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Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

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Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#111

Post by jiggawatts »

Speaking of tacit experience, I love watching YouTube videos made by professionals working in industries I’m just a rank amateur in.

One thing that occurred to me is that I’ll observe these people casually and repeatedly applying “methods of the art” without a second thought, but then spend the entire episode talking about some specific obscure issue they’re trying to solve.

In my mind these have equal difficulty — and in some sense they are equal! It’s just that professionals may have done basics so often they don’t even think about it any more. It’s become a habit, mere tacit knowledge.

Some random examples:

Correctly centering something in a lathe — done in incorrectly can lead to this: https://www.forbesadvocate.com.au/story/907281/faulty-oil-pi...

I can think of thousands of examples like that: tacit knowledge is the knowledge you gain when you do something many times a day. That doesn’t make it less important, less valuable, or more obvious to beginners.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#112

Post by chongli »

nyrikki wrote: post #101
chongli wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Lots of words have odd spelling due to false etymologies.

That's true as well.

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.

To me, these two statements suggest opposite recommendations. The first tells us that we should be cautious of prescriptive changes to spelling. The second that we should go ahead and drop the k in knife (and presumably change the spelling on all other words to be more phonetic).

I am inclined to be conservative here [1]. I found Mark Twain's satirical piece on the issue [2] rather persuasive. Like it or not, those old prescriptivists' changes have become part of the etymology. Making further changes for the sake of easier spelling would only complicate the etymology even further, and make it even harder for future English-speakers to read the texts of today.

[1] https://xkcd.com/927/

[2] https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.html

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#113

Post by sonicanatidae »

cratermoon wrote: post #90
lucidguppy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cool…

Since this is the internet, I'm asking, not arguing...just this time.. ;)

In this context, can we assume AI would be a good internal wiki assistant/Mod?

It could make many data correlations, rapidly, and suggest or act upon migration/collation/etc of information into more useful groupings, with related information automatically indexed and grouped, based on the more commonly searched for terms that match data related, or tagged. This could/would evolve over time, assuming the same AI and a changing team/staff, terms, current in-use hardware, in this case.

A simplified version of what I'm trying to say might be, AI can't know a fact, but it could parse inputs and build relationships between bits of data, based on how the users access that data, and under what headings it's commonly searched for.

An AI, especially the parse/response loop of LLM AIs, seems almost custom built to find that input, and match it with similar/related inputs and store the information in a more effective way, under more commonly searched headings from the users searching the wiki.

Am I missing something?

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#114

Post by nicbou »

sonicanatidae wrote: post #26
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…

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 write documentation for a living and refactoring is a significant part of my work. Keeping documentation tidy is a full time job.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#115

Post by nicbou »

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).

How can someone do this, concretely? I would love to slowly train an AI to fit the gap between search and one on one assistance, but I don’t know how to do it as a single person running an informative website.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#116

Post by vt100 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #6

Well, as in all of these absolutist black/white, binary statements, "it depends." In my experience, tribal knowledge, which also includes cultural inculcation, can be the difference between success and failure. Sometimes, on the success side, and, sometimes, on the failure side. The main thing about "tribal knowledge," is that it relies on long-term association/employment, and that is not something we see much of, th…

Surely there are tribes that transcend and cross corporations. That's why you can hire old colleagues and get a team up and running in a startup or new firm

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#117

Post by cratermoon »

sonicanatidae wrote: post #113
cratermoon wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cool…

Since this is the internet, I'm asking, not arguing...just this time.. ;) In this context, can we assume AI would be a good internal wiki assistant/Mod? It could make many data correlations, rapidly, and suggest or act upon migration/collation/etc of information into more useful groupings, with related information automatically indexed and grouped, based on the more commonly searched for terms that match data related…

> AI can't know a fact, but it could parse inputs and build relationships between bits of data, based on how the users access that data, and under what headings it's commonly searched for.

Yes, but so can text analytics tools that are not transformer model LLMs, and they can do it without thousands of swimming pools of water[1] or a gigawatt hour of electricity[2]. Those LLMs are just algorithmic summary generators, and text summarizers have existed for some time.

> find that input, and match it with similar/related inputs and store the information in a more effective way

But that's not how these automation tools work – they don't store information, they generate statistically likely text based on the training corpus.

1. https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/ai-water-energy-artificia...

2. https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-energy-consumption

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#118

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

vt100 wrote: post #116
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #6

Well, as in all of these absolutist black/white, binary statements, "it depends." In my experience, tribal knowledge, which also includes cultural inculcation, can be the difference between success and failure. Sometimes, on the success side, and, sometimes, on the failure side. The main thing about "tribal knowledge," is that it relies on long-term association/employment, and that is not something we see much of, th…

Surely there are tribes that transcend and cross corporations. That's why you can hire old colleagues and get a team up and running in a startup or new firm

That would be "association."

But there is also a great deal of extremely mercenary behavior, in today's workplace (not just tech).

I suspect that it would be hard to have contiguous relationships.

I worked at my last company for 27 years. I knew many folks for decades.

I believe that this kind of thing is ... uncommon ... these days.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#119

Post by toast0 »

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…

> I also think part of what makes a lot of modern life so disastrously ineffective is the belief by those running society that everyone can reach a similar intellectual level given the right "system".

Well, it's a nice belief to have, even if it's not true. But I think what's worse is the belief that everyone can reach a similar intellectutal level given the same "right system".

I'm pretty sure no system could teach me how to say draw legible sketches of pretty much anything, a valuable, intellectual skill. I'm ok with that and will move on with my life. But I'm even more sure a system that could teach me that skill would be unable to teach very many others. If you want to get everyone to the same intellectual level or maybe to at least some specific level, you've got to be flexible about how and what to teach and how long it's going to take.

I know plenty of people who can do basic 3d sketching with no specific instruction, but that's not me. I've got things I can pick up too. Some people are going to need a lot more time for things...

But schools will say they want to do flexible, student driven teaching, but then it's more of the same one size fits some.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#120

Post by popularonion »

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…

That's what I did at my last job, now I mostly feel like that was a mistake. I was the guy contributing 90% of the wiki knowledge, for no real appreciation or incentive. And when something I posted inevitably become out of date and caused a problem for someone, guess who got blamed? I feel like I was enabling the team's bad habits.

At $NEW_JOB I'm just putting everything into my Obsidian repo. It's great because I have complete freedom to refactor my notes however and whenever I want. When someone has a question for me, I just look up the answer in my notes and send it over to them. Then they'll copy it into their OneNote, and everyone is satisfied.

This isn't my ideal world, but this seems to be the state of equilibrium when management doesn't lay down any expectations or incentives.

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