[HN Gopher] Why the most valuable things you know are things you...
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Why the most valuable things you know are things you cannot say
Author : nr378
Score : 104 points
Date : 2026-04-04 16:49 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (deadneurons.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (deadneurons.substack.com)
| robocat wrote:
| I would call the difference intuitive knowledge versus rational
| knowledge.
|
| I've never seen the word calibration used this way:
| different modes of learning. The first is instruction: the
| transfer of explicit models, rules, and relationships from one
| person to another through language. The second is calibration:
| the development of internal models through repeated exposure to
| feedback in a specific environment. Judgement is
| learnable through calibration. It is not transmissible through
| instruction.
|
| Unfortunately the word "intuition" has been debased.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Intuition is just our brains' amazing pattern recognition
| ability at work.
| Slow_Hand wrote:
| You raise an interesting question. How do we keep the meanings
| of words from diverging so dramatically and so rapidly?
|
| A little bit is natural and expected, but this kind of change
| in meaning feels like a consequence of a culture that in the
| last decade has accelerated the practice of re-framing specific
| words and concepts as something that's "actually a positive" or
| "actually quite negative if you think about it".
|
| Part of this is a result of our (in the US) culture wars and
| hijacking of popular terms, but it's also a symptom of social
| media culture that's always seeking a hot take and creators who
| are looking to distinguish themselves with (what seems to me)
| clever re-framing.
|
| The result is a culture that is increasingly fragmented and in
| which a word can have dramatically different meaning and
| insinuations depending on it's use in certain social groups or
| intellectual cliques.
|
| It increasingly feels like I need to download a massive amount
| of linguistic context before I step into the world of a niche
| online community because their tight-knit dialogues and shared
| experiences have now re-framed a word or concept that was
| largely understood to mean something else.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| > How do we keep the meanings of words from diverging so
| dramatically and so rapidly?
|
| We don't engage. It's the only shot we have.
|
| There was a useful article at 404 Media recently about our
| failure to prevent those on the extreme edges of culture from
| normalizing their language and behavior: We Have Learned
| Nothing About Amplifying Morons[0]. See the article, but
| essentially by engaging we cede ground. Sorta like how both-
| sides journalism gives space to anti-science nuts and lets
| them spread falsehoods.
|
| 0. https://www.404media.co/we-have-learned-nothing-about-
| amplif...
| darkerside wrote:
| It's always been like this, just on a smaller scale. Every
| time you join a group, some people can read the room,
| learning and sensing the cultural implications, while others
| step in all the landmines and don't even hear the explosions.
| How do you do this? Not sure how to explain it, mostly
| calibration through experience!
| justonceokay wrote:
| Not being self-centered is helpful.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| I believe the author was arguing that "calibration" is also
| rational but it cannot be transmitted. You cannot learn it from
| reading or following a framework. Books and frameworks are too
| lossy. The author cited the example of doctors in their
| residency as an example of this second mode of learning. They
| are learning from hands on experience what other doctors had
| also learned before. With residency there are others who
| oversee the residents.
| robocat wrote:
| You're arguing against something I wasn't trying to imply.
|
| Choosing a good abstract dichotomy is hard (mine is also
| faulty, as you have noted).
|
| They chose "instruction" versus "calibration" which I feel is
| a terrible splitting plane (muddying whatever they are trying
| to articulate).
|
| I have been fascinated listening to a smart nursing friend of
| mine explain some of the intuitions they learnt through
| observation (not explicitly taught). I believe they had an
| outlier skill for noticing patterns. They might have been
| able to teach the patterns they saw, but they probably
| couldn't teach the skill of discovering patterns
| [?]intelligence.
| skeletoncrew2 wrote:
| Or maybe inductive vs deductive reasoning
| paulpauper wrote:
| Language changes though . He's directionally correct about
| calibration. People have some intuition about how something
| works, and then calibrate this tgrough feedback.
| Mikhail_Edoshin wrote:
| Saying certain thing hurts them like a scientist's knife that
| opens up an animal for a study but also kills it. Thus certain
| knowledge about life cannot be expressed in an analytical way: it
| loses the very subject it tries to catch. But if you use the
| knife merely to point to the animal... that is, if you use words
| not as an explanation but as means to guide the listener's
| attention, then there is a chance to convey that understanding. A
| parable works this way; or a work of real art.
| danielrmay wrote:
| This was a powerful read and a useful lens to apply to the
| legibility of the technology era we're in.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Thinking about this in the context of machine learning.. We can
| discover the dimensions and relationships between them through
| training over a set of examples.
|
| What we are generally getting though is a network with extremely
| high dimensionality trained on many domains at once, at least as
| far as the commonly used ones like LLMs and VLMs.
|
| We do have mixture of experts which I guess helps to compress
| things.
|
| Going back to the idea that this stuff just can't be represented
| by language, I wonder if someday there could be a type of more
| concise representation than transmitting for example a LoRA with
| millions of bytes.
|
| Maybe if we keep looking at distillation of different models over
| and over we might come up with some highly compressed
| standardized hierarchical representation that optimizes subdomain
| or expert selection and combination to such a degree that the
| information for a type of domain expertise can be transmitted
| maybe not orally between humans but at least in very compact and
| standard way between models.
|
| I guess if you just take something like a 1B 1 bit model and
| build a LoRA for a very narrow domain and then compress that.
| That's something like the idea. Or maybe a quantized NOLA.
|
| But I wonder if someday there will be a representation that is
| more easily interpretable like language but is able to capture
| high dimensional complex functions in a standard and concise way.
| pyyxbkshed wrote:
| I loved this! thanks for sharing :)
| thereitgoes456 wrote:
| I think of how trading firms cannot say their strategies, as they
| would lose their effectiveness.
|
| Or how many people know that many CEOs and leaders are idiots,
| but cannot say it, as they would face retribution.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| ai;dr: experience is denser than words can articulate. Also (I
| don't think it was mentioned) tacit knowledge is reflexive: it's
| recalled in the scenario it was acquired, which is usually when
| it's needed, whereas one must think through to recall book
| knowledge.
|
| I agree with the article's main point, but it's flagrantly AI and
| (as usual with AI) way too verbose.
| sidrag22 wrote:
| I think it read well, perhaps too intimidating for some to get
| into after the first couple paragraphs, but i think it's pretty
| much tailored at the audience here. I'm resistant to calling it
| obviously AI as well, the ideas are well thought out and it
| flows just fine, its certainly not a "here my article title and
| 2 sentence overview of whats its about, now write it", level of
| assistance, which i think your comment is kinda making it seem
| as though it is.
| zug_zug wrote:
| I think despite the presentation this has some good ideas in it:
|
| 1. Formally calling out a concept for judgment-based skills that
| cannot be easily taught. I think everybody understands this, but
| having a word for this would be useful.
|
| 2. Opening up the conversation on the topic of which types of
| skills can/should be codified and how.
|
| That said, everything else in the article is suss.
| "Dimensionality" is largely a distraction to try to sound smart,
| most of the claims in the article are unwarranted (e.g. processes
| & checklists can be great, even for disciplines with true experts
| like airline pilots).
|
| For example saying that skill learning cannot be accelerated is
| just patently false in many domains -- take something like
| learning chess. If you have a coach and other tools you'll learn
| a LOT faster. But certainly I've worked places that _wished_ they
| could automate away reliance on experts because it gives
| organization power to a few non-management individuals.
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| The Tao that can be spoken, is not the real Tao :-)
| Animats wrote:
| _" The second, more fundamental reason is that the relevant
| features are not given in advance. A large part of what the
| expert learns through experience is which features of the
| environment matter."_
|
| Yes.
|
| _" This is the deepest reason why experience cannot be
| compressed."_
|
| No. Finding relevant features and compressing their valuation is
| what ML systems do. Especially in vision systems. Early attempts
| at machine vision had human-chosen features and detectors for
| them. There used to be papers with suggested features -
| horizontal lines, vertical lines, diagonal lines, patterns of
| dots, colors, and such. That's where things were in the 1990s.
| Those have now been replaced by learning-generated low level
| feature detectors, which work better.
|
| This does need a lot of training content. The training process is
| inefficient. It definitely compresses, though.
| sidrag22 wrote:
| This has me considering law school vs something like, officiating
| a sport. A foul in basketball, or a balk in baseball are very
| much just judgement calls by the respective officials, kinda you
| know it when you see it. You can write down what a foul is, or
| what a balk is, and if you play by the letters of the rules in
| place, you will likely have a miserable game and it will be
| entirely the official's fault, you can also have a game where
| clear "fouls" are being committed but not called unless they go
| beyond what has been set as the baseline acceptable level of
| play(not in the spirit of defense or whatever), and it could be
| considered a wonderful game by all parties involved (let them
| play in action).
|
| Kinda has me wondering about the implications of the BAR being
| the end all be all of a law school. Contrast it with a Doctor's
| residency and i think law school is very much crafting an overly
| binary right/wrong profession, and perhaps they should have
| something beyond it more akin to something like officiating a
| sports game, where they see potential implications of being too
| stringent applying their rule system when there is certainly room
| for being charitable. It is a complex issue though, because the
| charitable interpretation of a law gives way for bad actors to
| abuse that interpretation.
|
| Now bridge this all with all the weird 1st level and 2nd level
| stuff surrounding medicine that is placed there by people outside
| of the field of medicine and imposed on an expert of the medical
| field. They have to apply their expertise to the patient, decide
| a course of action, and then describe that action in those
| 1st/2nd level terms to a non expert who for some reason is the
| deciding authority, despite downgrading the expert's actual
| thoughts by design. I know im all over the place, but it was a
| pretty good article that made me think about a lot of different
| applications of the ideas.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| > "Street smarts" refers to models that are too high-dimensional
| for linguistic transmission and were therefore acquired through
| calibrated experience. The street-smart person cannot explain why
| they know what they know, which makes them look inarticulate to
| the book-smart person, which leads the book-smart person to
| conclude that the street-smart person's knowledge is inferior.
| This conclusion is precisely backwards in domains where judgement
| matters. The inability to articulate the model is not evidence of
| a crude model. It is evidence of a model too sophisticated for
| the transmission channel.
|
| I disagree to a degree. Yes, what the author says is accurate
| about people dismissing street-smarts as a lower level of
| intelligence than it deserves. But a sufficiently skilled
| communicator can absolutely articulate many of the factors being
| evaluated when they judge a situation and how their descision-
| making process works.
|
| > They evaluate intelligence through the lens of articulacy
|
| There was an earlier instance of the author using a word such as
| unability (or similar) and it should have been inability and I
| let it go, but this misuse of language is making my head hurt.
| However, I confess that I thought the word should have been
| articularity and it turns out that's not a real word either. But
| I at least pay attention to spellcheck. I don't understand how
| someone could take the time to write a long and thoughtful essay
| about intelligence and not use spellcheck to proof it.
| wging wrote:
| What is wrong in that quoted sentence? Do you mean "articulacy"
| should instead be "articulateness"? "Articulacy" is also a
| word, and correct in this context.
| rdevilla wrote:
| Articulation. The lens of articulation. Or otherwise,
| "eloquence;" the lens of eloquence.
|
| LLMs ain't gonna do sheeeeeeeit if this is still where we are
| at...
| salawat wrote:
| I have terrible news for you. Linguistics is descriptive,
| not prescriptive. We will torment you with word game
| playing until such time as you loosen up.
| rdevilla wrote:
| The torment is evidently yours [0]. However, I am
| ecstatic you reveal your own inner turbulence, which I
| have deliberately engineered.
|
| By the way, how are those food prices working out for ya
| bud [1]? I understand that you are struggling, but please
| try not to get, quote, " _violent_ ".
|
| Pause. Empathize. Apologize. Then post.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47639747
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47636685
| robocat wrote:
| > But a sufficiently skilled communicator can absolutely
| articulate many of the factors being evaluated when they judge
| a situation and how their descision-making process works
|
| That sounds right but I suspect it is wrong. Watching smart
| intuition has been a personal interest of mine for years. Few
| people avoid the manifold traps.
|
| 1: people hallucinate their reasoning or are self-deceptive (or
| even intentionally deceptive). Watching AI has helped hone
| watching people.
|
| 2: you need to be sufficiently close in skills and language for
| someone to be able to communicate the nuances. E.g.
| sportspeople.
|
| 3: Judging whether an intuitive statement is true is hardhard.
| We need to identify a correct intuition (and ignore incorrect
| intuitions) before judging whether some explanation is valid.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Fully agree and this something I only fully realised quite late
| in life.
|
| One of the implications is that at any given point in time, the
| vast majority of human knowledge is living in people's brains and
| cannot be stored. The seemingly ineluctable and almost mechanical
| progression of technology is happening on a thin margin between
| generational losses.
| motoboi wrote:
| I believe what is missed here is that the brain assimilate things
| outside of it (not in the physical sense of course). Use a hammer
| for some time and the brain start to dedicate some networks to
| simulate the hammer internally and to integrate the hammer as
| parte of your body. The brain starts using the hammer in the same
| way it uses your hand. It becomes part of what the higher level
| processes use to read from and to manifest into the world.
|
| Nothing new here, this is called tool embodiment. A little time
| after assimilation, you stop consciously thinking about the tool.
| You are the hammer, the hammer is you.
|
| So what is being missed here is that the brain operates on, well,
| mental constructs. Ideas and ways of thinking. But those are not
| the world or the brain, those are tools.
|
| The higher level processes into your mind use ways of thinking
| the same way it uses the body. Its unconscious (because it has
| been doing this for enough time) and automatic. The brain just
| gets guided by the tools. It wants to hammer that nail.
|
| So, what does it have to do with crossing the street and not
| being able to transmit this knowledge?
|
| You can't transmit the incorporation. You can describe how to do
| things, how to think about things, but you can't reconnect other
| people's neurons to establish a way of thinking or a tool as part
| of the brain image of the self. Yet.
|
| You can't teach a baby how to embody his spine. You can't teach
| someone how to become his thoughts. But you can't certainly guide
| then on the use and this usage will build the neural networks.
| Once established, they'll get it.
| com2kid wrote:
| When I was 17 I was hired by a startup to write a book. The end
| product was a complete disaster (don't hire a 17 year old to
| write a book, also don't enter into contracts with 17 year old
| high school students w/o informing parents.)
|
| The book was on 3d modeling in Rhino 3d. I was _really_ good at
| Rhino3d at that time, to the extent that using it felt like a
| natural extension of my hands. IMHO every other 3d modeling
| program has a trash UI compared to the absolutely amazing UI
| that Rhinoceros 3d has.
|
| I had to learn how to translate my absolute love of Rhino3D
| onto a page and explain it to other people. It was _hard_. It
| made my brain work in ways it was not used to, but it was an
| incredibly valuable experience.
|
| The only remaining copy of the book sits behind me on a bit
| rotted CDR.
|
| I have had 3 types of math teachers in life. American teachers,
| who generally teach rules from a book according to a
| curriculum. Russian teachers, who have a passion and a love for
| the field and who teach how to intuitive the answer to math
| problems first before going all in on the formulas. And East
| Asian math teachers who show off the beauty of the equations
| themselves.
|
| I had one math teacher who couldn't speak English. He didn't
| need to, he had an incredible ability to communicate math
| through pure equations. It was lovely, one of the best math
| classes I've ever had. Math was truly used as a universal
| language.
|
| I had another teacher (Russian) who got so excited solving
| equations and explaining DiffEq that he'd break his chalk in
| half and he'd go diving under desks to pick up the pieces.
|
| But it is artists who are some of the best at transmitting
| intuitive knowledge. They have centuries of best practices of
| how to train students to rewrite their brains to literally see
| the world differently. (And yes a lot of it does involve
| drawing boring still lives of fruit bowls! But, hey, it works)
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >IMHO every other 3d modeling program has a trash UI compared
| to the absolutely amazing UI that Rhinoceros 3d has.
|
| It's not just you. There is something about it that is
| qualitatively different.
| Fwirt wrote:
| This jives with something that's occupied my brain a couple times
| in the last year, the separation of art and science.
|
| Science is empirical knowledge and processes which can be
| transferred, art is gut feeling and subconscious knowledge
| applied automatically, which can't be transferred.
|
| Roughly I think this corresponds to how our minds perform
| cognitive offloading of repeated tasks. New tasks that require
| instruction following occupy our attention, but the more we do
| them, the more our minds wire the behavior into our "muscle
| memory". Practitioners of the arts (or even the art of science,
| one might say) have a built a neural network that offloads tasks
| so that higher cognitive functions can focus on applying those
| tasks in expert ways.
|
| It's sort of like when we start out our brains have to bitbang
| all tasks (muscle movement, speech, etc.) but over time our
| brains develop their own TCP offloading, or UART peripherals. And
| you can't just download a TCP offloading engine, it has to be
| built into the silicon. Hence why "expert knowledge" isn't
| transmissible.
|
| Which is why spaced repetition is an effective learning method.
| You're hacking your brain to wire facts into the hardware.
| sva_ wrote:
| You might enjoy a 70s classic, _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
| Maintenance_
| znnajdla wrote:
| Absolutely agree. And this is why America cannot simply bring
| outsourced industries like manufacturing back. Expertise is built
| through hard-won experience and there is no easy way to transfer
| or replicate it. And this is why the best forms of instruction
| are akin to apprenticeship. You can't teach expertise through a
| book, but you can guide a person to develop their own expertise
| and speed up the process.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| He's got it backwards.
|
| "Language is a serial, low-bandwidth channel. It transmits one
| proposition at a time, sequentially. Each proposition can relate
| a small number of variables: "if X and Y, then Z." Complex
| conditionals can extend this to perhaps five or six variables
| before the sentence becomes unparseable: "if X and Y but not Z,
| unless W and V, then Q." ... "This is not a claim about human
| cognitive limitations. It is an information-theoretic claim about
| the channel capacity of natural language relative to the
| complexity of the models being transmitted."
|
| No.
|
| This definitely is about human cognitive limitations. Consider
| *why* that 6-variable rule is unparseable: Human working memory
| is typically about 7 items. His unparseable example has by a
| generous accounting 10 entities--6 variables and 4 relationships.
| (And by a strict accounting you need to count the "then", for 11
| entities.) Very, very few humans could learn that. Knowledge must
| be chopped up into chunks small enough to fit into our working
| memory to be understood and incorporated into our models.
|
| Once one chunk has been incorporated into our model we can then
| add another chunk to it, repeating until we have built up a
| complex model. And it's not just read, store, read another--each
| bit must be worked with to actually be modeled. (But this process
| does not need to be strictly linear--to take his stupid
| pedestrian, they can separately learn speed, distance, stopping
| distance etc and tie them together. But if his pedestrian cares
| if the driver is inattentive his model is wrong--why are you
| doing something that involves a moving driver being aware of you
| in the fist place??)
| znnajdla wrote:
| And this is also why all institutions rot over time. When the
| original experts and founders are gone, only the codified
| superficial knowledge remains. The result is bureaucracy coasting
| on the resources and reputation built by the original founders.
| Works until it encounters real problems that are not solved by
| superficial rules.
| resonious wrote:
| Right.. Countless times I see people struggle with something
| then complain about the fact that nobody wrote anything down
| ahead to hand hold them through the problem. As if the old
| experts would've known to write that. And often times they
| _did_ write stuff, but it either wasn 't read or it ran into
| this issue of instruction being incapable of transmitting
| everything you actually need.
| em-bee wrote:
| isn't that also related to active vs passive knowledge?
|
| active knowledge i can produce on command. passive knowledge only
| comes up when it is triggered from the outside.
|
| a lot of things we know are only accessible when they are
| triggered. i could not describe the path through a forest, but i
| know it when i walk it. same for the process to solve a
| particular problem. i could not describe the whole way. only if i
| follow the steps can i remember the next steps. and if there are
| multiple possible steps at some point, only for the choices that
| are actually triggered will i remember what comes after.
|
| you can follow me and learn the steps by observing me, but you
| will only learn the steps that we actually do. and i couldn't
| possibly give you a list of all other potential steps.
|
| in the latest video by tom scott, he watches people creating
| bells. the guy observing the molten metal knows when it has the
| right temperature by just looking at it. he learned that from
| years of practice, and his future replacement will learn it by
| observing him.
| alrmrphc-atmtn wrote:
| Reminds me of when I was learning to drive. Used to get very
| creative with my mistakes. Also reminiscent of speaking a foreign
| language; you may know all the relevant grammar rules, but fail
| to apply them in real-time.
|
| That said, procedural knowledge remains suspicious because it
| could hinge on a cheap mental shortcut. A very experienced
| pedestrian may unconsciously make terrible decisions based on
| overfitted train data or causally irrelevant variables.
| Expressing the model "formally" can help expose those terrible
| decisions (e.g. I feel good about 1980s Fiat Pandas so I cross
| more confidently when I see them...). Problem is that
| introspection does not always work well.
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