Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

Re:Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice by jacobolus on Wednesday June 10, 2020 @08:42PM (#23483957)

A big problem is that novices don’t know which parts need to be copied and sometimes don’t even notice what they are missing, so without either (a) getting a decent amount of expert feedback or (b) extensively reasoning things out from first principles and then doing a lot of trial and error, it’s easy to copy extraneous elements or skip essential ones.

A lot of methods and devices that we end up stuck with today in various contexts are just watered down copies of things that were once great, because all of the superficial features were slavishly copied by multiple generations of people who didn’t understand the original constraints or think about which ones have remained constant and which have changed.

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Re:Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice by barry-cotter on Wednesday June 10, 2020 @10:04PM (#23484525)

If you go from non-functional to functional with extraneous crap that’s a success. Unless you’re working at the forefront of research or at the absolute limits of your capabilities an explicit mental model of what you’re doing is of surprisingly little use. Even that exaggerates how useful it is. The huge majority of improvement is by trial and error, with shoddy and incomplete mental models.

Your last paragraph is just what happens when there’s no force demanding quality. If there’s not strong pressure to maintain or improve quality decline is inevitable.

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