Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

er4hn.info

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 143 posts

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#101

Post by nyrikki »

chongli wrote: post #94
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There are rules for English spelling. They’re just extremely complicated because English, in addition to all its Anglo-Saxon native words, has many loanwords from other languages: Norman French, Latin, Greek, German, and many more. To spell a word correctly it really helps to be able to identify its language of origin. If you watch the Scripps national spelling bee, you’ll regularly see the spellers asking about this…

Lots of words have odd spelling due to false etymologies.

Scissors, Island, Ache, and Could; were all from old English with random letters added by people in the 15th century who mistakenly thought they were from Latin.

Etymology is hard, and most textbook writers and teachers who invented the rules weren't qualified to actually find the true origin.

English accumulated a multitude of inconsistent spelling patterns, some from loan words, some from shift how words pronounced from vowel shifts, yod-dropping, and random reform attempts which weren't often based on rigourous evidence of origin.

It was an etymological fallacy that drove those spelling reforms to 'correct' the spelling anyway.

There is no real value in keeping the k in knife when the sound was dropped as an example.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#102

Post by citrin_ru »

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…

Maintaining wiki requires a lot of time. Even just adding new content is much more work than a reply over IM/email because one needs to find a right place (if stricture is not completely flat), explain the context (which people exchanging messages have but would be missing for someone who would read wiki), organize content so it has some internal structure e. t. c. And there is a bigger problem - wiki to which new pages frequently added typically full of outdated or no longer relevant information. Updating or archiving old wiki pages requires a lot of time too (and this work sometimes can be done only by an author or someone who knows subject equally well).

It is nice to have knowledge documented, but there is a tradeoff between time spend on wiki and time saved thanks to the wiki.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#103

Post by AnimalMuppet »

ekidd wrote: post #71
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…

> very context-specific expertise you only get through experience. When giving advice, I'm often tempted to point to a given situation, and to explain what rule of thumb I used to solve it. But then I would see a junior programmer applying the rule of thumb in a completely different situation and I'd want to say, "No, that will end in tears!" And I realized that a lot of my rules of thumb were really dumb when taken…

Um, can I retract about the last 15 years of my advice?

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#104

Post by deathanatos »

nyrikki wrote: post #92
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.

Like "i" before "e", except after "c"? While "i" does come before "e" nearly 75% of the time—even after "c" it is a probabilistic rule and not particularly useful. So not so well documented. Or how about the false rules that people tried to copy from Latin to English that don't really apply like double negatives or split infinitives. Shakespeare loses most of its humor in modern edited versions, he used spelling and…

> So not so well documented.

You're criticizing a rule of thumb, here. Sure, the rule of thumb isn't perfect … but it also never claimed to be.

But from that, you're drawing the illogical conclusion of "spelling isn't documented", which … the aforementioned rule has no logical connection to.

Plenty of dictionaries exists, good ones, ones that even document non-standard spellings or local variants.

> I think you will find that actual linguistic scholars error twords (sic) descriptivism (sic) vs prescription.

I'll highlight the irony, but this is besides the point, but doubly so when teaching someone how to write. You start with the prescribed spellings, and once the skill is mastered, or the language evolves, then either they know when to break the rules, or the new spelling is simply trending towards prescribed.

… it's the same for a lot of pursuits: in dance, we teach footwork first. Later, you learn when to bend the rules, and when to outright break them. I'd say it's the same in music, too.

> Only the less informed population of lay people stick to the prescription model as a proxy for intellectual ability.

This really isn't what upthread is trying to say, at all. If I had to rephrase it, they're suggesting that, when you teach spelling, some "get it", some don't, even repeatedly, and questioning whether there is some tacit knowledge that the first group has formed that the latter is struggling with.

I taught CS, and I'd say there is a similar pattern amongst students there. Some intuitively seem to get it — particularly, once given the rules for syntax, ifs, while, etc., how to synthesis new programs to solve until-then unseen problems. Yet other students struggle with this. (The closest I've come is "the former have a decent rule system/model in their heads, and the latter are just trying to bum by on heuristics.)

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#105

Post by RadiozRadioz »

The place I've just joined has an extremely big problem with this. There's a lot of documentation, but it all relies on an immense amount of background knowledge to be useful. It's difficult to strike a balance between excessive detail in docs versus wide readership, but I'm inclined to prefer the former as it helps alleviate situations like this.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#107

Post by dgunay »

Some tacit knowledge maybe is impossible to document, but in a lot of circles there is a distinct lack of ability by those who are skilled in some activity to describe how they do things. There is often a split between those who can execute at a world-class level, and those who aren't as good but can teach others effectively. I've seen this dynamic play out in competitive videogames, figure skating, musicianship, etc.

Take figure skating for example. I was being taught how to do a basic two foot spin by someone I know who is/was a competitive figure skater. Not a complicated move. They completely failed to explain to me a critical part of how to do the spin effectively (namely, where on my blades I should keep my balance and how I should angle them). So did several instructors leading classes on figure skating. I floundered for a while until one day I managed to figure it out by random chance.

I was quite annoyed, because to me it is a perfectly explainable thing that everyone was apparently either just figuring out through trial and error or just didn't think was worth explaining. But these kinds of pedagogical "blind spots" pervade nearly all human fields of study.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#108

Post by k_process »

er4hn wrote: post #70
jessriedel wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, this is the exactly correct critique of the article. I'll just add that the author did not seriously grapple with the fact that leaving at least some explicit knowledge undocumented is inevitable. There is no sharp divide between "explicit knowledge every programmer should know" and "explicit knowledge that only makes sense in our organization". Documenting is costly to produce, and documentation is costly to…

I agree that some is inevitable, but as that amount increases it will provide a drag in what the organization is able to accomplish. This becomes even worse as an organization is remote locally and globally spread out.

The challenges with the post's suggestion are (1) it accounts only for the time of the person needing information, not the one providing it, and (2) a specific question takes a small time to answer, but pre-documenting everything that is needed to answer any question takes orders of magnitude more time.

Some of this is outlined in Snowden's (not that Snowden) Laws of Knowledge Management.

http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/km-seven-princ...

These two are especially relevant:

2. We only know what we know when we need to know it.

7. We always know more than we can say, and we always say more than we can write down.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#109

Post by Izkata »

nyrikki wrote: post #92
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.

Like "i" before "e", except after "c"? While "i" does come before "e" nearly 75% of the time—even after "c" it is a probabilistic rule and not particularly useful. So not so well documented. Or how about the false rules that people tried to copy from Latin to English that don't really apply like double negatives or split infinitives. Shakespeare loses most of its humor in modern edited versions, he used spelling and…

> Like "i" before "e", except after "c"?

> While "i" does come before "e" nearly 75% of the time—even after "c" it is a probabilistic rule and not particularly useful.

That's only the first part of the rhyme. The second part is "or when sounded like 'a' as in 'neighbor' or 'weigh'", which handles most of those exceptions.

There's even a third part I remember hearing once, but can't remember it now.

Most English spelling/pronunciation rules are never explicitly taught, but they do exist - it's why "ghoti" isn't pronounced the same as "fish", to get that pronunciation you have to break at least two rules.

Years ago I found a page that listed like 40 or so English pronunciation rules that had to do with combinations of characters and where they appeared in words, it was really thorough and I wish I'd kept a link to it.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#110

Post by pavel_lishin »

ycombinete wrote: post #40
pavel_lishin wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

At which point it becomes the Dungeon Master

Funny joke and not inaccurate, but as a regular Dungeon Master, there have definitely been times where I'll say I don't know! For example:

- "Sorry, I'm not sure right now how that class feature would work in this situation. For now, let's assume it works like X so we don't have to bog down the session to google the answers or scour the books, and I'll take the time to look it up later and make sure we do the correct thing going forward."

- "You know what, I actually don't know what happens in this kingdom if the king is incapacitated, but still alive, I didn't think to prepare for that scenario! Um, roll me a history check, and if you get a 15 or higher, then you'll have heard of this happening before, and you tell us what happens!"

- "Ok friends, I didn't expect you to just go north into the woods and build a raft to cross the river. I literally have nothing prepared for this scenario, so instead of me making up something bad, let's call the session for now, and I'll prepare something that I know will be fun for next time."

Post reply on HN