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Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

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Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#101

Post by Wistar »

dmurray wrote: post #97
travisjungroth wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. I think it’s much more effective to copy too much rather than too little.

Some people who learn to speak foreign languages fast seem to do this. They copy a native speaker exaggeratedly, almost to the point of parody. And of course young children learn in the same way, by imitating everything rather than trying to filter for the "relevant" bits and imitating those. Most of us are too self-conscious to do this properly though.

Ah, interesting. Back in my presentation days, I found that, if I pretended to be a fire and brimstone preacher when I practiced speeches, and dialed it back when I actually gave the speech, those speeches went a lot better, and were better received.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#102

Post by lifeisstillgood »

andruby wrote: post #74
allenu wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much of coding and seeing good and bad design patterns is unconscious pattern matching and unconscious heuristics. I have the same experience of trying to put into words why one design pattern is better than another and it definitely is frustrating because from experience I do have a tacit "feel" about why something is wrong but to convey that to someone else is a challenge.

Would we call that "intuition"?

yeah, but we want to analyse this - is my intuition same as most other 20 year experienced coders? Is it good / correct intuition? is it transferable - can I see same patterns in a different language ? how far away from one language do we go before it breaks down (ie php -> python > java > clojure.)

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#103

Post by travisjungroth »

ssivark wrote: post #57
corporateslave5 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You never become exceptional this way. And if you run into situations you’ve never seen before, it’s harder to react competently. With coding, if you only ever use a style you copy, then everything looks like it could be solved in that way. This works and may help you up the corporate ladder. But it will never produce massively positive results

That may or may not be the case, but note that there are many (most?) domains where the positive payoff is bounded, but the negative payoff is not. This method seems particularly useful for those scenarios -- if you have "adequate" performers to copy from.

Instrument flying is actually a great example of this. There are no instrument flying competitions. Well, I guess there’s one every flight. First place, you make it there. Second place, you diverted. Third place, you crash and probably die.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#104

Post by closed »

shadowsun7 wrote: post #45
dragonwriter wrote: post #24

Misleading title: the thesis is more accurately “Tacit knowledge is why NDM methods are more useful than deliberate practice”. 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 h…

> dismissing delivered practice with the quick an for shallowly-addressed claim that it only works in field with established pedagogy This is the actual definition of deliberate practice . As in, Ericsson explicitly says deliberate practice CAN ONLY exist in domains with a long tradition of pedagogical development. Go and read the original papers by Ericsson. Or the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performa…

Thanks for the pointers! Not original commenter, but familiar with the literature a bit. One thing that confused me reading your article is that you are criticizing one, fairly narrow way Ericsson has defined deliberate practice.

But in Hambrick, Campitelli, and Macnamara's volume on expertise, they do a good job showing that he has not been consistent with definitions (e.g. 3 definitions: must have, sometimes must have, doesn't require a teacher).

Not a problem for your post, but I was pretty confused about what you were calling deliberate practice until reading this response.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#106

Post by yumaikas »

xrd wrote: post #13

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…

It's also worth bearing in mind that tacit knowledge can lead you astray. And that tacit knowledge can be developed without having to be in the same room as someone. It's just that it's learned and communicated _differently_ than explicit knowledge.

I think there's room to explore in the area of building exercises that try to build this tacit knowledge. Though some things are prohibitively expensive to learn outside of a work context. There are definitely a lot of things I've learned in a work context as a software developer that would have taken a lot longer to learn on my own.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#107

Post by jacobolus »

travisjungroth wrote: post #95
undershirt wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your choice of phrasing on “impression”. I think it captures what is meant by embodiment, that the knowledge is in the body, so you can get at it by imitating the whole of a person.

Thanks. I think it’s much more effective to copy too much rather than too little.

A big problem is that novices don’t know which parts need to be copied and sometimes don’t even notice what they are missing, so without either (a) getting a decent amount of expert feedback or (b) extensively reasoning things out from first principles and then doing a lot of trial and error, it’s easy to copy extraneous elements or skip essential ones.

A lot of methods and devices that we end up stuck with today in various contexts are just watered down copies of things that were once great, because all of the superficial features were slavishly copied by multiple generations of people who didn’t understand the original constraints or think about which ones have remained constant and which have changed.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#108

Post by memexy »

In high school physics class there was one kid that seemed to be really good so one day I asked him what his trick was and he said, "I just pretend I'm the teacher". I thought that was a really clever trick. During class he was figuring out ways of how to copy the teacher and it seemed to work. He would consistently get top marks on tests. He was accumulating tacit knowledge whereas everyone else was copying formulas and drilling problem sets.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#109

Post by shadowsun7 »

mcshaner1 wrote: post #61
shadowsun7 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> dismissing delivered practice with the quick an for shallowly-addressed claim that it only works in field with established pedagogy This is the actual definition of deliberate practice . As in, Ericsson explicitly says deliberate practice CAN ONLY exist in domains with a long tradition of pedagogical development. Go and read the original papers by Ericsson. Or the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performa…

I think there is room for nuance here. True deliberate practice is easiest to apply in those domains, but there are some lessons from Ericsson's work that can be applied using the NDM framework. I think the point that people miss often is that it is deliberate practice, not just practice. While we may not be able to practice like a potential chess grand master, we can deliberately challenge ourselves and look to lear…

In Peak, Ericsson seems to finally settle on one definition, which was what I used in the end. He calls what you just describe "not being able to deliberately practice like a grandmaster" a completely different thing — purposeful practice.

There's a whole chapter in Peak where he tries to talk about what to do if you are in a field with badly developed pedagogical methods. It's basically a badly written copy of The Power of Intuition (Klein). I was incredibly dissatisfied with it, because I was mostly interested in putting DP to practice, and his recommendations were far from practicable. I wish he had just referred to Hoffman or Klein, both of them practitioners in NDM, and therefore both more familiar with attempts to design training programs for fields where no pedagogical rigour exist.

I know you're inclined to give Ericsson a pass, and pass things off as deliberate practice even when his definition clearly excludes said thing. But my view is that we should call a spade a spade and use the exact definitions the man used. If he thought it was good enough for his popular audience, it should be good enough for me.

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