Why Tacit Knowledge is More Important Than Deliberate Practice
Metadata
Highlights & Notes
- Tacit knowledge is knowledge that cannot be captured through words alone.
- This explanation bit deserves some attention. In pedagogy, this is known as ‘transmissionism’, and it is regarded amongst serious educators with the same sort of derision you and I might have about flat-earth theories today
- In other words, tacit knowledge instruction happens through things like imitation, emulation, and apprenticeship. You learn by copying what the master does, blindly, until you internalise the principles behind the actions.
- To which I say: tacit knowledge exists all around us. Researcher Samo Burja explains tacit knowledge by way of example: he calls it “the ability to create great art or assess a startup (…) examples include woodworking, metalworking, housekeeping, cooking, dancing, amateur public speaking, assembly line oversight, rapid problem solving, and heart surgery.”
- his is actually generalisable. People with expertise in any sufficiently complicated domain will always explain their expertise with things like: “Well, do X. Except when you see Y, then do Z, because A. And if you see B, then do P. But if you see A and C but not B, then do Q, because reason D. And then there are weird situations where you do Z but then see thing C emerge, then you should switch to Q.” And if you push further, eventually they might say “Ahh, it just feels right. Do it long enough and it’ll feel right to you too
- My take on this is that it is so difficult that we shouldn’t even bother; assuming that you are reading this because you want to get good in your career, you should give up on turning tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge and just go after tacit knowledge itself.
- You can sort of squint and see this result being repeated across many organisations, in many domains, during the same period. (Wikipedia calls this problem the ‘knowledge acquisition problem’, which is a nice way of putting it; it was what ultimately caused expert systems to decline in popularity). As people rapidly discovered, it wasn’t so easy to get the ‘rules’ out of experts’s heads in the first place.
- Notes: Yea, but now it actually seems like it is easier with AI. People use other people's actions to train AI.
- Klein — now considered one of the pioneers of the Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) branch of psychology — likes to say that over-reliance on procedures makes human operators fragile
- Gary Klein himself has made a name developing techniques for extracting pieces of tacit knowledge and making it explicit. (The technique is called ‘The Critical Decision Method’, but it is difficult to pull off because it demands expertise in CDM itself).
- We should act as if tacit knowledge were a fact, because it is more useful to think about ways to gain that tacit knowledge directly, instead of hoping for some breakthrough to make tacit knowledge explicit.
- Notes: Note sure if I agree with this yet.
- The process of learning tacit knowledge looks something like the following: you find a master, you work under them for a few years, and you learn the ropes through emulation, feedback, and osmosis — not through deliberate practice.
- Notes: Not sure I agree it's an either/or the way he presents it here.
- And I think much of the world pays too much attention to deliberate practice and to cognitive bias research, and not enough to tacit knowledge acquisition.
- Notes: I agree that tacit knowledge is undervalued.
