things where you can extoll an intuition versus explicit knowledge such as a pizza baking recipe.
Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
#35Tacit 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…
The Royal Order of Adjectives.
https://www.lavc.edu/profdev/library/docs/Adjectives-and-adv...
Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
#36Tacit knowledge is what I've always thought of as "intuitive feel". As you grow in experience in a field, you start getting this feel for what will work and what won't work. This can be a great advantage, or a great disavantage. I had occasion to work with a fairly bright scientist. He said the reason that most great discoveries were made by relatively young people is because they hadn't developed these prejudices yet, so were unaware that it wasn't suppose to work this way.
Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
#37Deliberate practice builds tacit knowledge. Uninformative article.
Immersion builds tacit knowledge. Deliberate practice may or may not require immersion.
Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
#38I'm agreeing with the idea of the article, but I believe that Tacit knowledge which can't be attained with practice would call Talent or In-born gifts. For example, no matter how much chess I'll play and deliberately practice for 20 years I can't beat Fischer, Kasparov, Karpov etc.. since they are talented (Tacit knowledge) that doesn't mean they can't open their talent through books like "Bobby Fischer teaches Chess" or books about chess by Karpov (but who would do that during matches of chess). Deliberate Practice is the best way and most fast method for acquiring a skill
Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
#39If, in a mood of theoretical reflection, you make articulation in written or spoken language the criterion for "knowledge", it comes as a disappointment to think of all of the cases where we speak of someone knowing something (e.g. how to ride a bike) even though they are unable to train someone to do so entirely verbally (e.g. by written instruction, or over the phone). But adding the epicycles of "tacit knowledge"…
Are you familiar with the Recognition Primed Decision Making Model, or the field of Naturalistic Decision Making? NDM is a field of research that focuses on taking expert intuition (which I refer to as tacit knowledge in this piece), extracting it out of the heads of professionals and then creating training methods to enable less skilled operators to learn these tacit skills on their own. The methods are primarily as…
I just realized that Klein and Kahneman conditions are a good argument for apprenticeships in programming.
One condition is that the you get quick feedback about your decisions. For example, if a surgeon makes a mistake then blood splatters. In programming, if you make a syntax error the compiler immediately complains. However, a design mistake might only bite you months or years later. That is a big obstacle for developing an intuition. However, if an apprentice programmer makes a design mistake. His master can give quick feedback.
I can imagine that the lack of such feedback not only results in slower learning. It might mean the non-apprentice programmer is unable to ever acquire an intuition for design no matter how many years of experience.
Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
#40>>> He gave me a long explanation about software engineering principles. I waved him away and asked how he did it in five seconds. He said “Well, it just felt right. Ok, let’s go to lunch, you can fix it afterwards.”
Yes. I do a lot of coding on feel, and just today was explaining why something could be done one of two ways but one was better. It took about 30 seconds for my concious brain to work out why it was, even though my unconcious brain knew it straight away.
Weird. Try getting that in an expert system (which might be why they never took off).
And of course try getting that into a CDN without equivalent of twenty years practise.
How do we label good and bad business decisions? Every day?
(side note: actually this is a serious thing I am hoping to work on next year. I think the next big stage of human computer work is computer coaching or feedback on our behaviour. Easy things like our spending habits but heading towards coaching on interpersonal actions - could we for example film a great manager day in day out and identify their activities - and then get them to label the actions - who they spoke to who they encourage why they took that negotiating stance. Do it enough times and you have a real training base.)