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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 unsp

by shkkmo 5y ago

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 (but we don't bother because the tacit assumption is that the tacit knowledge is shared by all.) By conflating the unspoken with the unspeakable, the author fails to realize that a great deal of our tacit knowledge can be made explicit or at least partially explicit (and the value that can be captured by finding new ways to explicate the formerly unspeakable.)

kubanczyk 5y ago
No, I don't think it's a misuse of the word "tacit". It's a spectrum which has boundary line on one side only, but is open-ended on the other side. The boundary between the unspoken and the codified knowledge is clear-cut. The unspoken and unspeakable are just one spectrum, and the author's model does not have a boundary between them nor does he seem interested in finding such boundary. In other words the unspoken knowledge can be learned from two sides, not one. It's understandable that the author focuses on their side, but I don't think he does so with the intention to discourage "the effort to make [the knownledge] explicit".
- shkkmo 5y ago
  The author doesn't acknowledge any sort of spectrum and makes a general statement that trying to make tacit knowledge explicit is so hard as to be pointless to try. > 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.
  - kubanczyk 5y ago
    Maybe it's just my reading, but what follows this excerpt puts it in context. I.e. we shouldn't bother with converting the entirety of unspoken knowledge in some field: > Why do we know this? > [What many researchers found out] was that it is extremely difficult to encode all the possible branches and gotchas and nuances from a human expert into an expert system.
    - shkkmo 5y ago
      But the author doesn't say "don't only try to turn implicit knowledge into explicit knowledge", he says "you shouldn't even bother". To me that sounds like a direct analog to "nobody will ever understanding everything about the source code without reading it, so we shouldn't bother with documentation". Obviously we can't / shouldn't document everything, but creating documentation as you learn an undocumented legacy code base can be of great value (as can asking other developers to explicate their implicit knowledge). Over and over the Author ignores the unexplicated but explicable and assumes that implicit knowledge is inexplicable.
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
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.

by shkkmo 5y ago

kubanczyk 5y ago

No, I don't think it's a misuse of the word "tacit". It's a spectrum which has boundary line on one side only, but is open-ended on the other side. The boundary between the unspoken and the codified knowledge is clear-cut. The unspoken and unspeakable are just one spectrum, and the author's model does not have a boundary between them nor does he seem interested in finding such boundary. In other words the unspoken knowledge can be learned from two sides, not one. It's understandable that the author focuses on their side, but I don't think he does so with the intention to discourage "the effort to make [the knownledge] explicit".

shkkmo 5y ago
The author doesn't acknowledge any sort of spectrum and makes a general statement that trying to make tacit knowledge explicit is so hard as to be pointless to try. > 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.
- kubanczyk 5y ago
  Maybe it's just my reading, but what follows this excerpt puts it in context. I.e. we shouldn't bother with converting the entirety of unspoken knowledge in some field: > Why do we know this? > [What many researchers found out] was that it is extremely difficult to encode all the possible branches and gotchas and nuances from a human expert into an expert system.
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    But the author doesn't say "don't only try to turn implicit knowledge into explicit knowledge", he says "you shouldn't even bother". To me that sounds like a direct analog to "nobody will ever understanding everything about the source code without reading it, so we shouldn't bother with documentation". Obviously we can't / shouldn't document everything, but creating documentation as you learn an undocumented legacy code base can be of great value (as can asking other developers to explicate their implicit knowledge). Over and over the Author ignores the unexplicated but explicable and assumes that implicit knowledge is inexplicable.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

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.