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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

#51

Post by chrisweekly »

Xc43 wrote: post #41

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.…

^ I really wish this existed too. (Something akin to it does exist at least for certain niches, eg detailed web performance audits where the perf expert has an explicit emphasis on teaching the audience...)

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#53

Post by lolspace »

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…

Wit is not practical skill. You can't teach that to another person.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#54

Post by spekcular »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #27
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…

As someone who's studied this field extensively and applied it professionally, I'll go ahead and say I wouldn't recommend Accelerated Expertise to anyone. Reading it I got the distinct impression that the authors did not understand a great deal of the research they cited, either when supporting or dismissing it. Some good criticism of the book can be found here[0]. If some acronyms confuse you, the main one to know i…

Do you have recommendations for better references on self-learning?

I've read Cognitive Load Theory by Sweller et al., and while a good book, it's not very practically oriented.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#55

Post by xhevahir »

spekcular wrote: post #54
Hermitian909 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's studied this field extensively and applied it professionally, I'll go ahead and say I wouldn't recommend Accelerated Expertise to anyone. Reading it I got the distinct impression that the authors did not understand a great deal of the research they cited, either when supporting or dismissing it. Some good criticism of the book can be found here[0]. If some acronyms confuse you, the main one to know i…

Do you have recommendations for better references on self-learning? I've read Cognitive Load Theory by Sweller et al., and while a good book, it's not very practically oriented.

The authors of the linked article seem to think highly of Ten Steps to Complex Learning.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#56

Post by doctor_eval »

I've had a number of situations where I've run into trouble on projects because I have tacit knowledge about the domain - but I seem to struggle to make my tacit knowledge consumable by others, which leads to friction.

For example, to launch a new product we need the obvious end-user-visible features - but also sufficient back-office features to be able to quickly fix the inevitable problems that crop up. Things like adjusting a customer's account balance, say to give them a quick credit when something else goes wrong. Basic stuff right?

But management - this has happened to me - will often say something like "why are there going to be problems? Don't you know what you're doing?". And of course I do know what I'm doing, that's why I'm assuming something nobody has thought of is going to go wrong, and I'm trying to create a way to help us mitigate it without taking the lustre off the launch.

The problem as I see it is that management is often seen as a generic function of business with a translatable skill set, but in most cases they don't have the tacit knowledge they need to make good decisions in the domain they're supposedly managing.

Being able to turn this tacit knowledge into something consumable by others would be a huge boon to project management IMO.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#57

Post by shkkmo »

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…

While I agree that tacit knowledge exists and is widespread, I think the author misuses the word "tacit" to mean unspeakable rather than unspoken.

Clearly unspeakable knowledge is a subset of unspoken knowledge, but there is definitely unspoken knowledge that is speakable if we take the effort to make it explicit.

"things awkward people need spelled out" is a great example of tacit knowledge that is often speakable (but we don't bother because the tacit assumption is that the tacit knowledge is shared by all.)

By conflating the unspoken with the unspeakable, the author fails to realize that a great deal of our tacit knowledge can be made explicit or at least partially explicit (and the value that can be captured by finding new ways to explicate the formerly unspeakable.)

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#58

Post by SavantIdiot »

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…

Riding a bicycle isn't judgement.

But judgement is a type of tacit knowledge.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#59

Post by mwattsun »

At one point when my son was young and not doing well in school we had him tested. We were told he was a kinesthetic learner. At about that time he was getting into skateboarding. When he grew up he became a brilliant skateboarder who is well known for it in our hometown. He put as much thought into learning a new trick as I put into solving a programming problem. He still doesn't like school.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinesthetic_learning

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#60

Post by [deleted] »

spekcular wrote: post #54
Hermitian909 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's studied this field extensively and applied it professionally, I'll go ahead and say I wouldn't recommend Accelerated Expertise to anyone. Reading it I got the distinct impression that the authors did not understand a great deal of the research they cited, either when supporting or dismissing it. Some good criticism of the book can be found here[0]. If some acronyms confuse you, the main one to know i…

Do you have recommendations for better references on self-learning? I've read Cognitive Load Theory by Sweller et al., and while a good book, it's not very practically oriented.

[deleted]
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