I really dislike when companies represent their knowledge bases as a list of videos. I have seen it a few times and I look forward to videos becoming searchable more easily over time.
Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous
121–130 of 143 posts
Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
One should not look to be unreplaceable, but rather the opposite. Only when you become replaceable at a certain task (or able to delegate it) you can progress to do new (more interesting) things.
It could go either way. Some places will like and promote one to do different/more interesting things. Other places will eliminate the position with k, thx, bye! Moreover usually people have only so much energy to be always concerned with job / career growth/ changes etc. They are fine their little pieces of knowledge that make them useful at work in a unique way.
If your company has a habit of firing people that share information, or punish employees who work smarter instead of harder, it’s a sign that they might be out of touch with value creation and will eventually be punished by the market.
Being fired from such a place might actually be a blessing, not a curse.
Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous
#123Tacit 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…
Well put!
Donald Schön’s work on this topic is really enlightening. It’s not just that there’s knowledge in the heads of people that can’t be linguistically expressed well, but also that expression of it requires interaction with a specific situation.
This is also represents a massive gap for AI systems to become actual in-the-world problems solvers.
Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> Moravec's paradox is probably a good analogy, where what we think is easy is only easy due to previous experience.
One explanation of Moravec’s paradox is based on evolution. Human skills are implemented biologically with mechanisms that have been shaped by natural selection. The older the skill, the more time natural selection has had to shape it. Abstract thought is a recent development, so we should expect the current implementation to be relatively inefficient.
Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous
#125At 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 ha…
This is a perfect example of poor organizational incentives.
Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous
#126Earlier 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…
I've explained bugs and developed exploits just from noticing odd behavior in video games.
I know how a team is organized, I knew the multiplayer feature was tacked on (probably by interns), I know about network code edge cases, bada-bing bada-boom I can trigger a bug and understand why it happens without ever seeing their code.
Or sitting in a theater and just noticing the lighting setup and transitions rather than the performance itself.
Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
This gets muddy real fast. One could argue that tacit knowledge also applies when it comes to the feel of pulling laptops apart without breaking the tiny little clips. It takes a few before you get the feel for it, because the difference between snapping a tiny little case clip and not snapping it are about 1 psi (borrowing a term) difference..lol
That absolutely sounds like it.
I opened several laptops with spudger tools. Now I can open random items I didn't watch videos for just because I have an idea of how it _might_ be assembled.
Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous
#128Earlier 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…
A lot of then simply remember well. That is not tacit knowledge, that is explicite knowledge.
Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
My dungeon master has done similar things in the past. I do love finding out, after a campaign, that a favourite npc or room was made up on the fly after we did something unexpected though!
I especially like your second example. Rule of cool + added space for role play.
Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous
#130Intelligent people understand that knowledge can not ever be dangerous, because it's the human who makes things dangerous.
Intelligent people understand that when lesser intelligent people call knowledge dangerous, they will eventually, but definitely inevitably, ask for the banning of said knowledge, because "the evil knowledge makes people do things they shouldn't", or a variation thereof.