instead, documenting this granular, real-world knowledge is impractical and inefficient.
I would add that unlike software and law, that work directly with text that is then easily shared, searchable, and intrinsically composed of a finite set of discrete tokens, people working with the physical world cannot easily share or search amongst the infinite set of continuously variable physical features. As a mechanical engineer, I’ve often bemoaned the lack of a “stack overflow for product design” or similar, and I think this is a big part of why such a thing doesn’t exist. While in principal you could describe in text everything that you’re doing, that doesn’t provide any value in and of itself and thus when combined with other hurdles like confidentiality and time constraints, very little domain knowledge ends up in a place where everyone can access it.
I would add that unlike software and law, that work directly with text that is then easily shared, searchable, and intrinsically composed of a finite set of discrete tokens, people working with the physical world cannot easily share or search amongst the infinite set of continuously variable physical features. As a mechanical engineer, I’ve often bemoaned the lack of a “stack overflow for product design” or similar, and I think this is a big part of why such a thing doesn’t exist. While in principal you could describe in text everything that you’re doing, that doesn’t provide any value in and of itself and thus when combined with other hurdles like confidentiality and time constraints, very little domain knowledge ends up in a place where everyone can access it.