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Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

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Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#81

Post by Lutger »

CrypticShift wrote: post #66
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 is so meta. Here we are trying to verbalize our tacit knowledge of "tacit knowledge" :) While I agree with the distinction you made (Last paragraph is excellent), there is this grey area : Because in the digital era almost everything is recorded (oral meetings/written chitchat...), there is a huge quantity of information that is neither in the "Guts" nor in the "docs". To join others in this thread, I guess LLMs…

Exactly. However I think its a bit more complicated than a grey area. There is just no hard distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge, even though the distinction is useful.

It is not that any tacit bit of knowledge eludes articulation, it is the whole that is problematic. Nothing is truly undocumentable, but its like the specs for microsoft word: its just so much you already need to be an expert to navigate the whole of it.

Thats the distinction and LLM of course of very good at processing vast amounts of bits and pieces.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#82

Post by mnsc »

panarky wrote: post #78
chongli wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think almost all knowledge is tacit knowledge. Even stuff that would seem obviously explicit like mathematics and language. In my experience tutoring high school students, I’ve encountered plenty of students who struggle with spelling, grammar, or mathematical mistakes and no matter how many times I correct them it doesn’t stick. Then I see other students who pick these things up so quickly without correction. Math…

>> Tacit knowledge is not documented because it is undocumentable > students who struggle with spelling The ability to spell correctly is not tacit knowledge. >> Tacit knowledge is not documented because it is undocumentable Spelling is thoroughly documented.

It is thoroughly documented, yet alot of people make spelling mistakes and we sometime make up animals to mock people who spell stuff "as it sounds in their heads". And then there's people who are good spellers, whomst wouldn't blink twice or use Google when asked to spell "accommodate" or "nausaeus". Do you think that these mega spellers can document _how_ they spell correctly all the time? Or do you think they have some good intuition/tacit knowledge?

English is my second language so I tried to make some funny mistakes above due to the topic, but there might also be some unwanted/undocumented ones thrown in for good measure.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#83

Post by justin_oaks »

fidotron wrote: post #18
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”.

Is this true, though? After seeing enough bone-headed management decisions, I wonder if the bosses even know or care about documentation when making decisions to fire someone.

From my point of view, the lack of documentation might be a reason to fire someone.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#84

Post by sonicanatidae »

lucidguppy wrote: post #33
sonicanatidae wrote: post #26

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.

I don't want to get too much on the ai hype train - but it seems like this would be perfect for machine learning, trained on the wiki-snippets of the company and emails (initiator would have to set a flag saying this is going to be training data).

That would be a good use of LLM AI, imo. Good idea.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#85

Post by justin_oaks »

hoherd wrote: post #17

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…

I often create wiki pages to save myself the work of explaining it multiple times to different people. Ultimately, it's win-win. I don't have to put in more effort to explain something, and the requestor has the necessary information.

If other people don't contribute to the wiki then it's likely that there's nothing incentivizing it. It's not like management is handing out bonuses to people contributing to the wiki. Heck, even my contributions are self-serving.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#86

Post by mekoka »

Nice article and good points, but perhaps the author wasn't aware that "tacit knowledge" is a term already used for something else.

https://commoncog.com/the-tacit-knowledge-series/

Tacit knowledge is undocumentable because it's knowledge borne out of experience. It's tacit because articulating it would be too tedious, impractical, and most probably incomplete. Think learning to play a sport by simply watching videos or reading instructions. Michael Jordan famously explained that although all players are taught the same theory, there's a point in a veteran's career where they can read the game at a different level. Closer to programming, it's the reason we see more articles repudiating well packaged ideas, such as "Clean Code" (capitalization intended), as past beginners who bought into them, are becoming experienced enough to recognize them as leaky abstractions.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#87

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

krisoft wrote: post #72
sonicanatidae wrote: post #26

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.

> 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. I don't even think that is tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is how do you know when the edge of your chisel is too dull and need re-honing. (It feels off.) Or knowing how much weight transfer you nee…

it kind of blows me away how many people on these forums don't know what tacit knowledge is.

tacit knowledge is being able to ride a bicycle.

You'll never describe it well enough that a child can hop on the bicycle and ride it the first time.

the knowledge that enables someone to successfully ride a bicycle is tacit knowledge.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#88

Post by aleph_minus_one »

mnsc wrote: post #82
panarky wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Tacit knowledge is not documented because it is undocumentable > students who struggle with spelling The ability to spell correctly is not tacit knowledge. >> Tacit knowledge is not documented because it is undocumentable Spelling is thoroughly documented.

It is thoroughly documented, yet alot of people make spelling mistakes and we sometime make up animals to mock people who spell stuff "as it sounds in their heads". And then there's people who are good spellers, whomst wouldn't blink twice or use Google when asked to spell "accommodate" or "nausaeus". Do you think that these mega spellers can document _how_ they spell correctly all the time? Or do you think they have…

> Do you think that these mega spellers can document _how_ they spell correctly all the time?

At least in my native language, I can typically explain the rules why a word is spelled the way it is. The simple reason for this is that I am interested in the structure of languages. The typical reason that I experience among other people why they spell words wrong is that they are less interested in this topic.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#89

Post by nyrikki »

quacked wrote: post #79
chongli wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think almost all knowledge is tacit knowledge. Even stuff that would seem obviously explicit like mathematics and language. In my experience tutoring high school students, I’ve encountered plenty of students who struggle with spelling, grammar, or mathematical mistakes and no matter how many times I correct them it doesn’t stick. Then I see other students who pick these things up so quickly without correction. Math…

> I’ve encountered plenty of students who struggle with spelling, grammar, or mathematical mistakes and no matter how many times I correct them it doesn’t stick. Then I see other students who pick these things up so quickly without correction. I often wonder about this. I believe that each person has a certain intellectual threshold beyond which they cannot progress farther in (memory, spatial reasoning, logical reas…

As someone who suffers from dysgraphia, which isn't well understood and commonly missed or completely misunderstood, our teaching methods simply do not translate to effective methods.

In English especially where we have problems with vowel shifts multiple source languages and frankly stupid spelling of some words by ignorant prescriptivist Latinophiles, it is really rote memorization.

Math is like playing the guitar or skiing, it takes practice to be good at.

But if you aren't good at memorization of concepts you don't understand, the typical response is to make people spend more time with memorization.

This simply doesn't work and students start to believe they aren't smart enough and give up, because they aren't offered tools to adapt and it is easier to just be thought of as stupid or slow.

Mathematics, logic, and scientific reasoning are learned skills and while everyone will have ultimate limits to their abilities, they are hard for all humans but in different ways.

But you are right, most this is tactic, people just ignore factors that often aren't even learning disabilities, but are advantages some students have due to their history and exposure.

Moravec's paradox is probably a good analogy, where what we think is easy is only easy due to previous experience.

Many authors like Ernest Hemingway and Agatha Christie were horrible at spelling and grammar but had good editors.

Assuming that being bad at spelling and grammar indicates an 'intellectual threshold' is a dangerous path.

Calculus is a filter class because it is taught in a way that favors rote memorization of unexplained concepts, but introduce some abstract algebra concepts to a student or coworker and many can move forward.

Rote memorization does have value, but equating memorization skills wilh ultimate intellectual ability leads to far lower educational attainment for many people.

Great guitarists and other difficult skills are far less about 'natural abilities' than it is about hard work and being exposed to an environment that does discourage that hard work.

Stem is the same as is creative writing or effective communication.

It is hard for everyone to learn, but people forget how much effort it took.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#90

Post by cratermoon »

lucidguppy wrote: post #33
sonicanatidae wrote: post #26

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.

I don't want to get too much on the ai hype train - but it seems like this would be perfect for machine learning, trained on the wiki-snippets of the company and emails (initiator would have to set a flag saying this is going to be training data).

> machine learning

This is already kind of skewed by hype. It's not possible to teach a transformer architecture LLM the fact "Dell T420s Tower Servers have very poor cooling for the raid controllers". All that can be done is have a corpus of text where the statistically most likely text associated with a prompts about "raid controller cooling Dell T420" includes the text "Dell T420s Tower Servers have very poor cooling for the raid controllers", or some variant of it. But the model doesn't know that fact, or any other fact, so it's not being taught this knowledge.

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