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Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

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Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#11

Post by tikhonj »

Tacit knowledge is inevitable... but it's also different from what this article is about. Tacit knowledge is the kind of knowledge (and skill!) that cannot be fully explained or taught in words—think mechanical skills you can only pick up through physical practice or very context-specific expertise you only get through experience. In programming good taste is crucial and entirely tacit: we can try to distill taste into words and write books about it, but it will never be enough.

Tacit knowledge is not the same as explicit knowledge that just happens to not be documented. Tacit knowledge is not documented because it is undocumentable. You cannot avoid tacit knowledge. Human language fundamentally cannot express all the knowledge that experts develop through years of practice and experience. Even if an expert can express their experience, there are simply ideas and skills that people cannot learn exclusively from words.

This is an important distinction. Trying to eliminate undocumented explicit knowledge is useful for teams. Trying to eliminate tacit knowledge is disastrous. I've seen attempts to make tacit knowledge legible to management—it is one of the most direct ways to sabotage your own experts because experts fundamentally cannot make all their knowledge explicit. Expertise is tacit knowledge and tacit knowledge is expertise.

People generally understand that design by committee or design by regulation has awful results; one of the main reasons for this is that committees require decisions to be fully explicit and explainable—which hamstrings creative problem-solving and pushes for poor design decisions. Exclusively explicit processes get you lowest-common-denominator results: not the lowest common denominator of the expertise present, but the lowest common denominator of what people can explicitly communicate and understand, which is even lower! If you don't let experts be experts, you won't get expert-level work.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#12

Post by haswell »

jmfldn wrote: post #4

Perhaps such products are in the works, but I would love a private company LLM that slurps all messages, docs, meetings, and becomes an oracle that can be relied upon. Perhaps it could even infer tacit knowledge even when it's not explicit in any docs, since it could abstract principles and concepts from the maze of data.

As someone who has spent far too much time diving into old Slack threads to unearth what happened in the past, I can see incredible value in a capability like this.

On the other hand, I think many companies would hesitate to create lasting records of written communications that go beyond the company’s retention policy.

While it’d be extremely useful, I think it would also increase potential liability that is currently managed by purge policies.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#13

Post by travisjungroth »

Swizec wrote: post #7

> Tacit knowledge, often called “tribal knowledge” in tech, is prevalent in this industry. Tacit knowledge is not the same as tribal knowledge. Tribal knowledge is undocumented stuff. Tacit knowledge is about things that cannot be learned from documentation. Riding a bike is an example of tacit knowledge. No amount of reading about the theory of riding a bike will teach you how to ride a bike. You have to hop on the…

I wrote a very similar comment and you beat me to it by one minute! Deleted and reposted below for compactness.

Their usage of “tacit knowledge” is different from the most common usage. Tacit knowledge ≠ tribal knowledge. Tacit knowledge isn’t knowledge that no one has bothered to write down. It’s knowledge that is inherently difficult to write down. Riding a bike is tacit knowledge. Knowing when a class is doing “too much” is tacit knowledge. Knowing that the internal account must be created before the external account is not, but it’s the sort of thing that they’re talking about.

I wouldn’t make such a big deal about semantics but it’s the title and the first few sentences of the blog post. I expected something very different than “tribal knowledge is bad”.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#14

Post by denial »

This is an odd definition for tacit knowledge. My understanding is that it's more caught up in the intuition of concepts/systems that's difficult to codify because it's very contextual. This "tribal knowledge" perspective seems more like processes and facts that aren't documented. Not because of the inherent difficulty but instead because of priorities. Not that there isn't some intersection between the two.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#15

Post by jmfldn »

ericbarrett wrote: post #8
jmfldn wrote: post #4

Perhaps such products are in the works, but I would love a private company LLM that slurps all messages, docs, meetings, and becomes an oracle that can be relied upon. Perhaps it could even infer tacit knowledge even when it's not explicit in any docs, since it could abstract principles and concepts from the maze of data.

Such an oracle would be a devastating thing to lose to industrial espionage.

Indeed it would. But then the source training data would be bad to lose too. That already exists. I understand it would be a higher level of damage to lose the model of course, but the benefits outweigh the risks, and these could be managed via a very security-hardened product.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#16

Post by jmfldn »

haswell wrote: post #12
jmfldn wrote: post #4

Perhaps such products are in the works, but I would love a private company LLM that slurps all messages, docs, meetings, and becomes an oracle that can be relied upon. Perhaps it could even infer tacit knowledge even when it's not explicit in any docs, since it could abstract principles and concepts from the maze of data.

As someone who has spent far too much time diving into old Slack threads to unearth what happened in the past, I can see incredible value in a capability like this. On the other hand, I think many companies would hesitate to create lasting records of written communications that go beyond the company’s retention policy. While it’d be extremely useful, I think it would also increase potential liability that is currentl…

An excellent point around data retention and training data. It's not like you can scrub out bits of the neural network weights. I guess such a product would have to factor this in.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#17

Post by hoherd »

At a previous company where I had a lot of this "tacit knowledge", I had made a policy for myself. Whenever somebody asked me a question over IM or e-mail, I would look in the wiki. If the answer was not in the wiki, I would write a new wiki article or update an existing article with the answer, and I would respond with a link to the article, and a statement like "if this doesn't answer your question let me know what is missing or could be described better." The reasons for this were for me to dump my tribal knowledge out of my brain into something everybody could search and read, and to promote usage of the wiki as a place where people found answers. Unfortunately it did not appear to have another desired effect of getting everybody to contribute content. I think this was probably because people came to see the wiki as a place to find knowledge, not to put knowledge.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#18

Post by fidotron »

tikhonj wrote: post #11

Tacit knowledge is inevitable... but it's also different from what this article is about. Tacit knowledge is the kind of knowledge (and skill!) that cannot be fully explained or taught in words—think mechanical skills you can only pick up through physical practice or very context-specific expertise you only get through experience. In programming good taste is crucial and entirely tacit: we can try to distill taste in…

This.

This article confuses tacit knowledge for the phenomenon most eloquently described by a former (superb) sysadmin colleague “documentation is the enemy of job security”.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#19

Post by haltist »

MarkusQ wrote: post #3

This looks like a really good use case for LLMs. When you're small and starting out in person, record everything the dev team does -- meetings, whiteboads, pairing sessions, etc. (yeah, creepy, but I'm in brainstorming mode) and then as you start to scale beyond the ability to "ask someone who knows" trail up an LLM to serve as the 24x7 lore master.

This is very much like my panoptic computronium cathedral™. I only need $80B to build it to achieve AGI. The AGI requires 24/7 surveillance for making optimal decisions because it needs access to as much information as possible. The second stage will require worshipers to ingest nanosensors so that even their bowel movements can be tracked and analyzed by the AGI. This is all for the benefit of those who are under constant surveillance in the cathedral.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#20

Post by pavel_lishin »

MarkusQ wrote: post #3

This looks like a really good use case for LLMs. When you're small and starting out in person, record everything the dev team does -- meetings, whiteboads, pairing sessions, etc. (yeah, creepy, but I'm in brainstorming mode) and then as you start to scale beyond the ability to "ask someone who knows" trail up an LLM to serve as the 24x7 lore master.

A loremaster who will lie when they don't know the answer instead of saying, "I don't know".
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