Per my upcoming “Explain Yourself!” article, I am skeptical about the concept of “tacit knowledge”. For one thing, it puts up a sign that says, “Hey, don’t bother trying to explain this in words”, which leads to, “This is a black box; don’t look inside”, which leads to “It’s okay not to know how this works”.
Second, tacit knowledge often turns out to be verbalizable, questioning whether the term “tacit” is really calling out a valid cluster in thingspace[1]. For example, take the canonical example of learning to ride a bike. It’s true that you can learn it hands-on, using the inscrutable, patient training of the master. But you can also learn it by being told the primary counterintuitive insights (“as long as you keep moving, you won’t tip over”), and then a little practice on your own.
In that case, the verbal knowledge has substituted one-for-one with (much of) the tacit learning you would have gained on your own from practice. So how much of it was “really” tacit all along? How much of it are you just calling tacit because the master never reflected on what they were doing?
So for me, the appeal to “difficulty of verbalizing it” certainly has some truth to it, but I find it mainly functions to excuse oneself from critical introspection, and from opening important black boxes. I advise people to avoid using this concept if remotely possible; it tends to say more about you than the inherent inscrutability of the knowledge.
[1] To someone who sucks at programming, the ability to revise a recipe to produce more servings is “tacit knowledge”.
As someone who has made much of the concept of tacit knowledge in the past, I’ll have to say you have a point.
(I’m now considering the addendum: “made much of it because it served my interests to present some knowledge I claimed to have as being of that sort”. I’m not necessarily endorsing that hypothesis, just acknowledging its plausibility.)
It still feels as if, once we toss that phrase out the window, we need something to take its place: words are not universally an effective method of instruction, practice clearly plays a vital part in learning (why?), and the hypothesis that a learner reconstructs knowledge rather than being the recipient of a “transfer” in a literal sense strikes me as facially plausible given the sum of my learning experiences.
Perhaps an adult can comprehend “as long as you keep moving, you won’t tip over”, but I have a strong intuition it wouldn’t go over very well with kids, depending on age and dispositions. My parenting experience (anecdotal evidence as it may be) backs that up. You need to see what a kid is doing right or wrong to encourage the former and correct the latter, you need a hefty dose of patience as the kid’s anxieties get in the way sometimes for a long while.
Learning to ride a bike is a canonical example because it is taught early on, there is hedonic value in learning it early on, but it is typically taught at an age when a kid rarely (or so my hunch says) has the learning-ability to understand advice such as “as long as you keep moving, you won’t tip over”. There is such a thing as learning to learn (and just how verbalizable is that skill?).
It’s all too easy to overgeneralize from a sparse set of examples and obtain a simple, elegant, convincing, but false theory of learning. I hope your article doesn’t fall into that trap. :)
It still feels as if, once we toss that phrase out the window, we need something to take its place: words are not universally an effective method of instruction, practice clearly plays a vital part in learning (why?), and the hypothesis that a learner reconstructs knowledge rather than being the recipient of a “transfer” in a literal sense strikes me as facially plausible given the sum of my learning experiences.
I don’t disagree, but I don’t see how it contradicts my position either. The evidence you give against words being effective is that, basically, they don’t fully constrain what the other person is being told to do, so they can always mess up in unpredictable ways. That’s true, but it just shows how you need to understand the listener’s epistemic state to know which insights they lack that would allow them to bridge the gap
People do get this wrong, and end up giving “let them eat cake” advice—advice that, if it were useful, the problem would have been solved. But at the same time, a good understanding of where they are can lead to remarkably informative advice. (I’ve noticed Roko and HughRistik are excellent at this when it comes to human sociality, while some are stuck in “let them eat cake” land.)
Perhaps an adult can comprehend “as long as you keep moving, you won’t tip over”, but I have a strong intuition it wouldn’t go over very well with kids, depending on age and dispositions.
Well, in my case, once it clicked for me, my thought was, “Oh, so if you just keep moving, you won’t tip over, it’s only when you stop or slow down that you tip—why didn’t he just tell me that?”
It’s all too easy to overgeneralize from a sparse set of examples and obtain a simple, elegant, convincing, but false theory of learning. I hope your article doesn’t fall into that trap. :)
Well, if it were a sparse set I wouldn’t be so confident. I have a frustratingly long history of people telling me something can’t be explained or is really hard to explain, followed by me explaining it to newbies with relative ease. And of cases where someone appeals to their inarticulable personal experience for justification, when really it was an articulable hidden assumption they could have found with a little effort.
Anyone is welcome to PM me for an advance draft of the article if they’re interested in giving feedback.
And of cases where someone appeals to their inarticulable personal experience for justification, when really it was an articulable hidden assumption they could have found with a little effort.
leaves me wondering if you underestimate how much effort it takes to notice and express how to do things which are usually non-verbal.
I don’t understand. The part you quoted isn’t about expressing how to do non-verbal things; it’s about people who say, “when you get to be my age, you’ll agree, [and no I can’t explain what experiences you have as you approach my age that will cause you to agree because that would require a claim regarding how to interpret the experience which you have a chance of refuting]”
What does that have to do with the effort need to express how to do non-verbal things?
Excuse me—I wasn’t reading carefully enough to notice that you’d shifted from claims that it was too hard to explain non-verbal skills to claims that it was too hard to explain the lessons of experience.
Okay. Well, then, assuming your remark was a reply to a different part of my comment, my answer is that yes, it may be hard, but for most people, I’m not convinced they even tried.
Am I interpreting you correctly that you are not denying that some skills can only be learned by practicing the skill (rather than by reading about or observing the skill) but are saying that verbal or written instruction is just as effective as an aid to practice as demonstration if done well?
I’m still a bit skeptical about this claim. When I was learning to snowboard for example it was clear that some instructors were better able to verbalize certain key information (keep your weight on your front foot, turn your body first and let the board follow rather than trying to turn the board, etc.) but I don’t think the verbal instructions would have been nearly as effective if they were not accompanied by physical demonstrations.
It’s possible that a sufficiently good instructor could communicate just as effectively through purely verbal instruction but I’m not sure such an instructor exists. The fact that this is a rare skill also seems relevant even if it is possible—there are many more instructors who can be effective if they are allowed to combine verbal instruction with physical demonstrations.
Good points, but keep in mind snowboarding instructors aren’t optimizing the same thing that a rationalist (in their capacity as a rationalist) is optimizing. If you just want to make money, quickly, and churn out good snowboarders, then use the best tools available to you—you have no reason to convert the instruction into words where you don’t have to.
But if you’re approaching this as a rationalist, who wants to open the black box and understand why certain things work, then it is a tremendously useful exercise to try to verbalize it, and identify the most important things people need to know—knowledge that can allow them to leapfrog a few steps in learning, even and especially if they can’t reach the Holy Grail of full transmission of the understanding.
And I’d say (despite the first paragraph in this comment) that it’s a good thing to do anyway. I suspect that people’s inability to explain things stems in large part from a lack of trying—specifically, a lack of trying to understand what mental processes are going on in side of them that allows a skill to work like it does. They fail to imagine what it is like not to have this skill and assume certain things are easy or obvious which really aren’t.
To more directly answer your question, yes, I think verbal instruction, if it understands the epistemic state of the student, can replace a lot of what normally takes practice to learn. There are things you can say that get someone in just the right mindset to bypass a huge number of errors that are normally learned hands-on.
My main point, though, is that people severely overestimate the extent of their knowledge which can’t be articulated, because the incentives for such a self-assessment are very high. Most people would do well to avoid appeals to tacit knowledge, an instead introspect on their knowledge so as to gain a deeper understanding of how it works, labeling knowledge as “tacit” only as a last resort.
It’s possible that a sufficiently good instructor could communicate just as effectively through purely verbal instruction but I’m not sure such an instructor exists.
I would suspect this has more to do with the skill of the student in translating verbal descriptions into motions. You can perfectly understand a series of motions to be executed under various conditions, without having the motor skill to assess the conditions and execute them perfectly in real-time.
For example, take that canonical example of learning to ride a bike. It’s true that you can learn it hands-on, using the inscrutable, patient training of the master. But you can also learn it by being told the primary counterintuitive insights (“as long as you keep moving, you won’t tip over”), and then a little practice on your own.
In that case, the verbal knowledge has substituted one-for-one with tacit learning you would have gained on your own from practice.
I’m looking forward to your article, and I think that you’re right to emphasize the vast gap between “unverbalizable” and “I don’t know at the moment how to verbalize it”.
But, to really pass the “bicycle test”, wouldn’t you have to be able to explain verbally how to ride a bike so well that someone could get right on the bike and ride perfectly on the first try? That is, wouldn’t you have to be able to eliminate even that “little practice on your own”?
Or is there some part of being able to ride a bike that you don’t count as knowledge, and which forms the ineliminable core that needs to be practiced?
But, to really pass the “bicycle test”, wouldn’t you have to be able to explain verbally how to ride a bike so well that someone could get right on the bike and ride perfectly on the first try? That is, wouldn’t you have to be able to eliminate even that “little practice on your own”?
Depends on what the “bicycle test” is testing. For me, the fact that something is staked out as a canonical, grounding example of tacit knowledge, and then is shown to be largely verbalizable, blows a big hole in the concept. It shows that “hey, this part I can’t explain” was groundless in several subcases.
I do agree that some knowledge probably deserves to be called tacit. But given the apparent massive relativity of tacitness, and the above example, it seems that these cases are so rare, you’re best off working from the assumption that nothing is tacit, than from looking for cases that you can plausibly claim are tacit.
It’s like any other case where one possibility should be considered last. If you do a random test on General Relativity and find it to be way off, you should first work from the assumption that you, rather than GR, made a mistake somewhere. Likewise, if your instinct is to label some of your knowledge as tacit, your first assumption should be, “there’s some way I can open up this black box; what am I missing?”. Yes, these beliefs could be wrong—but you need a lot more evidence before rejecting them should even be on the radar.
(And to be clear, I don’t claim my thesis about tacitness to deserve the same odds as GR!)
something is staked out as a canonical, grounding example of tacit knowledge, and then is shown to be largely verbalizable
Just to be clear, I don’t think it has been shown in the case of bike-riding that the knowledge can be transferred verbally. You can give someone verbal instruction that will help them improve faster at bike-riding, that isn’t at issue. It’s much less clear that telling someone the actual control algorithm you use when you ride a bike is sufficient to transform them from novice into proficient bike rider.
You can program a robot to ride a bike and in that sense the knowledge is verbalizable, but looking at the source code would not necessarily be an effective method of learning how to do it.
I think being able to verbally transmit the knowledge that solves most of the problem for them is proof that at least some of the skill can be transferred verbally. And of course it doesn’t help to tell someone the detailed control algorithm to ride a bike, and I wouldn’t recommend doing so as an explanation—that’s not the kind of information they need!
One day, I think it will be possible to teach someone to ride a bike before they ever use one, or even carry out similar actions, though you might need a neural interface rather than spoken words to do so. The first step in such a quest is to abandon appeals to tacit knowledge, even if there are cases where it really does exist.
Per my upcoming “Explain Yourself!” article, I am skeptical about the concept of “tacit knowledge”. For one thing, it puts up a sign that says, “Hey, don’t bother trying to explain this in words”, which leads to, “This is a black box; don’t look inside”, which leads to “It’s okay not to know how this works”.
Second, tacit knowledge often turns out to be verbalizable, questioning whether the term “tacit” is really calling out a valid cluster in thingspace[1]. For example, take the canonical example of learning to ride a bike. It’s true that you can learn it hands-on, using the inscrutable, patient training of the master. But you can also learn it by being told the primary counterintuitive insights (“as long as you keep moving, you won’t tip over”), and then a little practice on your own.
In that case, the verbal knowledge has substituted one-for-one with (much of) the tacit learning you would have gained on your own from practice. So how much of it was “really” tacit all along? How much of it are you just calling tacit because the master never reflected on what they were doing?
So for me, the appeal to “difficulty of verbalizing it” certainly has some truth to it, but I find it mainly functions to excuse oneself from critical introspection, and from opening important black boxes. I advise people to avoid using this concept if remotely possible; it tends to say more about you than the inherent inscrutability of the knowledge.
[1] To someone who sucks at programming, the ability to revise a recipe to produce more servings is “tacit knowledge”.
As someone who has made much of the concept of tacit knowledge in the past, I’ll have to say you have a point.
(I’m now considering the addendum: “made much of it because it served my interests to present some knowledge I claimed to have as being of that sort”. I’m not necessarily endorsing that hypothesis, just acknowledging its plausibility.)
It still feels as if, once we toss that phrase out the window, we need something to take its place: words are not universally an effective method of instruction, practice clearly plays a vital part in learning (why?), and the hypothesis that a learner reconstructs knowledge rather than being the recipient of a “transfer” in a literal sense strikes me as facially plausible given the sum of my learning experiences.
Perhaps an adult can comprehend “as long as you keep moving, you won’t tip over”, but I have a strong intuition it wouldn’t go over very well with kids, depending on age and dispositions. My parenting experience (anecdotal evidence as it may be) backs that up. You need to see what a kid is doing right or wrong to encourage the former and correct the latter, you need a hefty dose of patience as the kid’s anxieties get in the way sometimes for a long while.
Learning to ride a bike is a canonical example because it is taught early on, there is hedonic value in learning it early on, but it is typically taught at an age when a kid rarely (or so my hunch says) has the learning-ability to understand advice such as “as long as you keep moving, you won’t tip over”. There is such a thing as learning to learn (and just how verbalizable is that skill?).
It’s all too easy to overgeneralize from a sparse set of examples and obtain a simple, elegant, convincing, but false theory of learning. I hope your article doesn’t fall into that trap. :)
I don’t disagree, but I don’t see how it contradicts my position either. The evidence you give against words being effective is that, basically, they don’t fully constrain what the other person is being told to do, so they can always mess up in unpredictable ways. That’s true, but it just shows how you need to understand the listener’s epistemic state to know which insights they lack that would allow them to bridge the gap
People do get this wrong, and end up giving “let them eat cake” advice—advice that, if it were useful, the problem would have been solved. But at the same time, a good understanding of where they are can lead to remarkably informative advice. (I’ve noticed Roko and HughRistik are excellent at this when it comes to human sociality, while some are stuck in “let them eat cake” land.)
Well, in my case, once it clicked for me, my thought was, “Oh, so if you just keep moving, you won’t tip over, it’s only when you stop or slow down that you tip—why didn’t he just tell me that?”
Well, if it were a sparse set I wouldn’t be so confident. I have a frustratingly long history of people telling me something can’t be explained or is really hard to explain, followed by me explaining it to newbies with relative ease. And of cases where someone appeals to their inarticulable personal experience for justification, when really it was an articulable hidden assumption they could have found with a little effort.
Anyone is welcome to PM me for an advance draft of the article if they’re interested in giving feedback.
I’m in general agreement, but
leaves me wondering if you underestimate how much effort it takes to notice and express how to do things which are usually non-verbal.
I don’t understand. The part you quoted isn’t about expressing how to do non-verbal things; it’s about people who say, “when you get to be my age, you’ll agree, [and no I can’t explain what experiences you have as you approach my age that will cause you to agree because that would require a claim regarding how to interpret the experience which you have a chance of refuting]”
What does that have to do with the effort need to express how to do non-verbal things?
Excuse me—I wasn’t reading carefully enough to notice that you’d shifted from claims that it was too hard to explain non-verbal skills to claims that it was too hard to explain the lessons of experience.
Okay. Well, then, assuming your remark was a reply to a different part of my comment, my answer is that yes, it may be hard, but for most people, I’m not convinced they even tried.
xkcd
Am I interpreting you correctly that you are not denying that some skills can only be learned by practicing the skill (rather than by reading about or observing the skill) but are saying that verbal or written instruction is just as effective as an aid to practice as demonstration if done well?
I’m still a bit skeptical about this claim. When I was learning to snowboard for example it was clear that some instructors were better able to verbalize certain key information (keep your weight on your front foot, turn your body first and let the board follow rather than trying to turn the board, etc.) but I don’t think the verbal instructions would have been nearly as effective if they were not accompanied by physical demonstrations.
It’s possible that a sufficiently good instructor could communicate just as effectively through purely verbal instruction but I’m not sure such an instructor exists. The fact that this is a rare skill also seems relevant even if it is possible—there are many more instructors who can be effective if they are allowed to combine verbal instruction with physical demonstrations.
Good points, but keep in mind snowboarding instructors aren’t optimizing the same thing that a rationalist (in their capacity as a rationalist) is optimizing. If you just want to make money, quickly, and churn out good snowboarders, then use the best tools available to you—you have no reason to convert the instruction into words where you don’t have to.
But if you’re approaching this as a rationalist, who wants to open the black box and understand why certain things work, then it is a tremendously useful exercise to try to verbalize it, and identify the most important things people need to know—knowledge that can allow them to leapfrog a few steps in learning, even and especially if they can’t reach the Holy Grail of full transmission of the understanding.
And I’d say (despite the first paragraph in this comment) that it’s a good thing to do anyway. I suspect that people’s inability to explain things stems in large part from a lack of trying—specifically, a lack of trying to understand what mental processes are going on in side of them that allows a skill to work like it does. They fail to imagine what it is like not to have this skill and assume certain things are easy or obvious which really aren’t.
To more directly answer your question, yes, I think verbal instruction, if it understands the epistemic state of the student, can replace a lot of what normally takes practice to learn. There are things you can say that get someone in just the right mindset to bypass a huge number of errors that are normally learned hands-on.
My main point, though, is that people severely overestimate the extent of their knowledge which can’t be articulated, because the incentives for such a self-assessment are very high. Most people would do well to avoid appeals to tacit knowledge, an instead introspect on their knowledge so as to gain a deeper understanding of how it works, labeling knowledge as “tacit” only as a last resort.
I would suspect this has more to do with the skill of the student in translating verbal descriptions into motions. You can perfectly understand a series of motions to be executed under various conditions, without having the motor skill to assess the conditions and execute them perfectly in real-time.
I’m looking forward to your article, and I think that you’re right to emphasize the vast gap between “unverbalizable” and “I don’t know at the moment how to verbalize it”.
But, to really pass the “bicycle test”, wouldn’t you have to be able to explain verbally how to ride a bike so well that someone could get right on the bike and ride perfectly on the first try? That is, wouldn’t you have to be able to eliminate even that “little practice on your own”?
Or is there some part of being able to ride a bike that you don’t count as knowledge, and which forms the ineliminable core that needs to be practiced?
Depends on what the “bicycle test” is testing. For me, the fact that something is staked out as a canonical, grounding example of tacit knowledge, and then is shown to be largely verbalizable, blows a big hole in the concept. It shows that “hey, this part I can’t explain” was groundless in several subcases.
I do agree that some knowledge probably deserves to be called tacit. But given the apparent massive relativity of tacitness, and the above example, it seems that these cases are so rare, you’re best off working from the assumption that nothing is tacit, than from looking for cases that you can plausibly claim are tacit.
It’s like any other case where one possibility should be considered last. If you do a random test on General Relativity and find it to be way off, you should first work from the assumption that you, rather than GR, made a mistake somewhere. Likewise, if your instinct is to label some of your knowledge as tacit, your first assumption should be, “there’s some way I can open up this black box; what am I missing?”. Yes, these beliefs could be wrong—but you need a lot more evidence before rejecting them should even be on the radar.
(And to be clear, I don’t claim my thesis about tacitness to deserve the same odds as GR!)
Just to be clear, I don’t think it has been shown in the case of bike-riding that the knowledge can be transferred verbally. You can give someone verbal instruction that will help them improve faster at bike-riding, that isn’t at issue. It’s much less clear that telling someone the actual control algorithm you use when you ride a bike is sufficient to transform them from novice into proficient bike rider.
You can program a robot to ride a bike and in that sense the knowledge is verbalizable, but looking at the source code would not necessarily be an effective method of learning how to do it.
I think being able to verbally transmit the knowledge that solves most of the problem for them is proof that at least some of the skill can be transferred verbally. And of course it doesn’t help to tell someone the detailed control algorithm to ride a bike, and I wouldn’t recommend doing so as an explanation—that’s not the kind of information they need!
One day, I think it will be possible to teach someone to ride a bike before they ever use one, or even carry out similar actions, though you might need a neural interface rather than spoken words to do so. The first step in such a quest is to abandon appeals to tacit knowledge, even if there are cases where it really does exist.