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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

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.
exmadscientist 5y ago
> why it took a decade and $70m to replicate the foam In fact, if I'm thinking of the right foam here (codename FOGBANK, believed to be a lithium deuteride aerogel), the problem was even worse. There was a contaminant in one of the original raw materials (acetonitrile, if memory serves) that turned out to be essential to the whole process working. But nobody in the original program knew this contaminant was even present, much less its importance, so of course they didn't document it. Not explicit knowledge, not tacit knowledge, just an unfinished R&D job.

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.

exmadscientist 5y ago

> why it took a decade and $70m to replicate the foam In fact, if I'm thinking of the right foam here (codename FOGBANK, believed to be a lithium deuteride aerogel), the problem was even worse. There was a contaminant in one of the original raw materials (acetonitrile, if memory serves) that turned out to be essential to the whole process working. But nobody in the original program knew this contaminant was even present, much less its importance, so of course they didn't document it. Not explicit knowledge, not tacit knowledge, just an unfinished R&D job.