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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

#71

Post by rpmisms »

I speedcube, and deliberate practice is extremely important. I also code, and deliberate practice doesn't do much in that area. I need to have a feel for the code, understand what chunks of code do without having to read every line. That's tacit knowledge.

Maybe the difference could be explained with racecar driving. Driving the track correctly, hitting apexes, downshifting at the right moment; that's deliberate practice.

Knowing your car, understanding what a particular vibration means, feeling when you're approaching your traction limit, knowing that your engine is weak from 4-5k RPM, that's tacit knowledge.

Deliberate practice can foster tacit knowledge, however. Going through the motions opens your mind up to understanding what's going on behind the relatively simple task you're performing.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#72

Post by ClumsyPilot »

PaulHoule wrote: post #29

"Tacit knowledge cannot be externalized" is a cruel thing for me to hear when it comes to social skills. Ty Tashiro writes about how "awkward" people https://www.ted.com/talks/ty_tashiro_why_we_re_socially_awkw... need things to be spelled out and made explicit. With that, we can function as well as anyone. Without that we suffer when we get advice like "be yourself", "read Dale Carnegie", etc. Ty was lucky to have p…

"be yourself"

The most useless advise in history, closely followed by "just stop being depressed"

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#73

Post by BeFlatXIII »

PaulHoule wrote: post #29

"Tacit knowledge cannot be externalized" is a cruel thing for me to hear when it comes to social skills. Ty Tashiro writes about how "awkward" people https://www.ted.com/talks/ty_tashiro_why_we_re_socially_awkw... need things to be spelled out and made explicit. With that, we can function as well as anyone. Without that we suffer when we get advice like "be yourself", "read Dale Carnegie", etc. Ty was lucky to have p…

> Without that we suffer when we get advice like "be yourself", "read Dale Carnegie", etc.

I've grown to appreciate such useless advice. It is useless in answering the question you wanted help with but it is a strong signal that you can prune the person who gave such advice out of your social graph without any negative repercussions.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#74

Post by ClumsyPilot »

shkkmo wrote: post #57
PaulHoule wrote: post #29

"Tacit knowledge cannot be externalized" is a cruel thing for me to hear when it comes to social skills. Ty Tashiro writes about how "awkward" people https://www.ted.com/talks/ty_tashiro_why_we_re_socially_awkw... need things to be spelled out and made explicit. With that, we can function as well as anyone. Without that we suffer when we get advice like "be yourself", "read Dale Carnegie", etc. Ty was lucky to have p…

While I agree that tacit knowledge exists and is widespread, I think the author misuses the word "tacit" to mean unspeakable rather than unspoken. Clearly unspeakable knowledge is a subset of unspoken knowledge, but there is definitely unspoken knowledge that is speakable if we take the effort to make it explicit. "things awkward people need spelled out" is a great example of tacit knowledge that is often speakable (…

I understand this to be "difficult to express in a usefull manner", and many soft skills fall into this category. Plenty of people who are goosld at it put together advise that is actually worthless. Many of them don't even know why they are good at it.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#75

Post by ahelwer »

revskill wrote: post #11

The article leads to a bad example. If i heard from my technical lead such sentence as "feel right" or "feel wrong", i would huh, let me take more research on my own then we'll retry again. Seniority is different from juniority in the ability to make things explicit as much as possible, from the requirements to the implementation specification. I think in software engineering, the more explicit, the better.

Nobody ever says that in professional environments. They’ll retroactively develop a plausible-sounding justification for their gut instinct. Sometimes, if they’re not particularly self-observant they’ll even believe the explanation they created is the reason they believe what they believe.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#76

Post by wainstead »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #27
shadowsun7 wrote: post #13

Readers who are interested in the actionable aspects of this topic should probably read the last instalment in this series: https://commoncog.com/blog/accelerated-expertise/ The basic idea is this: 1. Deliberate practice only works for skills with a history of good pedagogical development. If no such pedagogical development exists, you can’t do DP. Source: read Peak, or any of Ericsson’s original papers. Don’t read t…

As someone who's studied this field extensively and applied it professionally, I'll go ahead and say I wouldn't recommend Accelerated Expertise to anyone. Reading it I got the distinct impression that the authors did not understand a great deal of the research they cited, either when supporting or dismissing it. Some good criticism of the book can be found here[0]. If some acronyms confuse you, the main one to know i…

Are schemas the same idea that Barbara Oakley calls “chunking”?

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#77

Post by Jensson »

ahelwer wrote: post #75
revskill wrote: post #11

The article leads to a bad example. If i heard from my technical lead such sentence as "feel right" or "feel wrong", i would huh, let me take more research on my own then we'll retry again. Seniority is different from juniority in the ability to make things explicit as much as possible, from the requirements to the implementation specification. I think in software engineering, the more explicit, the better.

Nobody ever says that in professional environments. They’ll retroactively develop a plausible-sounding justification for their gut instinct. Sometimes, if they’re not particularly self-observant they’ll even believe the explanation they created is the reason they believe what they believe.

> Sometimes, if they’re not particularly self-observant they’ll even believe the explanation they created is the reason they believe what they believe.

Most people seem to believe their post hoc explanations. Or at least most people wont admit that they are post hoc explanations, it is hard to know the difference since they come up with those post hoc explanations with the intention to manipulate you. That is also the reason it is so hard to change peoples minds in an argument, they wont bring up the real reasons they believe stuff they just bring up the post hoc tings. People seem to think that exposing your real reasoning makes you vulnerable. Like yeah, you get vulnerable to learning new stuff and changing your opinion, that isn't so bad.

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#78

Post by jodrellblank »

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…

> "Programmers have another common example of how a belief in transmissionism often doesn't work out as well as the author hopes"

Here's an example of programmer [interviewer] belief in transmissionism https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29410641

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#79

Post by civilized »

shadowsun7 wrote: post #13

Readers who are interested in the actionable aspects of this topic should probably read the last instalment in this series: https://commoncog.com/blog/accelerated-expertise/ The basic idea is this: 1. Deliberate practice only works for skills with a history of good pedagogical development. If no such pedagogical development exists, you can’t do DP. Source: read Peak, or any of Ericsson’s original papers. Don’t read t…

This suggests a way to go from tacit knowledge to good pedagogical development if you're the tacit knowledge possessor:

1. Be self-aware

2. Extract case library of simulations from yourself

3. Write a book covering the case library

Re: Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

#80

Post by rmah »

I only skimmed a few of the articles but as far as I can tell it boils down to: 1) He says that the ideas of "deliberate practice" is wrong 2) Describes "deliberate practice" as repeatedly following instructions... which as far as I know, isn't what "deliberate practice" is. 3) Then he says what you really need to do is practice smartly (a lot) to gain "tacit knowledge"

... but isn't that is pretty much what "deliberate practice" prescribes? Practice a lot at the edge of competence (or just over it). It just doesn't explicitly say "to gain tacit knowledge".

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