[HN Gopher] Two stories about tacit knowledge
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Two stories about tacit knowledge
Author : Wildgoose
Score : 65 points
Date : 2021-11-01 17:28 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.strangeloopcanon.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.strangeloopcanon.com)
| kldavis4 wrote:
| 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.
| didibus wrote:
| 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.
| pitspotter2 wrote:
| I've read _The Tacit Dimension_ but I 'd be interested to know
| what are your favourite Polanyi links or writings?
| kragen wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| _Atlas Shrugged_ actually being applicable to your situation is
| interesting.
| kragen wrote:
| Not, I hasten to add, in numerous other ways. I only
| mentioned the similarities.
| roenxi wrote:
| It is really noticeable in talk on solar prices that the
| learning curve for nuclear tech is _negative_. Ie, nuclear
| plants get more expensive as technology improves.
|
| The odds of that being a natural effect are minuscule.
| Something is strangling innovation and it is probably some
| piece of regulation. It is a bit grim but I suppose we're
| looking to places like India and China for the next big waves
| of innovation in nuclear energy.
| kragen wrote:
| Other cases where this seems to have happened include
| pacemakers; hearing aids; supersonic jets; ocean-liner trips;
| small planes (e.g., Cessnas); mercury; chemistry sets; most
| vacuum tubes; hovercraft; bubble memory (and more generally
| SSDs that don't die from read disturb); Gyrojet guns; brass
| vacuum fittings; ebonite; and old-growth lumber. If you limit
| yourself to just US production, you can apparently add things
| like microcontrollers; many kinds of machine tools;
| ventilators; Nixie tubes; and N95 respirators.
|
| I don't think it's grim at all that India and China are
| having big waves of nuclear innovation, but I don't think
| they stand much of a chance against solar except for niche
| applications until there's a total manufacturing revolution.
| koeng wrote:
| 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.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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)
| rst wrote:
| 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.)
| chairmanwow1 wrote:
| I find this writing style really hard to follow.
| gumby wrote:
| What about it? Seemed pretty straightforward to me.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I agree. He seems to go off on tangents all over the place
| without reaching clear conclusions about the original topic.
| lisper wrote:
| "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.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
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