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Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

commoncog.com

101–110 of 133 posts

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#101

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…

Your comment hit me right in the reality. I’m a uni student currently taking an OOP Cpp course. At times I don’t know what to ask or how to ask it because of the cognitive load. Value of, address at, private member function, pure virtual functions, bah! I’ll get there, eventually.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#102
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.…

There's a lot of material like what you ask for audio engineering. In my experience, it is effective, but you have to have the deliberate practice hours in order to absorb the tacit knowledge. And you have to put in a LOT of hours seeing how someone works in order to catch the nuances that can't be verbalized.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#103
post #100

What are good, rich sources for our tacit knowledge? - Pair programming? - Informal interactions with leads? - Study and emulate great works? - Dabbling with intriguing works unrelated to our main project? - Our own behavior (reflected tacit knowledge made explicit via personal software process)?

Code review. The feedback can range from the bare minimum of acceptance all the way to tricks, tips, wisdom, philosophy and so on. Normally you only get the former, but you can get more if you ask for it.

Ehh. 99% of code review is useless nitpicking about whitespace and variable names. Frankly, I have learned far more about software engineering reading hacker news than I have through reviews.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#104

I clicked this link because I’m currently building an MVP for a software product and getting a hang of the essentials has been going relatively well thanks to my tacit knowledge around computers/software. However, what I did not expect was for the article to go into that Atul Gawande quote on the laparoscopic appendectomy. It just so happens that the MVP I’m building is part of a training program for laparoscopic ski…

It was interesting to read the judo analysis and then the surgical example and then generalize by taking complex experiences (for lack of a better word) and deriving patterns out of them to understand what the important difference is. It seems like, in some sense, tacit learning might be viewed as 2nd order - programming at the type level and practice is programming at the term level. This seems to model the tennis analysis also; experts recognizing the posture of the opponent immediately prior to hitting the tennis ball to infer the type of serve.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#105

"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…

> Without that we suffer when we get advice like "be yourself", "read Dale Carnegie", etc. I've grown to appreciate such useless advice. It is useless in answering the question you wanted help with but it is a strong signal that you can prune the person who gave such advice out of your social graph without any negative repercussions.

Couldn't you argue the person you would be pruning is a person that is most likely to appreciate you just as you are?

It seems reasonable to argue that if they are indeed in your social graph and they give you that advice, perhaps they like you for who you are and thus the advice at least from their perspective is good.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#107

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…

Your comment hit me right in the reality. I’m a uni student currently taking an OOP Cpp course. At times I don’t know what to ask or how to ask it because of the cognitive load. Value of, address at, private member function, pure virtual functions, bah! I’ll get there, eventually.

Those sound like idiosyncrasies of CPP that you shouldn't care about, unless you want detailed expertise in CPP.

... Which is fine if you've got an application in mind, but otherwise, they're a distorted view on the concepts to fit a specific implementation.

Most of those concepts are all describing, "when do you tell somebody where to point?" and "when do you follow the arrows?"

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#108
In the sport Ultimate Frisbee, tacit knowledge is key. I'd never heard of it before this article, but this makes a lot of sense, because it's a relatively new sport without a developed coaching system, and many adult players come to it as adults.

In college, the team tried to teach us explicitly and it made absolutely no sense. By playing for years, I've developed the simple instruction of "Stand where you do not want or expect the disc to go, and at the right time, run to where you do want the disc to go."

The part that takes hundreds of hours is understanding "where you want the disc to go" and that can't be explained clearly because it changes every five seconds. After 10 years, the answer is usually obvious to me, but a new comer has absolutely no idea why anything is happening or why they are not getting thrown to.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#109

"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…

I can relate to this. The "permission" aspect also cuts both ways sometimes, because I learned to be cautious and then _that_ became the thing I was doing wrong, according to others, who berated me for not being assertive enough.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#110
I thought that when kids learn how to ride a bike they can (1) use those "small" wheels on both sides that allow them not to fall and learn how to balance.. or (2) their parent puts a metal bar behind the seat and uses it to help keep the kid in balance: when the kid falls too much in some direction the parent uses the bar to push the bike back. After some time the kid learns how to balance on their own.

As for other stuff, simulators?

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