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Tacit knowledge is the lowest rung of understanding. It's the understanding that cats and dogs form, unable to talk but able to listen and consider. The main di

Tacit knowledge is the lowest rung of understanding. It's the understanding that cats and dogs form, unable to talk but able to listen and consider. The main difficulty is that, because one cannot express tacit knowledge, one cannot reform or improve it. Part of why operationalization is so important in the hard sciences is because it gives us access to otherwise-inacessible things, including tacit knowledge. The only knowledge that is tacit for the typical person is the knowledge of how to move muscles. For example, to whistle, the tacit portion is the pursing of the lips, but the rest of it is music theory which can be communicated and taught using language.

sanxiyn 6y ago
Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do. -- Donald Knuth
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  By this definition, chess used to be an art, but is now the domain of science.
9wzYQbTYsAIc 6y ago
“Tacit knowledge can be defined as skills, ideas and experiences that people have but are not codified and may not necessarily be easily expressed”. By that operational definition, “muscle memory only” seems to be a rather overly constrained attribution of knowledge to the typical person.
hprotagonist 6y ago
I have multiple ABET-accredited degrees in engineering. I learned more about how metal works in 2 months in a machine shop than i did in 4 years of undergrad and 5 years of grad school. "Knowing that" is nice, but it is not the same as "Knowing how", and one cannot beget the other.
nick-garfield 6y ago
This is interesting.. I've never heard of the term "tacit knowledge" before, but it makes a lot of sense to me. It particularly reminds me of my experience being on-call at my last company. Our systems were pretty unstable, and the most stressful part of the job was getting paged at 4am when everything was falling apart, customers couldn't use the app, multiple analysts would be sending messages asking "what's going on?", and as the on-call engineer, I happened to be the last line of defense (the system wasn't managed by a devops team). In that moment, there's a lot of stuff that has to be done quickly: - orient yourself and figurate out what's going on (even in a sleep-deprived state) - prioritize mitigation over root-cause analysis - communicate early and often with the stakeholders present This isn't stuff one can pickup by reading a "runbook". It took years of working with the systems, absorbing knowledge from my senior co-workers, and learning from past mistakes to get to a point where these priorities became in-grained in the way I approach outages. So from my own experience, I would disagree with the definition that tacit knowledge is purely muscle memory or that it can't be improved. One's mindset can certainly evolve and I would consider that as "gaining" tacit knowledge. I would even say something like music theory can be tacit knowledge. If you talk with musicians that do a lot of improvisation, they can certainly talk to you about music theory, but they're rarely "thinking" about music theory when they play. Just intellectually telling someone how notes/chords relate to one another doesn't transmit that "feeling" one needs to create great music.
mattkrause 6y ago
> only knowledge that is tacit for the typical person is the knowledge of how to move muscles. Thats's not really true. If you are a native English speaker, it might surprise you to learn that English adjectives have a default order. We normally say "the big red ball" but "the red big ball" sounds decidedly odd unless there's an explicit contrast ("No, not the blue one. I want the red big ball"). This is apparently taught in ESL classes, but neither I nor any of my native-speaker colleagues remember learning it in school. You have an "intuitive" model of physics in your head that allows you to rapidly determine if piles of objects are stable without grinding through balance-of-forces calculations. It's not exact, and deviates from reality in interesting ways, but it's there. https://www.pnas.org/content/110/45/18327.short https://www.pnas.org/content/110/45/18327.short You have all kinds of implicit priors that help you make sense of sensory input. You have some idea of the speed and smoothness with which things move, how an object's apparent size changes as you move towards or away from it and how it might look under different lighting conditions. People share some, but not all of these priors, and they're hard to elicit, hence the endless discussion about The Dress that was either black/blue or white/gold.
- Kednicma 6y ago
  This knowledge that you are discussing is quite interesting, but not tacit: You had no problem explaining it to me in words alone. Moreover, it can all be operationalized; physics in particular is well-operationalized and usually evaluated numerically. I gather that part of the tacit-knowledge movement is to talk about knowledge that cannot be put into words. The example of how to move a muscle is extremely instructive: There is no sequence of words that will allow a person to examine and select the correct bundles of nerves for moving a muscle, and instead a person simply must learn to do it somehow. Even then, if somebody does something like isolating grouped muscle movements, they might be able to explain in words how to fine-tune control over some muscles.
  - mattkrause 6y ago
    The adjective case might be debatable, since it's usually learned implicitly but could be taught. Intuitive physics may be a stronger example: the point is that it's not "real" physics where you numerically evaluate the statics and centers of mass. It's a set of heuristics that let you rapidly (and not always successfully) determine if a pile of books is stable, using some internal model of the world. Ditto for sensory input. You have all these built-in principles (or priors or biases) that have evolved over millions of years to help you make sense of ambiguous or impoverished sensory input. These are also mostly implicit. We can certainly name these effects talk /about/ them, and even probe them with careful experiments....but we can do that to bike-riding too.

sanxiyn 6y ago

Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do. -- Donald Knuth

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
By this definition, chess used to be an art, but is now the domain of science.

9wzYQbTYsAIc 6y ago

“Tacit knowledge can be defined as skills, ideas and experiences that people have but are not codified and may not necessarily be easily expressed”. By that operational definition, “muscle memory only” seems to be a rather overly constrained attribution of knowledge to the typical person.

hprotagonist 6y ago

I have multiple ABET-accredited degrees in engineering. I learned more about how metal works in 2 months in a machine shop than i did in 4 years of undergrad and 5 years of grad school. "Knowing that" is nice, but it is not the same as "Knowing how", and one cannot beget the other.

nick-garfield 6y ago

This is interesting.. I've never heard of the term "tacit knowledge" before, but it makes a lot of sense to me. It particularly reminds me of my experience being on-call at my last company. Our systems were pretty unstable, and the most stressful part of the job was getting paged at 4am when everything was falling apart, customers couldn't use the app, multiple analysts would be sending messages asking "what's going on?", and as the on-call engineer, I happened to be the last line of defense (the system wasn't managed by a devops team). In that moment, there's a lot of stuff that has to be done quickly: - orient yourself and figurate out what's going on (even in a sleep-deprived state) - prioritize mitigation over root-cause analysis - communicate early and often with the stakeholders present This isn't stuff one can pickup by reading a "runbook". It took years of working with the systems, absorbing knowledge from my senior co-workers, and learning from past mistakes to get to a point where these priorities became in-grained in the way I approach outages. So from my own experience, I would disagree with the definition that tacit knowledge is purely muscle memory or that it can't be improved. One's mindset can certainly evolve and I would consider that as "gaining" tacit knowledge. I would even say something like music theory can be tacit knowledge. If you talk with musicians that do a lot of improvisation, they can certainly talk to you about music theory, but they're rarely "thinking" about music theory when they play. Just intellectually telling someone how notes/chords relate to one another doesn't transmit that "feeling" one needs to create great music.

mattkrause 6y ago

> only knowledge that is tacit for the typical person is the knowledge of how to move muscles. Thats's not really true. If you are a native English speaker, it might surprise you to learn that English adjectives have a default order. We normally say "the big red ball" but "the red big ball" sounds decidedly odd unless there's an explicit contrast ("No, not the blue one. I want the red big ball"). This is apparently taught in ESL classes, but neither I nor any of my native-speaker colleagues remember learning it in school. You have an "intuitive" model of physics in your head that allows you to rapidly determine if piles of objects are stable without grinding through balance-of-forces calculations. It's not exact, and deviates from reality in interesting ways, but it's there. https://www.pnas.org/content/110/45/18327.short https://www.pnas.org/content/110/45/18327.short You have all kinds of implicit priors that help you make sense of sensory input. You have some idea of the speed and smoothness with which things move, how an object's apparent size changes as you move towards or away from it and how it might look under different lighting conditions. People share some, but not all of these priors, and they're hard to elicit, hence the endless discussion about The Dress that was either black/blue or white/gold.

Kednicma 6y ago
This knowledge that you are discussing is quite interesting, but not tacit: You had no problem explaining it to me in words alone. Moreover, it can all be operationalized; physics in particular is well-operationalized and usually evaluated numerically. I gather that part of the tacit-knowledge movement is to talk about knowledge that cannot be put into words. The example of how to move a muscle is extremely instructive: There is no sequence of words that will allow a person to examine and select the correct bundles of nerves for moving a muscle, and instead a person simply must learn to do it somehow. Even then, if somebody does something like isolating grouped muscle movements, they might be able to explain in words how to fine-tune control over some muscles.
- mattkrause 6y ago
  The adjective case might be debatable, since it's usually learned implicitly but could be taught. Intuitive physics may be a stronger example: the point is that it's not "real" physics where you numerically evaluate the statics and centers of mass. It's a set of heuristics that let you rapidly (and not always successfully) determine if a pile of books is stable, using some internal model of the world. Ditto for sensory input. You have all these built-in principles (or priors or biases) that have evolved over millions of years to help you make sense of ambiguous or impoverished sensory input. These are also mostly implicit. We can certainly name these effects talk /about/ them, and even probe them with careful experiments....but we can do that to bike-riding too.