There is information which is readily transmitted through non-experiential means: tacit knowledge. Books, lectures, conversations.
There is information that must be experienced, drilled, and committed to habit and muscle memory: tacit knowledge. Drill, practice, experiment, coaching. Often 1:1 or at least 1:few.
It's highly arguable that individual knowledge does not become cultural knowledge until a means of transmitting it from one generation to the next becomes both established on institutionalised. It need not be a large institution, but it must have persistence.
Within any knowledge domain, the explicit knowledge transmits more readily than the tacit. With time and complexity, I suspect a situation much analogous to Amdahl's law is reached, in which generational knowledge transfer comes to be dominated by the tacit component -- it is harder, slower, and more expensive to transmit, and tends to irreducibility.
Technical cultures which become or incorporate a tradition of shared stories and lore, as Unix and Linux have done, seem to achieve this better than others.
And that neglects issues of semantic and cultural drift which affect written texts.
Though I'd come to this conclusion some years ago, I'm finding reading Mortimer J. Adler's How to Read a Book that this is a significant theme of that work.
There is information that must be experienced, drilled, and committed to habit and muscle memory: tacit knowledge. Drill, practice, experiment, coaching. Often 1:1 or at least 1:few.
It's highly arguable that individual knowledge does not become cultural knowledge until a means of transmitting it from one generation to the next becomes both established on institutionalised. It need not be a large institution, but it must have persistence.
Within any knowledge domain, the explicit knowledge transmits more readily than the tacit. With time and complexity, I suspect a situation much analogous to Amdahl's law is reached, in which generational knowledge transfer comes to be dominated by the tacit component -- it is harder, slower, and more expensive to transmit, and tends to irreducibility.
Technical cultures which become or incorporate a tradition of shared stories and lore, as Unix and Linux have done, seem to achieve this better than others.
And that neglects issues of semantic and cultural drift which affect written texts.
Though I'd come to this conclusion some years ago, I'm finding reading Mortimer J. Adler's How to Read a Book that this is a significant theme of that work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book