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Two stories about tacit knowledge

• Nasrudith 5y ago
  The difference between the two tasks is "any solution" vs "a specific fixed piece of a solution". It is kind of fundamental to the physics. The second is a highly specific bit for a solution. I wouldn't be surprised if the foam was made far harder to reproduce by obstructionism of the actual warheads in question, too because of the pathological secrecy in governments for matters of far lesser stakes.
  • mikewarot 5y ago
    My understanding is that there were some impurities in the original sources that made the stuff work. Purer ingredients likely didn't react the same way. The same behavior was noted when recreating the "spark of life" experiments from the 1950s in non-borosilicate containers. It turned out that the containers themselves played a role. A similar situation occurs with sonoluminescence, where the trace ingredients of air have to be dissolved in the water to get it to work. (argon and co2)
• chairmanwow1 5y ago
  I find this writing style really hard to follow.
  • gumby 5y ago
    What about it? Seemed pretty straightforward to me.
    • tonyarkles 5y ago
      This is possibly me projecting my own biases into the author's writing, but the specific style of "some paragraphs made up of only a single long sentence, some paragraphs made up of a few small sentences" reminds me very much of the ADHD folks I know and their writing style.
  • elliekelly 5y ago
    I think the two “stories” were edited down a bit too much and are missing background information that isn’t technically relevant to the story but makes it difficult to follow because we have no context. Once I read the linked stories in points 1. and 2. at the top the rest made a lot more sense. I don’t think it’s fair to assume readers will click on links and read the linked material in full though. Most readers don’t even finish reading the article they’re currently reading!
  • kldavis4 5y ago
    I agree. He seems to go off on tangents all over the place without reaching clear conclusions about the original topic.
• koeng 5y ago
  Biohacking/biotech is an interesting example, since you can scale down to individual biohackers or up to farms (in which those farms very clearly have manufacturing/process that is hard to replicate). However, biology also has the ability to adapt to its circumstances and replicate itself. Though that ability is usually annoying, it just might enable manufacturing/scale up that is easy to copy, something that is fundamentally different from all other kinds of high-tech manufacturing.
• lisper 5y ago
  "Lawrence Radiation Laboratory hired three fresh PhDs with little nuclear physics background and asked them to go build a nuke, and they did." No, they didn't. They designed a nuke. Not the same as actually building one. Designing a nuke is not at all difficult, and indeed the linked article describes how they decided to design a plutonium-based implosion device rather than a uranium-fueled gun-type device specifically in order to make the project more challenging than it otherwise would have been.
• kragen 5y ago
  Freeman Dyson's autobiography tells how in 01956 he joined General Atomics, a nuclear-reactor startup, and his small team designed and built a new kind of nuclear reactor in two years, the TRIGA; Teller was one of the team members. The prototype operated for 39 years, 33 of them were manufactured, some are still in operation, and none of them has ever had a nuclear accident. A few years after that, when Project Orion was canceled, he stopped working on nuclear reactors. He said it just wasn't fun anymore. And I imagine he's right; since about that time, working on nuclear reactors enmeshes you in the national security state, where promotion depends on political favor as much as technical competence, and rank is measured by headcount and by project classification level. There's a certain kind of person that's fun for, but it's usually not the kind of person who spends his Christmas vacation working problems from a calculus textbook. It's not the kind of person who discovers a lot of new things. Atomic Energy merit badges went out of style. About 20 years later, at the end of the 01970s, the costs of building new nuclear reactors started to skyrocket, which is another way of saying that our productivity at building nuclear reactors started to collapse. I just read Atlas Shrugged, which tells a story of a technological society strangled by regulation, unpredictable kleptocracy, and a brain drain ("draining the brains", the book said, 6 years before the Royal Society coined the term "brain drain"). This aspect of the book resonated with me, although many others did not, perhaps in part because I live in Argentina, whose technological development is strangled by regulation, unpredictable kleptocracy, and a brain drain, though the brain drain is to the US and Europe rather than to a secret conspiracy. We had a famous fusion energy program, Project Huemul, which turned out to be a scam. I wonder if the same thing happened to nuclear engineering? Maybe the potential Tellers and Freeman Dysons born in the 01960s and later never got involved in nuclear physics, except for David Hahn, who ended up with paranoid schizophrenia after his mother committed suicide, and died at 39 of an overdose of opiates. Maybe nuclear engineering had a brain drain to electrical engineering, computer science, and related fields.
  • rackjack 5y ago
    Atlas Shrugged actually being applicable to your situation is interesting.
    • 5y ago
• rst 5y ago
  The two nuke stories aren't quite equivalent. The nuclear-naive postdocs designed a Nagasaki-style fission weapon. The "Fogbank" material that we forgot how to make is a component of fusion bombs, which are widely reported to be generally a whole lot trickier (you've got a small A-bomb which is supposed to light a much larger fusion bomb -- and not just blow the pieces of it all over creation.)
  • aidenn0 5y ago
    Also, wikipedia at least indicates that the problems of Fogbank included an unknown "contaminant" that was required for proper functioning. This is a common issue replicating older alloys as well; the exact impurities in the contemporary ores are not always known.
• kldavis4 5y ago
  I am a big fan of Michael Polanyi's writings on tacit knowledge and I was disappointed to find that the author completely misuses the term. Explicit knowledge can be codified and easily expressed. Tacit knowledge is not codified and not easily expressed. Given the details of story one (they went to a library and researched a variety of topics), that seems to clearly be referring to explicit knowledge. The second story is lacking crucial details about why it took a decade and $70m to replicate the foam, but we can assume that there was some reproducible process behind the original foam that was lost and required a great deal of effort to reproduce. Again, that would be explicit (not tacit) knowledge. The only way that it would not be is if there were individuals with a technique that was not codified and easily expressed that the original foam depended upon.
  • pitspotter2 5y ago
    I've read The Tacit Dimension but I'd be interested to know what are your favourite Polanyi links or writings?
    • kldavis4 5y ago
      "Personal Knowledge" and "Science, Faith and Society" are two that I've enjoyed
      • pitspotter2 5y ago
        Thank you!
  • didibus 5y ago
    Well said. Another way to think about tacit knowledge: Mit chell Jo Jonathan Mitchell Why do you know those refer to the same individual or at least highly suspect they do? Now you can begin to explain the rules and logic underpinning that understanding, but for every explanation you give, a counterexample can be shown where you'll go: Ah yes, but in this case... And you'll add more and more rules, yet you'll find that never do these rules and your own judgement are a 1:1 perfect match if you were to test them against yourself, you'll keep finding cases where you concluded differently. Thus what is this knowledge that you truly leverage to make the decision? It seems that you cannot explain it fully, maybe your explanation isn't even anywhere the true knowledge you leverage, but only an approximation you made up when asked how? That knowledge is thus tacit, because you cannot express it fully to others, you won't be able to document it, or to produce a computer algorithm for it, or to communicate it to anyone else. It seems to become your expert intuition. It turns out that Machine Learning has made some breakthrough in that realm, in that the computer can similarly learn some tacit understanding, though it may not be the same as yours, it gets closer than what your rules expressed, and it too cannot be explained back, why the computer comes to its decision is also tacit.
• wombatmobile 5y ago
  > It's worthwhile noticing that this propensity to leap ahead, self experiment and generally operate outside established strictures has always been a key feature of science . . . and art, business, sport, entertainment, politics…. Flocks of seagulls and pigeons do it too. A small percentage feeds on the outside of the flock. Many go hungry. Some die. The few that strike it rich through serendipity prosper. Some form whole new flocks with their generations of offspring. And so it goes.
• blueyes 5y ago
  Based on the blog post, and without knowledge of the underlying foam that they were trying to replicate, I would say that a crucial distinction here is that the first team was asked to create something new, which meant that many different inventions achieved by different paths were enough to get the job done. The second team was asked to produce a much more precisely specified thing, which may only have been possible to make with one process. So the two teams had different tasks, and the difference is not implicit vs process. It's many ways to many things, vs few ways to one thing. The latter problem sounds much harder to me.
• deleted 5y ago
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• yellow_lead 5y ago
  >> If you really want to make important discoveries, you have to know how to work the system,” says Richard Muller, an American physicist and emeritus professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Muller revealed that he had secretly redirected funding from approved projects to fund riskier rejected ones in a letter in Science magazine in 1980. > It's worthwhile noticing that this propensity to leap ahead, self experiment and generally operate outside established strictures has always been a key feature of science! Maybe we shouldn't glorify what sounds a lot like academic / grant fraud.
  • avmich 5y ago
    A better phrase probably would be "we shouldn't label academic / grant fraud some effective time-honored methods"?
  • lambdatronics 5y ago
    I know a retired chemist who said something similar. In order to get funded consistently, you have to be successful every time in getting the results you claimed you would on your previous grant application. The only way to be sure you can do that, is to sneak some work on the next grant into the current one. Granting agencies think they are being more efficient, but there's no way to avoid risk in research - they've just pushed it off on the researchers. Researchers need to have some career stability, so they found a way to hand the risk back to the agency, by adding the cost of trying the riskier experiments into the cost of the boring, sure-thing projects. Everybody gets what they want!
• tylerrobinson 5y ago
  Whether the stories are good or true is debatable, but I thought this was a nice bit of insight in any case: > Turns out it's really bloody hard to replicate an organisation. You can call this irreplicable part culture, because that's what it is. Which is a way of saying sure you can hire some folks with some data but that's not gonna help you build a self driving car. That's why the loss of a person hurts so much, because they take knowledge with them that's not only not written down anywhere but can't be written down. And yet, just because it hurts the poachee doesn't mean it will help the poacher. The exciting stuff is all culture, which is as numinous[1] and emergent and intangible as it is real. Of course we know that losing a strong colleague or employee is a terrible experience, because they know more than they could ever share through documentation. The novel bit for me is thinking about that employee’s next employer. There’s no guarantee they can make the same outcomes happen again. [1] “having a strong religious or spiritual quality; indicating or suggesting the presence of a divinity.” Context had me thinking this word meant “myriad” but I’m glad I looked it up.
• deleted 5y ago
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