41–50 of 143 posts
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.
An oracle that doesn't tell you when it doesn't know something, and lies or hallucinates answers instead?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 co…
Surely I wouldn't need to ingest anything to monitor my bowels, mightnt I simply insert a device up my ass?
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…
How do you keep your wiki from evolving into a kludge of random-ish info? One example of tacit knowledge is knowing the Dell T420s Tower Servers have very poor cooling for the raid controllers and often, this can cook them over time, requiring replacement or, at least repasting the heatsink. Now imagine 100s of those little tidbits. Useful, but hard to categorize.
Basically, as Toyota says, build quality _into_ each part of the product rather than layering it on top by documenting discrete pieces of info that an operator has to discover, understand and act upon
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…
Where does this idea come from other than good engineering practice?
If you work with smart, talented people in a fast moving world it seems, as you say, inevitable that you face the "problem" of tacit knowledge and manage it positively.
In Designing Sound (and my lectures on sound design) I researched and wrote about this as "ineffable knowledge". My observation in arts and design through the 90s and early 00s was that we regularly get people who are x100 superstars but they're unable to articulate exactly how they do things and pass that knowledge to others (I was researching this from a UI/UX point of view). That is /talent/ and it's why we value people as more than just interchangeable cogs. Much process knowledge, and crucially problem-solving knowledge in any project will reside in the heads of individuals.
(TBF I think the article is more about tacit cultural knowledge within the team as a whole)
Sure if we lose key individuals the project is threatened, but on the other hand trying to get them to do a full knowledge dump, such that any replacement would be frictionless, is a fools errand.
Treating "information" that way and ignoring people is one-dimensional thinking.
So I don't think it's helpful to talk about tacit knowledge itself as "dangerous". What is more dangerous is composing mediocre teams only from replaceable workers and spending too much of their time on documenting as a safety net when they should be pushing forward. Meanwhile a danger is in treating valuable people so badly their continuity is not assured. Far fewer people fall under the proverbial bus than simply leave for better jobs.
So we could take the view that over-cautious self-reporting and documenting is a sign of, and attempt to manage, low commitment business attitudes, poor wages, conditions and low job-security.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you keep your wiki from evolving into a kludge of random-ish info? One example of tacit knowledge is knowing the Dell T420s Tower Servers have very poor cooling for the raid controllers and often, this can cook them over time, requiring replacement or, at least repasting the heatsink. Now imagine 100s of those little tidbits. Useful, but hard to categorize.
Put it in the runbook for the alarm you got when the server failed, or the maintainance guide that your team runs through every month. Or make heatsink repasting a regular documented process, or something similar. Basically, as Toyota says, build quality _into_ each part of the product rather than layering it on top by documenting discrete pieces of info that an operator has to discover, understand and act upon
I'll review the runbooks. We have a number of them, mostly created by me. :)
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…
How do you keep your wiki from evolving into a kludge of random-ish info? One example of tacit knowledge is knowing the Dell T420s Tower Servers have very poor cooling for the raid controllers and often, this can cook them over time, requiring replacement or, at least repasting the heatsink. Now imagine 100s of those little tidbits. Useful, but hard to categorize.
In short, the categorization and organization is key, and you have to do it when the number of documents is not only increasing, but different enough.
Sometimes, I just write a longer document and once it's ready, it can be broken into smaller ones. Doing this helps save the organization tremendous amounts of time in not having to re-learn things, or dig it up.
At the end what the author should criticize is not the tacit knowledge but how the organization manages the knowledge. And that is, knowledge management.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 co…
Surely I wouldn't need to ingest anything to monitor my bowels, mightnt I simply insert a device up my ass?