Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

One tangent comment to go with this: One of Klein's occasional coauthors, Robert Hoffman, co-wrote a book on expert weather forecasters that I really liked. Weather is hard to predict, but one thing they found that what the best forecasters did was to look at the data before looking at what the computer models predicted. Once they had an idea of what they thought the weather might look like, they compared with the model. This kept their skills sharp and ensured that they continued to learn.

This is a weird thing to argue. Productivity could be something like [system-knowledge] X [tacit-knowledge-of-programming] so just tacit knowledge wouldn't get a team maximum productivity.

Altogether, it seems like what's tacit in programming or tacit in any complex domain is "how to integrate different complex and sometimes contradictory things". It's important but hardly important in a "you can discard everything else, this is the magic" sort of way.

In fact, after coming out of the "fugue," I can have trouble with verbal articulation.

But when I am in the "fugue," I can actually design a pretty intense system, without writing down a thing.

If nobody listens and respect you you can't be a good coach. This happened in Real Madrid with a coach that had been a mediocre player. The "top of the world starts" did not listen to this person because they did not admire or respected him.

In Rocky the film for example you see as Rocky gives an advice to a kid, before he is famous. The kid does not listen because "Who are you? A loser".

This could happen even if the person is a master, because of envy. I remember a man that was very successful with women, and wanting honestly to help others do the same, only to being rejected by others because they felt threatened or envied him so much.

I see this every day, when someone who is successful at something because he does something better than others. But others do not admit that this person is better creating rationalizations like "this person is so lucky", and then they will generalize even further "all success is luck", when they could not get it.

I know because I have learned a lot from those people and in some ways replicated their success. The only thing I needed to do was admiring that they were better than me at something, being humble at first, and that looks easy but it is very hard because it goes against your ego.

I took a skiing lesson from a master and he looked at me skiing and made me practice basic sky lessons: the kind novices take.

I remember thinking: WTF! I already know how to ski well!! But I forced myself into listening and doing exactly what he told me, even when it looked ridiculous and made no sense.

My skiing improved radically because of that.