Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice • Hacker News Board

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#121

Post by hinkley » Mon, Dec 13, 2021, 4:19 PM UTC

xwolfi wrote: post #99

hinkley wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I somehow became specialist at that randomly (like you, random troubled project thrown at me at the odd chance I d find someth as a cheap new joiner turned into a lucky break and a predisposition for enjoying hunting these) and I start now to see patterns and be helpful in all troubled projects Im thrown at as a joker... to a point I lead a performance optimization mini team now... If I were to teach, which I kinda d…

One of my weirdest fixes was removing a duplicate database request on an admin page that was taking 30 seconds to load. But instead of dropping to 15 seconds, the response time dropped to 3 seconds.

I've also removed a lot of 10% calls that improved performance by 20%. Profilers don't show the cost of your code to the CPU and Virtual Memory caches. And there are new or malloc calls whose full cost is paid by another thread due to the tempo of the allocations.

As you say, looking at the count column is a huge thing. But the biggest failure I've seen is one of imagination. So many people give up when the last tall tent pole has been addressed. Even if we've only hit a 3rd of our performance goal, they believe they've tried everything and we should move on. Nobody knows how to do perf analysis with a budget. For instance, the 'current users' count should not be entitled to 10% of the page load time.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#122

Post by SilasX » Mon, Dec 13, 2021, 4:46 PM UTC

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…

“Judgment” and “tacit knowledge” belong in the same epistemic category as “magic!”, or god-of-the-gaps, or “complexity”.

They have no explanatory power, they only flag the absence of a complete explanation: specially, the inability at present to break down and reproduce the process that generated the correct behavior.

They should not be revered for their superiority, but scrutinized for the true source of power they draw from.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#123

Post by BizarroLand » Mon, Dec 13, 2021, 6:20 PM UTC

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 think judgement may not be the right word. Perhaps discernment would be a better fit.

They share similar concepts but judgement is more final, definitive, decisive in nature whereas discernment is comparatively flexible.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#124

Post by BizarroLand » Mon, Dec 13, 2021, 6:31 PM UTC

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…

Since tacit knowledge can be gained experientially, watching videos on social skills where the actions are demonstrated can build your social skills just like being instructed on how to ride a bike can make it easier for you to learn how to ride a bike.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#125

Post by BizarroLand » Mon, Dec 13, 2021, 6:37 PM UTC

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #72

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…

"be yourself" The most useless advise in history, closely followed by "just stop being depressed"

"Be yourself!" cried the attractive, socially adept and successful person to the pungent, unshaved, overweight college-dropout loser in a ratty Futurama t-shirt who lives in a friends' basement and struggles to pay the exceedingly lenient rent.

"On second thought," the savvy adept said, "Strive to become the person you wish you were and hope that people will like who that is."

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#126

Post by LambdaTrain » Mon, Dec 13, 2021, 9:24 PM UTC

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…

I like how Op introduces Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) to address the question about how to accelerate expertise. But I am just a little critical/suspicious about this narrative, because Op and those NDM experts such as Gary Klein are working for companies that monetize this method. Is there any real world evidence that can soothe this sense of suspicion?

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#127

Post by bsanr2 » Mon, Dec 13, 2021, 10:52 PM UTC

throwaway4356 wrote: post #116

bsanr2 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bee…

Fantastic observation! I will add though, some fields are far more open than others. Most notable would probably be software or computing in general. An observant person can glean insights from places like HN, Reddit, lobste.rs, GitHub/Lab threads, university course pages from all over the world, personal opinionated blogs, etc. etc. (add reading good open source code to this list too). I say observant because you ne…

You wouldn't happen to spend time as a cartoon canid, would you?

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#128

Post by throwaway4356 » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 1:33 AM UTC

bsanr2 wrote: post #127

throwaway4356 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fantastic observation! I will add though, some fields are far more open than others. Most notable would probably be software or computing in general. An observant person can glean insights from places like HN, Reddit, lobste.rs, GitHub/Lab threads, university course pages from all over the world, personal opinionated blogs, etc. etc. (add reading good open source code to this list too). I say observant because you ne…

You wouldn't happen to spend time as a cartoon canid, would you?

I don't know what you're referring to.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#129

Post by shkkmo » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 3:04 AM UTC

kubanczyk wrote: post #120

shkkmo wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author doesn't acknowledge any sort of spectrum and makes a general statement that trying to make tacit knowledge explicit is so hard as to be pointless to try. > My take on this is that it is so difficult that we shouldn’t even bother; assuming that you are reading this because you want to get good in your career, you should give up on turning tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge and just go after tacit knowl…

Maybe it's just my reading, but what follows this excerpt puts it in context. I.e. we shouldn't bother with converting the entirety of unspoken knowledge in some field: > Why do we know this? > [What many researchers found out] was that it is extremely difficult to encode all the possible branches and gotchas and nuances from a human expert into an expert system.

But the author doesn't say "don't only try to turn implicit knowledge into explicit knowledge", he says "you shouldn't even bother".

To me that sounds like a direct analog to "nobody will ever understanding everything about the source code without reading it, so we shouldn't bother with documentation".

Obviously we can't / shouldn't document everything, but creating documentation as you learn an undocumented legacy code base can be of great value (as can asking other developers to explicate their implicit knowledge).

Over and over the Author ignores the unexplicated but explicable and assumes that implicit knowledge is inexplicable.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#130

Post by TeeMassive » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 4:31 AM UTC

theprotocol wrote: post #109

TeeMassive wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What's worse is that when I left my home and had finally the permission to go outside, at ~14 years old, I was basically unable to make any decisions or take any initiative. I literally had to relearn how to behave in society and at work, one hurtful mistake at a time.