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Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

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131–140 of 143 posts

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#131
There is hard knowledge and there is tacit knowledge. It’s not black and white. It’s a continuum.

Tacit knowledge documentation can take form of pro tips, best practices, anecdotes, postmortems, retrospectives, values, and philosophy statements.

It’s possible to capture a bit of it in written form. It will never be fully documented. A little goes a long way though.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#132
post #119
post #79

Earlier 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…

> 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…

>>I know plenty of people who can do basic 3d sketching with no specific instruction, but that's not me

I used to think that I am tone deaf and have no memory for melodies. Bu t after I forces myself to spend a lot of time singing, playing guitar and listening to music it occured that I just lacked some basic skills that combined suddenly creates magical ability of recalling melodies in my head and even repeating them. The same was with drawing and public speaking and general movement coordination (strength training can do wonders in this department).

This made me believe that some of problems of education system comes from general inability to convince students to spend more (dozen times more) on practicing basic skills (being this writing, small/big motoric skills, logical thinking oraz even some seemingly unimportant stuff like voice emission)

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#133
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 ha…

Interesting story about where blame is placed, and your move to Obsidian. Thanks for sharing.

I've actually done something similar to your Obsidian repo: I put all my notes into markdown and publish them with mkdocs[1]. This gives me the same editorial control and freedom from blame as your notes, but mine are public by default, so I can still simply reply with a link. I just can't post anything that is sensitive, which hasn't been a significant drawback yet. I have considered moving to an Obsidian based system, but have yet to find something compelling enough to make the switch. It looks like an awesome app though and is still on my radar.

1. https://danielhoherd.com/tech-notes/exiftool/

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#134
post #132
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>>I know plenty of people who can do basic 3d sketching with no specific instruction, but that's not me I used to think that I am tone deaf and have no memory for melodies. Bu t after I forces myself to spend a lot of time singing, playing guitar and listening to music it occured that I just lacked some basic skills that combined suddenly creates magical ability of recalling melodies in my head and even repeating the…

I think there are three things here - which are not mutually exclusive.

1. No amount of practice will enable me to break the 100m world record - or even probably be within 30-40% of it.

2. However, training would dramatically improve my time.

3. Most importantly, in life I could beat Usain Bolt by simply starting running 5 seconds earlier - ie for most things peak performance isn't what matters - it's effort/persistence.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#135
post #132
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>>I know plenty of people who can do basic 3d sketching with no specific instruction, but that's not me I used to think that I am tone deaf and have no memory for melodies. Bu t after I forces myself to spend a lot of time singing, playing guitar and listening to music it occured that I just lacked some basic skills that combined suddenly creates magical ability of recalling melodies in my head and even repeating the…

Which were the basic skills you thought you were lacking in terms of remembering tone?

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#136
post #72

Earlier 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

> One could argue that tacit knowledge also applies when it comes to the feel of pulling laptops apart without breaking the tiny little clips.

I agree that that is tacit knowledge.

> This gets muddy real fast.

I don't see how your example demonstrates the muddyness?

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#137
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>I know plenty of people who can do basic 3d sketching with no specific instruction, but that's not me I used to think that I am tone deaf and have no memory for melodies. Bu t after I forces myself to spend a lot of time singing, playing guitar and listening to music it occured that I just lacked some basic skills that combined suddenly creates magical ability of recalling melodies in my head and even repeating the…

Which were the basic skills you thought you were lacking in terms of remembering tone?

I really do not know the proper name here but it is akin to visualisation (but with music). I could not recall intervals and rythm that makes given song recognizable (could not replay the song in my head) just like if you lack visual imagination you cannot solve even the easiest geometric problems without pen and paper or create good shape composition plan for painting.

And basing my intuition on example of one (me) both visual and tone imagination and memory can be developed from almost zero.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#138
post #79
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…

>that everyone can reach a similar intellectual level given the right "system"

False on absolute terms and useless for most "real life" training. Time to learn/master a subject is an enormous competitive advantage to foster, as "talented" people will always have an edge over "clumsy" people. Mediocre people can only beat a genius trough effort of luck IF the genius is lazy and/or unlucky.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#139
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which were the basic skills you thought you were lacking in terms of remembering tone?

I really do not know the proper name here but it is akin to visualisation (but with music). I could not recall intervals and rythm that makes given song recognizable (could not replay the song in my head) just like if you lack visual imagination you cannot solve even the easiest geometric problems without pen and paper or create good shape composition plan for painting. And basing my intuition on example of one (me)…

How did you develop them from zero if you were missing those basic skills?

I am a musician and I'm keenly interested in music education. I believe you when you say that you lacked some basic facilities; I think it's rare, but more common than people think that someone is genuinely tone-deaf, or can't "visualize" pitches and intervals, or can't memorize songs, or can't feel a rhythm. I always wonder if those deficiencies can be overcome. I'm really interested in your tale, if you wanted to write more privately, would you consider sending me an email? It's in my HN profile.

Re: Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Sure. I get that AI doesn't "know" things.

My specific suggestion was about leveraging the parsing and response loop of LLM AIs to analyze free text, parse what's useful and the reply would be collating the data.

Thanks for taking the time to reply!

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