[HN Gopher] Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate pr...
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Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
Author : rbanffy
Score : 177 points
Date : 2021-12-12 18:08 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (commoncog.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (commoncog.com)
| voiper1 wrote:
| I'm sorry, I was really into the whole Deliberate practice thing
| and then I read this and thought "Oh no, did I have it all
| wrong?"
|
| So I read the book he quoted - "Source of Power". And you know
| what? It has a tremendous overlap with Deliberate Practice.
|
| The proponents of Deliberate Practice never claim to "just do it
| over and over" - you have to have background knowledge, a
| teacher/coach, etc... the tacit knowledge. Part of it is given to
| you and part of it is something that you're put into a position
| to experience for yourself.
|
| It seems the "divide" is overstated.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Indeed - after the long build up, the "reveal" was distinctly
| underwhelming. Arguments against a straw man are only
| persuasive if no-one notices that your foil is a straw man.
| js8 wrote:
| Yeah, I always understood deliberate practice as reflecting on
| what you're doing and focusing on parts which are wrong, i.e.
| figuring out where you might be missing the "tacit knowledge".
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Deliberate practice can also be developed in fields unlike
| music and math and chess, such as the pursuit of mastering
| experimentation & discovery which also takes a lifetime to
| never entirely master itself.
|
| The combination of tacit knowledge with deliberate practice is
| especially powerful, even more so when augmented by working
| smart, in addition to working hard rather than instead of
| working hard.
|
| Leveraged furthest when applied to a foundation of natural
| unfair advantage of some kind or another.
|
| Over the longest lifetime you can muster.
| monster_group wrote:
| A long article that is basically saying you can't gain deep
| expertise by merely reading instruction manual and executing the
| instructions over and over. Expertise comes from a lot of
| experience with various situations that develops a sense of
| what's right and what's wrong. That is not surprising to me at
| all.
| VTimofeenko wrote:
| WRT teaching people how to ride vehicles: I have taught a few
| people to ride a motorcycle and have myself been through a few
| courses.
|
| What I found works best is a ~50-50 combination of verbal
| explanation of important know-hows(bike moves where you are
| looking, don't stare at the speedometer/front fork, look through
| the turn) and preparing the student to learn the tacit component
| on their own (counter steering is spooky action at a distance,
| just make it feel right and pay attention to how the bike reacts
| to the movements of the body)
| shadowsun7 wrote:
| Readers who are interested in the actionable aspects of this
| topic should probably read the last instalment in this series:
| https://commoncog.com/blog/accelerated-expertise/
|
| The basic idea is this:
|
| 1. Deliberate practice only works for skills with a history of
| good pedagogical development. If no such pedagogical development
| exists, you can't do DP. Source: read Peak, or any of Ericsson's
| original papers. Don't read third party or popsci accounts of DP.
|
| 2. Once you realise this, then the next question you should ask
| is how can you learn effectively in a skill domain where no good
| pedagogical development exists? Well, it turns out a) the US
| military wanted answers to exactly this question, and b) a good
| subsection of the expertise research community wondered exactly
| the same thing.
|
| 3. The trick is this: use cognitive task analysis to extract
| tacit knowledge from the heads of existing experts. These experts
| built their expertise through trial and error and luck, not DP.
| But you can extract their knowledge as a shortcut. After this,
| you use the extracted tacit knowledge to create a case library of
| simulations. Sort the simulations according to difficulty to use
| as training programs. Don't bother with DP -- the pedagogical
| development necessary for DP to be successful simply takes too
| long.
|
| Broadly speaking, DP and tacit knowledge extraction represent two
| different takes on expertise acquisition. For an overview of
| this, read the Oxford Handbook of Expertise and compare against
| the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise. The former represents the
| tacit knowledge extraction approach; the latter represents the DP
| approach. Both are legitimate approaches, but one is more
| tractable when you find yourself in a domain with underdeveloped
| training methods (like most of the skill domains necessary for
| success in one's career).
| hinkley wrote:
| A mentor can teach you both the pedagogy and their own pet
| peeves/beliefs, so it's not quite as bad as that. You do need
| to consult multiple mentors to get a breadth of so called tacit
| knowledge though.
|
| The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed.
|
| About half of the things I used to obsess about fifteen years
| ago are now common if not dogma. I don't obsessively track the
| things that don't pan out but odds are I was dead wrong about a
| few of them. Still waiting on the rest.
| kqr wrote:
| I can recommend this review too. I read it a little while ago
| and it lead me to read the book itself, and at that point I was
| so hooked I started reading the Oxford Handbook of Expertise.
| I'm doing it a chapter at a time so it's not going fast, but
| it's very rewarding.
|
| I think, by applying some of the core principles (variety of
| scenarios, high difficulty, guidance from expert available,
| high density of lessons, etc) I can learn things quicker, as
| well as help others learn things quicker. Even without CTA
| proper, which is its own skill I haven't taken the time to
| learn yet.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| As someone who's studied this field extensively and applied it
| professionally, I'll go ahead and say I wouldn't recommend
| Accelerated Expertise to anyone. Reading it I got the distinct
| impression that the authors did not understand a great deal of
| the research they cited, either when supporting or dismissing
| it. Some good criticism of the book can be found here[0]. If
| some acronyms confuse you, the main one to know is CLT,
| Cognitive Load Theory. The idea roughly is that humans have a
| relatively fixed amount of stuff they can hold in their head
| and the process by which we become more expert is by making
| "schemas" that allow us to automate processes and group many
| small ideas together. When learning you want to create robust,
| correct schemas quickly.
|
| https://3starlearningexperiences.wordpress.com/tag/accelerat...
| sova wrote:
| Thank you so much for taking the time to explain that. This is
| something I wish I had read before going to uni. Knowing how to
| skillfully "extract knowledge" from an expert with a powerful
| question is a skill in itself. I wish there was more emphasis
| in education in uncovering tacit knowledge instead of simply
| being spoonfed the way it's been done for generations. This is
| helpful and I'm going to take this with me where-ever I go from
| now on.
| bsanr2 wrote:
| This exposes part of the reason behind, and bodes poorly for
| those subject to, the lack of success underrepresented groups
| have in certain fields. If "tacit knowledge" most expeditiously
| gained from interacting with experts is the most important
| aspect of skill acquisition in cutting edge (relatively-
| speaking) areas like applied STEM, then, of course, issues of
| mentorship and gatekeeping rise to primacy.
|
| This has been my personal experience as well, and it makes me
| highly suspicious of anyone whose advice for acquiring
| technical skills is simply to practice constantly - "draw every
| day," "you have to code," "always be networking," etc. They
| either aren't aware of how useless this advice is, or simply
| don't care about your growth or performance. Which, I admit
| ambivalently, is reasonable in this society; if you want
| someone to care, pay them to. This of course opens us back up
| to the issue of underrepresented groups often being unable to
| afford formal "someone caring about your growth."
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I think you can take it up a level from the individual to culture
| to see it even more clearly. I think one of the most glaring
| examples of tacit knowledge is simply physical agglomeration. If
| tacit knowledge wasn't that important, why is it that people pay
| thousands of dollars of rent just to be in the right spot while
| 'everything is available' on the net? Why does half of all VC
| money go into a bunch of zipcodes? Why do so few key
| professionals network like we're in 15th century Venice?
|
| Physicality and proximity are incredibly important, ironically
| maybe more so in the world of 'knowledge work' than when it comes
| to physical activity. An incredible amount of knowledge work
| happens implicitly when people organize spontaneously without
| them even being aware. Alex Pentland wrote an interesting book on
| it called _Social Physics_ where he tried to empirically measure
| how much more effective in-person exchange of information is.
| chezball wrote:
| Hey Barrin92, can you explain (or give context around d) this,
| "Why do so few key professionals network like we're in 15th
| century Venice?"
| andy99 wrote:
| I've thought about something similar before in the context of
| explainable machine learning [0]. The author alludes to it -
| explicit knowledge is like an expert system. And I would argue
| that tacit knowledge is closer to a modern neural network that
| has learned from lots of examples. Asking such a system for an
| "explanation" - just like trying to encode knowledge in an expert
| system, inevitable doesn't give a satisfying result because of
| all the judgment and caveats involved in real live. A better
| approach is to judge competence based on past experience.
|
| As an additional corollary, the tacit knowledge concept is a good
| argument against decision frameworks generally, which destroy
| information by trying to capture experience in a rubric.
|
| [0] Getting more out of experts by focusing on results and not
| process: observations of people and neural networks
| http://marble.onl/managing_ml.html
| [deleted]
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| I clicked this link because I'm currently building an MVP for a
| software product and getting a hang of the essentials has been
| going relatively well thanks to my tacit knowledge around
| computers/software.
|
| However, what I did not expect was for the article to go into
| that Atul Gawande quote on the laparoscopic appendectomy. It just
| so happens that the MVP I'm building is part of a training
| program for laparoscopic skill and the other half of my job is
| making the actual educational content, including the appendectomy
| (I'm a jack-of-all-trades - we're a tiny company). How strangely
| surprising!
|
| I spend a lot of time testing our product with users, who all
| happen to be in surgical training. The professor of surgery with
| whom we collaborate, regularly brings up the kid/bicycle/teaching
| experience. Laparoscopic suturing is currently seen as an art
| form, and it's a such a great example, so he usually just tells
| people to practice. In surgery more than in any other field
| everything is relative, mushy and tricky. You're juggling manual
| instrument skill with medical knowledge, along with people skills
| (in the OR). Our approach has been to focus - with our products
| you only learn the skill but none of the other stuff.
|
| I'm definitely saving this one, and going be exploring all the
| linked sources and materials. Thanks!
| joshlemer wrote:
| Just read this relevant and interesting article on "Scaling Tacit
| Knowledge": https://nintil.com/scaling-tacit-knowledge
| Koshkin wrote:
| Not true if you want to learn to speak Chinese.
| [deleted]
| mrtksn wrote:
| Isn't Tacit knowledge what ML actually learns?
| lordnacho wrote:
| IMO Tacit knowledge is what we used to call judgement.
|
| Judgement is basically knowing a bunch of things but having a
| good idea of which things are more important than others, and
| especially knowing which things are worth spending time on any
| which aren't.
|
| It's like when I see someone talking about financial options and
| they put everything on the board at once: what are puts and
| calls, what's an iron butterfly and other strategies, do they
| need to know the payoff diagram, what about black scholes, what
| are the Greeks, when should I exercise, and so on. They are all
| things that a professional option trader knows, but when you're a
| pro you reduce your cognitive load because you know what actually
| matters and you are not juggling all these concepts at the same
| time.
|
| It's also the source of frustration when interviewing. Say you've
| written CPP for many years, you're probably not prepared to
| answer questions on all corners of the language, even though
| you're an expert in some sense. Someone relatively newer might be
| better at that task, because they're thinking a lot about
| everything, including things they haven't decided are unimportant
| yet.
| hinkley wrote:
| Judgement or specialty.
|
| Oddly, my first specialty was performance optimization. A
| predisposition met a trouble project and I spent half my time
| finding ways to speed up code without making it offensive. Then
| later projects had problems but no mandate, so I got pushback.
| I got really good at crypto-optimization - changes that improve
| performance but look like something else (cleanup, bug fixes,
| feature requests), and found there's a whole quadrant of code
| changes that answer both legibility and speed.
|
| There is very little magic or intuition based about any of
| this. It could be in a book. If anyone knows of a book that
| covers this, I'd love to gift it to people, because as far as
| I'm aware I'm seen as a weird (semiretired) street preacher on
| this subject. But I'm just tweaking existing recipes as it
| were, adding common ingredients in uncommon ways.
| thoughtFrame wrote:
| I guess Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book fits
| the bill, though no amount of literature replaces getting
| your hands dirty in late 80s-early 90s level
| hardware+software. However, while you can do this, you're
| still missing the things you learned by being part of a team
| (of the kind which there are probably in the low hundreds
| right now). How much I'd give to be part of Nintendo or Id
| software or some other era-appropriate team figuring out how
| to make the early big 3D games like Mario 64 or its
| contemporaries on the PSX. Of course you can bust out an SDK
| and try it out but it probably won't be the same.
|
| Those teams built up that kind of tacit knowledge like in
| this video about software texture mapping
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=xn76r0JxqNM
| carfacts wrote:
| This is why often when setting guidelines around particular
| behavior, standards that require some judgement may be better
| than rules that are to be followed blindly without any
| discretion.
|
| Compare the rules around speed limits, don't drive above 70mph
| (no judgement, could be too slow or too quick in a given
| situation) vs the one often observed and followed in reality,
| drive at a reasonable speed, roughly what others are driving at
| (use your judgement about what's safe).
| [deleted]
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Likewise, you can be very good at fixing things without knowing
| what every single tool in your toolbox is even for. In fact,
| sometimes not knowing is an advantage -- you might use
| something in a way that was never intended that ends up solving
| a problem.
| Koshkin wrote:
| I seem to be one of those, and people often say that things
| are afraid of me. And I have no idea why, maybe it's just
| luck...
| 88913527 wrote:
| I once interviewed for a front-end role and had to google some
| CSS property name, as I still haven't committed to memory the
| difference between "align-items" and "justify-content", but I
| got dinged for that in feedback: grateful to have received
| feedback, which often isn't the case. It was one of those
| things I considered unimportant in the grander scheme of FE
| development.
| thoraway66 wrote:
| Where merit is dictated by how much time you spend ogling
| others output and expectations.
|
| Amazing.
|
| I'm sure all those folks have extensive time spent curing
| cancer and not just writing web apps for profit too.
|
| I'm really looking forward to the day 80% of digital
| experience is just generated on demand by well known
| algorithms and filling dependency files just so for a machine
| (source files included as constraints on memory and cpu
| behavior, just like which deps to allow) is obsoleted dumb
| work
| laserlight wrote:
| Yet another article trying to become popular by attacking with a
| false dichotomy to an already popular topic.
| Xc43 wrote:
| A Youtube channel could be made out of this idea: skill
| extraction*. For every field...
|
| Akin a podcast/interview. Where the whole purpose is for the
| interviewee to share his tacit knowledge.
|
| Experts go and are asked questions about specific situations.
| Said questions are made in such a way to tease out the tacit
| knowledge. (using the critical decision method)
|
| ... The more I think about it the more I want it to exist. Anyone
| knows of something similar? Or is interested to create it? or
| just interested to have it exist?
|
| * https://commoncog.com/blog/putting-mental-models-to-practice...
| chrisweekly wrote:
| ^ I really wish this existed too. (Something akin to it does
| exist at least for certain niches, eg detailed web performance
| audits where the perf expert has an explicit emphasis on
| teaching the audience...)
| spydum wrote:
| Interesting to me as I feel good infosec arch & engineers embody
| this. I've been struggling with how to educate large swaths of
| devs and ops people but the amount of knowledge is hard to
| distill, much of it definitely seems tacit as described.
| temp8964 wrote:
| I have no idea what he's trying to compare, deliberate practice
| (a method of learning) is one important way to learn tacit
| knowledge (a kind of knowledge).
|
| How can you compare a method of learning to a kind of knowledge?
| This comparison does not make sense at all.
| swayvil wrote:
| This was written for engineers. It's an explanation of art.
|
| Now the engineer has an explanation of art but still no art.
|
| Which is pretty much where we started.
|
| I don't think explaining is gonna cut it here.
| agumonkey wrote:
| To me pedagogy is mostly being companion to the newcomer and
| coupling with his feelings while reducing the search space. Avoid
| high risk, avoid long term block. Provide a fun spot to swim in
| and gradually increase the width.
| k__ wrote:
| Sound to me like "tacit knowledge" is simply a practical skill?
|
| I mean, obviously you can explain many things to someone who
| can't replicate it "just in time", riding a bike is one of those
| examples.
|
| Explain math, playing guitar, reading, or whatever perfectly to a
| person, they still have to practice to be able to do it.
|
| The problem isn't the explanation, it's the difficulty of the
| skill to learn.
|
| Don't know why we need a new word/phrase for it.
| i_hate_pigeons wrote:
| I thought about learning to play violin when reading this
| article, a teacher might explain you everything but it's
| impossible to understand as it's something so unnatural and
| driven by feel and experience. In fact you start playing with
| not great technique for a few years until you develop the
| ability to start working on the finer details and so on
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| I don't think not being able to teach how to ride a bicycle is
| due to being limited by words and language but more limited by
| muscle memory. Riding bicycle involves controlling multiple
| muscles at the same time, and doing it just without using
| subconscious and automatic part of mind is impossible.
|
| It is the same reason as you can't teach someone to play guitar
| by words without actually making them play and see the mistakes,
| even though you are perfectly capable to teach which area to
| press and how to strum and even make the person memorize the
| sequence.
| skybrian wrote:
| Programmers have another common example of how a belief in
| transmissionism often doesn't work out as well as the author
| hopes: the monad tutorial.
|
| Here are other examples I can think of:
|
| - Learning programming in the first place. Many people struggle.
|
| - Teaching rhythm to an older adult with no musical experience.
|
| - Ear training. No explanation will substitute for practice.
|
| This isn't to say that explanations never work and you shouldn't
| try, but rather their hit rate may be lower than you think, that
| coming up with the right exercises might work better, and that
| beta testing your work is important.
| travisd wrote:
| I'll take this as a shameless opportunity to plug my startup:
| Pathbird (pathbird.com). Happy to chat more about this if
| anyone is curious: travis@pathbird.com.
|
| I developed it with a professor at UMich to teach a data
| science course for non-CS grad students. He had a deep belief
| in tinkering, exploration, and one-step-at-a-time learning. And
| I've seen it work pretty well. Pathbird itself is a platform
| for instructors to build these kinds of computational, "guided"
| lessons that emphasize the experience and process of learning.
|
| Far too many intro CS/programming lessons read like glossaries.
| Obviously the syntax of if statements and for loops is
| important, but starting there on day one encourages students to
| miss the forest for the trees.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| Yes, tacit knowledge exists. Riding bicycles is a great example.
| Technical design is a terrible one. Design docs are so important
| partly because they force you to put some thought into making
| your implicit assumptions explicit, in a way where you and other
| folks can question and learn from them.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| "Tacit knowledge cannot be externalized" is a cruel thing for me
| to hear when it comes to social skills.
|
| Ty Tashiro writes about how "awkward" people
|
| https://www.ted.com/talks/ty_tashiro_why_we_re_socially_awkw...
|
| need things to be spelled out and made explicit. With that, we
| can function as well as anyone. Without that we suffer when we
| get advice like "be yourself", "read Dale Carnegie", etc.
|
| Ty was lucky to have parents that understood that he needed this
| and made sure he got it. I didn't. Often it would take me a while
| to get what came naturally to the other kids and adults never
| seemed to recognize that, which made me feel really lonely.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| > Ty Tashiro writes about how "awkward" people need things to
| be spelled out and made explicit. With that, we can function as
| well as anyone. Without that we suffer when we get advice like
| "be yourself", "read Dale Carnegie", etc.
|
| As an awkward person myself this certainly rings a bell. But
| for me it's more about getting permission. Growing up in an
| abusive household, everything that I did was like walking in an
| open minefield. You're running and doing things intuitively and
| everything seems normal until you're hit with an explosion of
| verbal and sometimes physical abuse.
| dorianmariefr wrote:
| I would call it practise and say: "Practise makes perfect" or "It
| is in forging that one becomes a blacksmith."
| revskill wrote:
| The article leads to a bad example. If i heard from my technical
| lead such sentence as "feel right" or "feel wrong", i would huh,
| let me take more research on my own then we'll retry again.
|
| Seniority is different from juniority in the ability to make
| things explicit as much as possible, from the requirements to the
| implementation specification.
|
| I think in software engineering, the more explicit, the better.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| Somebody serious about deliberate practice will spend a lot of
| time seeking "tacit knowledge." The author is possibly confused
| and thinks the term refers to repetition or reading or something.
| The original paper studies pianists and violinists (possibly
| chess players too?) - people who aren't spending their exhausting
| practice in a library or chatting on discord except when it's the
| most important thing to do
|
| The strategic choice of how and what to study is also part of a
| good deliberate practice regime (interrupted from time to time in
| programming by needing to cram leetcode for no good reason,
| because why would a company want to hire somebody who was an
| expert at making modular easy-to-change systems when there are
| these heaps everywhere that need to be written from scratch in 15
| minutes?)
| caminante wrote:
| I see your point, and I'm not equipped to articulate the
| distinction. It is fuzzy.
|
| _> Somebody serious about deliberate practice will spend a lot
| of time seeking "tacit knowledge."_
|
| Putting words in the author's mouth, he's saying that tacit
| knowledge is more important in areas where (i) execution isn't
| clearly prescribed; to (ii) perform at a high level.
|
| The author gets into how in certain fields, there's a "missing
| manual" and requires figuring it out yourself or undergoing an
| apprenticeship, prioritizing attainment of tacit knowledge.
|
| Leetcoding is a "missing manual" expertise path and doesn't
| converge, IMHO, like chess, violin, athletics, etc.
| [deleted]
| andi999 wrote:
| "he calls it "the ability to create great art or assess a startup
| (...) "
|
| Milan, 1496: "Hey Leonardo, I really like your last supper, great
| work. Oh, and hey by the way, your assement of the new company
| was awesome"
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