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Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

commoncog.com

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Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#41

Post by Xc43 »

A Youtube channel could be made out of this idea: skill extraction*. For every field...

Akin a podcast/interview. Where the whole purpose is for the interviewee to share his tacit knowledge.

Experts go and are asked questions about specific situations. Said questions are made in such a way to tease out the tacit knowledge. (using the critical decision method)

... The more I think about it the more I want it to exist. Anyone knows of something similar? Or is interested to create it? or just interested to have it exist?

* https://commoncog.com/blog/putting-mental-models-to-practice...

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#42

Post by TeeMassive »

PaulHoule wrote: post #29

"Tacit knowledge cannot be externalized" is a cruel thing for me to hear when it comes to social skills. Ty Tashiro writes about how "awkward" people https://www.ted.com/talks/ty_tashiro_why_we_re_socially_awkw... need things to be spelled out and made explicit. With that, we can function as well as anyone. Without that we suffer when we get advice like "be yourself", "read Dale Carnegie", etc. Ty was lucky to have p…

> Ty Tashiro writes about how "awkward" people need things to be spelled out and made explicit. With that, we can function as well as anyone. Without that we suffer when we get advice like "be yourself", "read Dale Carnegie", etc.

As an awkward person myself this certainly rings a bell. But for me it's more about getting permission. Growing up in an abusive household, everything that I did was like walking in an open minefield. You're running and doing things intuitively and everything seems normal until you're hit with an explosion of verbal and sometimes physical abuse.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#44

Post by i_hate_pigeons »

k__ wrote: post #34

Sound to me like "tacit knowledge" is simply a practical skill? I mean, obviously you can explain many things to someone who can't replicate it "just in time", riding a bike is one of those examples. Explain math, playing guitar, reading, or whatever perfectly to a person, they still have to practice to be able to do it. The problem isn't the explanation, it's the difficulty of the skill to learn. Don't know why we n…

I thought about learning to play violin when reading this article, a teacher might explain you everything but it's impossible to understand as it's something so unnatural and driven by feel and experience. In fact you start playing with not great technique for a few years until you develop the ability to start working on the finer details and so on

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#45

Post by thoraway66 »

88913527 wrote: post #12
lordnacho wrote: post #5

IMO Tacit knowledge is what we used to call judgement. Judgement is basically knowing a bunch of things but having a good idea of which things are more important than others, and especially knowing which things are worth spending time on any which aren't. It's like when I see someone talking about financial options and they put everything on the board at once: what are puts and calls, what's an iron butterfly and oth…

I once interviewed for a front-end role and had to google some CSS property name, as I still haven't committed to memory the difference between "align-items" and "justify-content", but I got dinged for that in feedback: grateful to have received feedback, which often isn't the case. It was one of those things I considered unimportant in the grander scheme of FE development.

Where merit is dictated by how much time you spend ogling others output and expectations.

Amazing.

I’m sure all those folks have extensive time spent curing cancer and not just writing web apps for profit too.

I’m really looking forward to the day 80% of digital experience is just generated on demand by well known algorithms and filling dependency files just so for a machine (source files included as constraints on memory and cpu behavior, just like which deps to allow) is obsoleted dumb work

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#46

Post by chezball »

Barrin92 wrote: post #19

I think you can take it up a level from the individual to culture to see it even more clearly. I think one of the most glaring examples of tacit knowledge is simply physical agglomeration. If tacit knowledge wasn't that important, why is it that people pay thousands of dollars of rent just to be in the right spot while 'everything is available' on the net? Why does half of all VC money go into a bunch of zipcodes? Wh…

Hey Barrin92, can you explain (or give context around d) this, “Why do so few key professionals network like we're in 15th century Venice?”

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#48

Post by fuzzfactor »

voiper1 wrote: post #3

I'm sorry, I was really into the whole Deliberate practice thing and then I read this and thought "Oh no, did I have it all wrong?" So I read the book he quoted - "Source of Power". And you know what? It has a tremendous overlap with Deliberate Practice. The proponents of Deliberate Practice never claim to "just do it over and over" - you have to have background knowledge, a teacher/coach, etc... the tacit knowledge.…

Deliberate practice can also be developed in fields unlike music and math and chess, such as the pursuit of mastering experimentation & discovery which also takes a lifetime to never entirely master itself.

The combination of tacit knowledge with deliberate practice is especially powerful, even more so when augmented by working smart, in addition to working hard rather than instead of working hard.

Leveraged furthest when applied to a foundation of natural unfair advantage of some kind or another.

Over the longest lifetime you can muster.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#49

Post by bsanr2 »

shadowsun7 wrote: post #13

Readers who are interested in the actionable aspects of this topic should probably read the last instalment in this series: https://commoncog.com/blog/accelerated-expertise/ The basic idea is this: 1. Deliberate practice only works for skills with a history of good pedagogical development. If no such pedagogical development exists, you can’t do DP. Source: read Peak, or any of Ericsson’s original papers. Don’t read t…

This exposes part of the reason behind, and bodes poorly for those subject to, the lack of success underrepresented groups have in certain fields. If "tacit knowledge" most expeditiously gained from interacting with experts is the most important aspect of skill acquisition in cutting edge (relatively-speaking) areas like applied STEM, then, of course, issues of mentorship and gatekeeping rise to primacy.

This has been my personal experience as well, and it makes me highly suspicious of anyone whose advice for acquiring technical skills is simply to practice constantly - "draw every day," "you have to code," "always be networking," etc. They either aren't aware of how useless this advice is, or simply don't care about your growth or performance. Which, I admit ambivalently, is reasonable in this society; if you want someone to care, pay them to. This of course opens us back up to the issue of underrepresented groups often being unable to afford formal "someone caring about your growth."

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#50

Post by Koshkin »

sam0x17 wrote: post #7
lordnacho wrote: post #5

IMO Tacit knowledge is what we used to call judgement. Judgement is basically knowing a bunch of things but having a good idea of which things are more important than others, and especially knowing which things are worth spending time on any which aren't. It's like when I see someone talking about financial options and they put everything on the board at once: what are puts and calls, what's an iron butterfly and oth…

Likewise, you can be very good at fixing things without knowing what every single tool in your toolbox is even for. In fact, sometimes not knowing is an advantage -- you might use something in a way that was never intended that ends up solving a problem.

I seem to be one of those, and people often say that things are afraid of me. And I have no idea why, maybe it’s just luck…
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