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Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

commoncog.com

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Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#31

Post by travisd »

skybrian wrote: post #17

Programmers have another common example of how a belief in transmissionism often doesn't work out as well as the author hopes: the monad tutorial. Here are other examples I can think of: - Learning programming in the first place. Many people struggle. - Teaching rhythm to an older adult with no musical experience. - Ear training. No explanation will substitute for practice. This isn't to say that explanations never w…

I’ll take this as a shameless opportunity to plug my startup: Pathbird (pathbird.com). Happy to chat more about this if anyone is curious: travis@pathbird.com.

I developed it with a professor at UMich to teach a data science course for non-CS grad students. He had a deep belief in tinkering, exploration, and one-step-at-a-time learning. And I’ve seen it work pretty well. Pathbird itself is a platform for instructors to build these kinds of computational, “guided” lessons that emphasize the experience and process of learning.

Far too many intro CS/programming lessons read like glossaries. Obviously the syntax of if statements and for loops is important, but starting there on day one encourages students to miss the forest for the trees.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#32

Post by monster_group »

A long article that is basically saying you can't gain deep expertise by merely reading instruction manual and executing the instructions over and over. Expertise comes from a lot of experience with various situations that develops a sense of what's right and what's wrong. That is not surprising to me at all.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#34

Post by k__ »

Sound to me like "tacit knowledge" is simply a practical skill?

I mean, obviously you can explain many things to someone who can't replicate it "just in time", riding a bike is one of those examples.

Explain math, playing guitar, reading, or whatever perfectly to a person, they still have to practice to be able to do it.

The problem isn't the explanation, it's the difficulty of the skill to learn.

Don't know why we need a new word/phrase for it.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#35

Post by thoughtFrame »

hinkley wrote: post #26
lordnacho wrote: post #5

IMO Tacit knowledge is what we used to call judgement. Judgement is basically knowing a bunch of things but having a good idea of which things are more important than others, and especially knowing which things are worth spending time on any which aren't. It's like when I see someone talking about financial options and they put everything on the board at once: what are puts and calls, what's an iron butterfly and oth…

Judgement or specialty. Oddly, my first specialty was performance optimization. A predisposition met a trouble project and I spent half my time finding ways to speed up code without making it offensive. Then later projects had problems but no mandate, so I got pushback. I got really good at crypto-optimization - changes that improve performance but look like something else (cleanup, bug fixes, feature requests), and…

I guess Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book fits the bill, though no amount of literature replaces getting your hands dirty in late 80s-early 90s level hardware+software. However, while you can do this, you're still missing the things you learned by being part of a team (of the kind which there are probably in the low hundreds right now). How much I'd give to be part of Nintendo or Id software or some other era-appropriate team figuring out how to make the early big 3D games like Mario 64 or its contemporaries on the PSX. Of course you can bust out an SDK and try it out but it probably won't be the same.

Those teams built up that kind of tacit knowledge like in this video about software texture mapping https://youtube.com/watch?v=xn76r0JxqNM

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#36

Post by caminante »

gentleman11 wrote: post #18

Somebody serious about deliberate practice will spend a lot of time seeking “tacit knowledge.” The author is possibly confused and thinks the term refers to repetition or reading or something. The original paper studies pianists and violinists (possibly chess players too?) - people who aren’t spending their exhausting practice in a library or chatting on discord except when it’s the most important thing to do The str…

I see your point, and I'm not equipped to articulate the distinction. It is fuzzy.

> Somebody serious about deliberate practice will spend a lot of time seeking “tacit knowledge.”

Putting words in the author's mouth, he's saying that tacit knowledge is more important in areas where (i) execution isn't clearly prescribed; to (ii) perform at a high level.

The author gets into how in certain fields, there's a "missing manual" and requires figuring it out yourself or undergoing an apprenticeship, prioritizing attainment of tacit knowledge.

Leetcoding is a "missing manual" expertise path and doesn't converge, IMHO, like chess, violin, athletics, etc.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#38

Post by scyzoryk_xyz »

I clicked this link because I’m currently building an MVP for a software product and getting a hang of the essentials has been going relatively well thanks to my tacit knowledge around computers/software.

However, what I did not expect was for the article to go into that Atul Gawande quote on the laparoscopic appendectomy. It just so happens that the MVP I’m building is part of a training program for laparoscopic skill and the other half of my job is making the actual educational content, including the appendectomy (I’m a jack-of-all-trades - we’re a tiny company). How strangely surprising!

I spend a lot of time testing our product with users, who all happen to be in surgical training. The professor of surgery with whom we collaborate, regularly brings up the kid/bicycle/teaching experience. Laparoscopic suturing is currently seen as an art form, and it’s a such a great example, so he usually just tells people to practice. In surgery more than in any other field everything is relative, mushy and tricky. You’re juggling manual instrument skill with medical knowledge, along with people skills (in the OR). Our approach has been to focus - with our products you only learn the skill but none of the other stuff.

I’m definitely saving this one, and going be exploring all the linked sources and materials. Thanks!

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#39

Post by carfacts »

lordnacho wrote: post #5

IMO Tacit knowledge is what we used to call judgement. Judgement is basically knowing a bunch of things but having a good idea of which things are more important than others, and especially knowing which things are worth spending time on any which aren't. It's like when I see someone talking about financial options and they put everything on the board at once: what are puts and calls, what's an iron butterfly and oth…

This is why often when setting guidelines around particular behavior, standards that require some judgement may be better than rules that are to be followed blindly without any discretion.

Compare the rules around speed limits, don’t drive above 70mph (no judgement, could be too slow or too quick in a given situation) vs the one often observed and followed in reality, drive at a reasonable speed, roughly what others are driving at (use your judgement about what’s safe).

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