This is why every attempt to "systematize all human knowledge" cannot succeed.
Tacit knowledge concept connects a lot of dots. It was a missing piece of the puzzle.
Really interesting article.
Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
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Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
#72"When I pushed these people on their judgments, they would try to explain in terms of principles or heuristics. But the more I pushed, the more exceptions and caveats and potential gotchas I unearthed." It is a popular believe that being an expert on something doesn't mean you will be an expert on teaching that thing, but in this case it could also be that any number of implementations was possible, and the seniors h…
I think of it the other way around: Until I can teach the thing to someone else, I am not yet an expert.
Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
#73It seems we rediscover Gilbert Ryle's knowing-how vs knowing-that distinction every few years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Ryle or if you are so inclined https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-how/ Note: if you have a computer and it can be "told" once and forever remember it, then converting know-that into know-how by teaching it 100s of if-then rules was, at one point, considered a worthy research p…
It's funny that several thousand words that laboriously reinvent the wheel about tacit knowledge could be summed up in a handful of words of declarative knowledge.
Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
#74>>> 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.
Would we call that "intuition"?
Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
#75The reason tacit knowledge exists and is essential is because the brain is immensely complex, and most of what it does is outside consciousness.
To take just one well-studied example, in vision photons hit visual receptors in the retina, and then go through the optic nerve which is a complex computer that analyses the signals in stages, like picking out points, then lines, then shapes, and so on, and then it is sent to several different visual areas of the brain, each of which pulls out different features, like motion, colors, 3d shapes, faces, and emotional expressions, and then finally it arrives in consciousness. Something similar is true for every other sensation, and how they are integrated to give us our perception and understanding of the world.
As a consequence, children from birth learn all sorts of things without explicit instruction and often even much focal thought, include the great majority of the rules of language itself.
All of this is subjectively experienced as a sort of feel or intuition. It is described by philosophers such as Michael Polanyi and various phenomenologists. I studied with one of them, Eugene Gendlin, who developed a method called experiential focusing for helping people make use of their tacit knowledge (he called it felt meaning). You might want to take a look at his book Focusing.
One more point. The idea that all knowledge can be clearly explicated is an example of the denial of human finitudes that is common in much of Western philosophy, but that are affirmed by other schools Western philosophy, such as pragmatism, existential-phenomenology, and post-Wittgensteinian analytic philosophy.
Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
#76We have neural networks in our brains which for some reason cannot be trained without practice in real world. No amount of reading about riding will train those real-time feedback loops that operate on much lower latencies then you can formulate conscious thoughts.
This is a limitation of our brains and not fundamental property of knowledge or information.
In AI neural networks which can ride bikes or recognize objects are easily introspected and copied. In humans this isn't implemented ;)
Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
#77I 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
I wonder if the OP post has more to do with nerves/confidence than learning. By imagining he was Sean, he felt confident and the naturally performed better at the job at hand.
To answer your point, there are times in the "learning curve" you need to get used to doing something, and then times to become exceptional. Compare learning to drive to formula 1. And commongcog has an article for that: https://commoncog.com/blog/get-numb-get-good/
Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
#78Been waiting ages for literally anything posted on commoncog.com to get traction on HN, because it's all interesting deep writing about meta-human issues, useful for "us lot" and invokes good discussion.
When I see a new post from commoncog, I don't read it right away. I think "right need to carve out half hour of quiet uniterrupted time for that later".
It's one of the few I have on my mobile phone RSS reader, the others being quanta magazine, and another interesting blog I found through HN.
So that's my praise, I recommend you add it to your readers too :-)
Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
#79Isn’t there already a long philosophical analysis of this phenomenon — know-how vs know-what?
Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
#80> Tacit knowledge is knowledge that cannot be captured through words alone. This definition is slightly wrong. Tacit knowledge can't be described in words alone, but it can be captured through words alone. One of the reasons we built FWD:Everyone ( https://www.fwdeveryone.com ) was to capture the tacit knowledge contained within email conversations. When you can see the entire conversation, you learn how people inter…
> you learn how people interact with one another and you can learn to model your own communication based off of that.
This strikes me a little like "By reading lots of good code, you can learn to model your own code based on that". It probably helps, but a lot is dependent on context.
The blog post goes into this with the long quote about choosing tools and techniques for an appendectomy. How do you capture that sort of context in an email thread? Annotations like "Based on X and Y factors, I chose to write Z", where X and Y are not explicit in the email text?
I haven't looked too closely, but it seems to me that the primary value of these email threads (in terms of learning communication) is to provide a body of real-world examples - but there also needs to be applied experience (with feedback) with written communication for the lessons to really sink in.