I loved this! thanks for sharing :)
Why the most valuable things you know are things you cannot say
11–20 of 70 posts
Re: Why the most valuable things you know are things you cannot say
#12I think of how trading firms cannot say their strategies, as they would lose their effectiveness.
Or how many people know that many CEOs and leaders are idiots, but cannot say it, as they would face retribution.
Re: Why the most valuable things you know are things you cannot say
#13ai;dr: experience is denser than words can articulate. Also (I don’t think it was mentioned) tacit knowledge is reflexive: it’s recalled in the scenario it was acquired, which is usually when it’s needed, whereas one must think through to recall book knowledge.
I agree with the article’s main point, but it’s flagrantly AI and (as usual with AI) way too verbose.
Re: Why the most valuable things you know are things you cannot say
#14I think despite the presentation this has some good ideas in it:
1. Formally calling out a concept for judgment-based skills that cannot be easily taught. I think everybody understands this, but having a word for this would be useful.
2. Opening up the conversation on the topic of which types of skills can/should be codified and how.
That said, everything else in the article is suss. "Dimensionality" is largely a distraction to try to sound smart, most of the claims in the article are unwarranted (e.g. processes & checklists can be great, even for disciplines with true experts like airline pilots).
For example saying that skill learning cannot be accelerated is just patently false in many domains -- take something like learning chess. If you have a coach and other tools you'll learn a LOT faster. But certainly I've worked places that wished they could automate away reliance on experts because it gives organization power to a few non-management individuals.
Re: Why the most valuable things you know are things you cannot say
#15I would call the difference intuitive knowledge versus rational knowledge. I've never seen the word calibration used this way: different modes of learning. The first is instruction: the transfer of explicit models, rules, and relationships from one person to another through language. The second is calibration: the development of internal models through repeated exposure to feedback in a specific environment. Judgemen…
I believe the author was arguing that “calibration” is also rational but it cannot be transmitted. You cannot learn it from reading or following a framework. Books and frameworks are too lossy. The author cited the example of doctors in their residency as an example of this second mode of learning. They are learning from hands on experience what other doctors had also learned before. With residency there are others who oversee the residents.
Re: Why the most valuable things you know are things you cannot say
#16The Tao that can be spoken, is not the real Tao :-)
Re: Why the most valuable things you know are things you cannot say
#17I would call the difference intuitive knowledge versus rational knowledge. I've never seen the word calibration used this way: different modes of learning. The first is instruction: the transfer of explicit models, rules, and relationships from one person to another through language. The second is calibration: the development of internal models through repeated exposure to feedback in a specific environment. Judgemen…
Or maybe inductive vs deductive reasoning
Re: Why the most valuable things you know are things you cannot say
#18"The second, more fundamental reason is that the relevant features are not given in advance. A large part of what the expert learns through experience is which features of the environment matter."
Yes.
"This is the deepest reason why experience cannot be compressed."
No. Finding relevant features and compressing their valuation is what ML systems do. Especially in vision systems. Early attempts at machine vision had human-chosen features and detectors for them. There used to be papers with suggested features - horizontal lines, vertical lines, diagonal lines, patterns of dots, colors, and such. That's where things were in the 1990s. Those have now been replaced by learning-generated low level feature detectors, which work better.
This does need a lot of training content. The training process is inefficient. It definitely compresses, though.
Re: Why the most valuable things you know are things you cannot say
#19This has me considering law school vs something like, officiating a sport. A foul in basketball, or a balk in baseball are very much just judgement calls by the respective officials, kinda you know it when you see it. You can write down what a foul is, or what a balk is, and if you play by the letters of the rules in place, you will likely have a miserable game and it will be entirely the official's fault, you can also have a game where clear "fouls" are being committed but not called unless they go beyond what has been set as the baseline acceptable level of play(not in the spirit of defense or whatever), and it could be considered a wonderful game by all parties involved (let them play in action).
Kinda has me wondering about the implications of the BAR being the end all be all of a law school. Contrast it with a Doctor's residency and i think law school is very much crafting an overly binary right/wrong profession, and perhaps they should have something beyond it more akin to something like officiating a sports game, where they see potential implications of being too stringent applying their rule system when there is certainly room for being charitable. It is a complex issue though, because the charitable interpretation of a law gives way for bad actors to abuse that interpretation.
Now bridge this all with all the weird 1st level and 2nd level stuff surrounding medicine that is placed there by people outside of the field of medicine and imposed on an expert of the medical field. They have to apply their expertise to the patient, decide a course of action, and then describe that action in those 1st/2nd level terms to a non expert who for some reason is the deciding authority, despite downgrading the expert's actual thoughts by design. I know im all over the place, but it was a pretty good article that made me think about a lot of different applications of the ideas.
Re: Why the most valuable things you know are things you cannot say
#20> “Street smarts” refers to models that are too high-dimensional for linguistic transmission and were therefore acquired through calibrated experience. The street-smart person cannot explain why they know what they know, which makes them look inarticulate to the book-smart person, which leads the book-smart person to conclude that the street-smart person’s knowledge is inferior. This conclusion is precisely backwards in domains where judgement matters. The inability to articulate the model is not evidence of a crude model. It is evidence of a model too sophisticated for the transmission channel.
I disagree to a degree. Yes, what the author says is accurate about people dismissing street-smarts as a lower level of intelligence than it deserves. But a sufficiently skilled communicator can absolutely articulate many of the factors being evaluated when they judge a situation and how their descision-making process works.
> They evaluate intelligence through the lens of articulacy
There was an earlier instance of the author using a word such as unability (or similar) and it should have been inability and I let it go, but this misuse of language is making my head hurt. However, I confess that I thought the word should have been articularity and it turns out that’s not a real word either. But I at least pay attention to spellcheck. I don’t understand how someone could take the time to write a long and thoughtful essay about intelligence and not use spellcheck to proof it.