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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

#51
As a bit of a thought experiment; would Simulation be the closest we have towards "Transmissionism"? I'm not arguing that it is or isn't, but whether we can approach those non-verbal and tacit knowledge as encoded through programs and data?

To throw out an easy counter-argument, we could say that Simulation/Programming is like comparing Words to an Image, aka nothing of the sort. Additionally, there is the difference between Simulation and Reality, where simulation simplifies or glosses over many elements of reality. Looking up the definition indicates that Passivity seems to be the key, and simulations are anything but passive.

To give a concrete example of what I mean, in my early career I worked at a defense contractor building a training simulator for a weapons platform. The training was to mimic the same training on a gun range. Soldiers were graded by the simulation as if it were the instructor with a sharp eye and a stopwatch. It tested everything from how long you held the trigger (at least three seconds), how you swiveled your head to scan for targets, identifying targets and relaying them to your vehicle commander, etc.

I would argue that it goes beyond Transmissionism, as it now corresponds far more to an actual reality than mere metaphors and words. However it does make me wonder where the line might be, if it even exists.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#52
This is why language/framework design is so interesting. After enough time spent with one a developer will be running off tacit knowledge.

Extending/patching that doesn’t fit in with tacit knowledge is also dangerous. React has done a great job of that, it looks much different than a few years ago, but the changed behaviors never felt “wrong” internally.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#53

I figured out something very similar in flight school. When I did my instrument rating, I realized my instructor, Sean, wasn’t perfect. No pilot is. But, I believed he could pass an instrument check ride. I could not. I decided that rather than figure out if everything he did was the best way or “worked for me”, I would just do my best Sean impression. I still had the opportunity to get even better by learning from o…

You never become exceptional this way. And if you run into situations you’ve never seen before, it’s harder to react competently. With coding, if you only ever use a style you copy, then everything looks like it could be solved in that way. This works and may help you up the corporate ladder. But it will never produce massively positive results

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#54

I figured out something very similar in flight school. When I did my instrument rating, I realized my instructor, Sean, wasn’t perfect. No pilot is. But, I believed he could pass an instrument check ride. I could not. I decided that rather than figure out if everything he did was the best way or “worked for me”, I would just do my best Sean impression. I still had the opportunity to get even better by learning from o…

You never become exceptional this way. And if you run into situations you’ve never seen before, it’s harder to react competently. With coding, if you only ever use a style you copy, then everything looks like it could be solved in that way. This works and may help you up the corporate ladder. But it will never produce massively positive results

If you copy enough styles then you will eventually see the connections between the styles and come up with your own. This is exactly how you become exceptional, by copying the best over and over again in as many styles as possible until you 'get it'. You have to think about it and understand it too but that comes naturally to anyone who is capable of becoming exceptional, that's the seeing the connections part.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#55

>>> He gave me a long explanation about software engineering principles. I waved him away and asked how he did it in five seconds. He said “Well, it just felt right. Ok, let’s go to lunch, you can fix it afterwards.” Yes. I do a lot of coding on feel, and just today was explaining why something could be done one of two ways but one was better. It took about 30 seconds for my concious brain to work out why it was, eve…

So much of coding and seeing good and bad design patterns is unconscious pattern matching and unconscious heuristics. I have the same experience of trying to put into words why one design pattern is better than another and it definitely is frustrating because from experience I do have a tacit "feel" about why something is wrong but to convey that to someone else is a challenge.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#56

I figured out something very similar in flight school. When I did my instrument rating, I realized my instructor, Sean, wasn’t perfect. No pilot is. But, I believed he could pass an instrument check ride. I could not. I decided that rather than figure out if everything he did was the best way or “worked for me”, I would just do my best Sean impression. I still had the opportunity to get even better by learning from o…

You never become exceptional this way. And if you run into situations you’ve never seen before, it’s harder to react competently. With coding, if you only ever use a style you copy, then everything looks like it could be solved in that way. This works and may help you up the corporate ladder. But it will never produce massively positive results

As a description of the limits of this strategy, your assessment is probably accurate. This is a reasonable strategy for developing common competence. Whether that means you should adopt it probably depends on where on the relevant competency curves you are -- or how uncommon the competence around you is.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#57

I figured out something very similar in flight school. When I did my instrument rating, I realized my instructor, Sean, wasn’t perfect. No pilot is. But, I believed he could pass an instrument check ride. I could not. I decided that rather than figure out if everything he did was the best way or “worked for me”, I would just do my best Sean impression. I still had the opportunity to get even better by learning from o…

You never become exceptional this way. And if you run into situations you’ve never seen before, it’s harder to react competently. With coding, if you only ever use a style you copy, then everything looks like it could be solved in that way. This works and may help you up the corporate ladder. But it will never produce massively positive results

That may or may not be the case, but note that there are many (most?) domains where the positive payoff is bounded, but the negative payoff is not. This method seems particularly useful for those scenarios -- if you have "adequate" performers to copy from.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#58
I believe this is how you learn:

* I watch you do it. * You watch me do it. * Then I do it.

I have to watch someone else undertake a task to understand it. After, I attempt to undertake the task and receive feedback from the individual whom I watched first. Then after I've gathered the knowledge I can do the task. The context I learned about this approach was when I learned to use a chainsaw. But it has served me extremely well in both learning and teaching other topics over the years.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#59
post #44

Teaching college students how to program my first year of grad school, I realized that it's not possible to make someone understand something. In a real sense, I could not teach them to program. Learning how to program is learning a new way of thinking, and there was no way I could force them to start thinking in this way. I was more trying to guide them to have many personal epiphanies - through a combination of soc…

Exactly my experience slowly learning to code as an adult. My partner sometimes explains a programming concept to me that just won't sink in.

After some practice and time, I can feel my thinking rearranging itself around the concept until it's second nature. Personally it's a feeling I enjoy, part of the reason I like taking up new hobbies all the time.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#60
A long time ago in a philosophy of math class, our professor offered this problem: upon hatching chicks have to be separated by sex. Experienced poultry farmers know how to tell them apart from feel but it's not a process they can describe. The problem then was: how would they teach it to a new hire? The solution offered was that they have the rookie hold the chick in their hands and guess while the experienced farmer corrects them. This was a great example of how tacit knowledge is acquired.
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