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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

#81

Post by Jensson »

rpmisms wrote: post #71

I speedcube, and deliberate practice is extremely important. I also code, and deliberate practice doesn't do much in that area. I need to have a feel for the code, understand what chunks of code do without having to read every line. That's tacit knowledge. Maybe the difference could be explained with racecar driving. Driving the track correctly, hitting apexes, downshifting at the right moment; that's deliberate prac…

You can do deliberate practice for technical creativity, I do it all the time. You basically take any problem, like "How to build a server", and instead of looking up guides on how to do it you just start breaking it down. So a server needs to connect ot other computers, so you go and figure out how to make such connections, and then how to make multiple connections in parallel, then how to listen to connections etc. And soon you will have a working server. That was how I learned programming. It is slower and more tedious than just looking it up, but it is good deliberate practice for getting more technically creative. Looking things up doesn't teach you much, figuring things out yourself is how you practice things in this domain. Deliberately not looking up solutions to known problems is like a super power, you don't want to spoil yourself there you can only figure things out before you have seen how it is done after that you just recall the solution.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#83

Post by wikibob »

hinkley wrote: post #26
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…

Judgement or specialty. Oddly, my first specialty was performance optimization. A predisposition met a trouble project and I spent half my time finding ways to speed up code without making it offensive. Then later projects had problems but no mandate, so I got pushback. I got really good at crypto-optimization - changes that improve performance but look like something else (cleanup, bug fixes, feature requests), and…

Could you write that book?

Or better yet, how about just writing a series of blog posts or a newsletter?

Don't waste time on the setup, just register something on substack.com and I'm sure a bunch of folks here will subscribe. It sounds like a fascinating subject.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#84

Post by dceddia »

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.

This is one of those weird little details that pretty much doesn't matter, because you just try both, and you do that every time, and it's fine. Maybe knowing the difference saves you 15 seconds.

I had an aha moment a little while ago when I realized "justify-content" works like the "justify" buttons in Google Docs/other word processors -- left/center/right. It's not a perfect parallel, since justify-content changes its meaning if the flex-direction changes, but it matches with the default behavior.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#85

Post by godDLL »

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…

Tacit knowledge is the difference between making a decision and then acting, vs being free of the need to make a decision and acting right away. As in successfully.

Judgement is exactly the opposite of tacit knowledge.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#86

Post by skybrian »

ticviking wrote: post #63
skybrian wrote: post #17

Programmers have another common example of how a belief in transmissionism often doesn't work out as well as the author hopes: the monad tutorial. Here are other examples I can think of: - Learning programming in the first place. Many people struggle. - Teaching rhythm to an older adult with no musical experience. - Ear training. No explanation will substitute for practice. This isn't to say that explanations never w…

How do you actually teach both Rhythm and Ear training? I'm struggling at both right now. I've paid a teacher, and it's helping, but now I'm curious how we actually teach these things.

For rhythm, counting and clapping seems to help, avoiding the complexity of playing the right notes. Playing to a metronome slowly is good practice but my student dislikes it. I suppose rhythm games might help?

For ear training, I’ve read that singing helps, since it associates vocals with pitches. I’ve tried ear training programs and even wrote one, and it’s the sort of thing where you get better by practicing a little a day. Doing a lot of practice at once is just frustrating. I was doing better for a while, but stopped practicing and wouldn’t say my ear is all that good.

Recently I’ve been transcribing music, which probably helps some. It’s sort of like figuring out a crossword puzzle where it takes a few guesses to get the notes right.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#87

Post by senderista »

chezball wrote: post #46
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?”

If they did they’d be poisoning their competitors.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#88

Post by spekcular »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #62
spekcular wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sadly I'm not familiar with books that focus on self-learning. If you're struggling to apply the knowledge from CLT it suggests that you're mostly missing skills related to curriculum design like sequencing, scoping, and scaffolding. You might consider an introductory book into curriculum design (apologies, I don't have the name of a good one at hand). You might also benefit from reading something like "How I Wish I'…

Just started reading the maths book, and it looks amazing. Thanks so much for the reference.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#89

Post by esjeon »

temp8964 wrote: post #21

I have no idea what he's trying to compare, deliberate practice (a method of learning) is one important way to learn tacit knowledge (a kind of knowledge). How can you compare a method of learning to a kind of knowledge? This comparison does not make sense at all.

Exactly. The post doesn't make sense at all. Learning is a cycle b/w "tacit knowledge" and "deliberate practice".

There's also this chicken-and-egg problem: (1) you can't absorb the knowledge well because you haven't practiced (2) you can't practice well because you don't know a shit.

This early stage is really really painful.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#90

Post by autarch »

ticviking wrote: post #63
skybrian wrote: post #17

Programmers have another common example of how a belief in transmissionism often doesn't work out as well as the author hopes: the monad tutorial. Here are other examples I can think of: - Learning programming in the first place. Many people struggle. - Teaching rhythm to an older adult with no musical experience. - Ear training. No explanation will substitute for practice. This isn't to say that explanations never w…

How do you actually teach both Rhythm and Ear training? I'm struggling at both right now. I've paid a teacher, and it's helping, but now I'm curious how we actually teach these things.

These are both things where practice can help. For rhythm, as skybrian noted, try counting and clapping along. Then try writing down the rhythm of a melody or some other part of a piece of music. Have your teacher or someone with better rhythm evaluate your work. Keep doing that with more and more challenging pieces over time. BTW, just as an aside, most pop music vocal melodies are fairly syncopated and probably not the best choice for starting. Classical music _of the classical period_ is probably a lot easier (but things get more complex as you move towards the romantic and modern periods).

For ear training, you need to practice interval recognition, chord recognition, transcribing melodies, transcribing chord progressions, etc. And _also_ you should be doing a lot of singing, especially sight singing. Again, you'll need someone more expert than you to tell you if you're getting it right in some cases. But if you're transcribing a piece that has sheet music you can get instant feedback. And the same goes for sight singing. Sing it, then play it on the piano and see if it sounds right. Better yet, _record_ yourself singing it and play along on the piano. If the all the notes are the same, you win.

The other thing you should be doing is actually playing music! Doing lots of exercises is great, but the whole point of this is to make you a better musician, not just someone who's really good at notating rhythms of the music they hear.

(Source: I have a master degree in music composition and I taught ear training and theory during grad school. Plus I also struggled quite a bit with ear training (but not rhythm) myself.)

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