In my experience tutoring high school students, I’ve encountered plenty of students who struggle with spelling, grammar, or mathematical mistakes and no matter how many times I correct them it doesn’t stick. Then I see other students who pick these things up so quickly without correction.

Mathematics, especially, seems to have a strong tacit component. If all you do is read the textbook you’re going to bomb the exam. You need to practice a lot to develop your mathematical intuition.

I often wonder about this. I believe that each person has a certain intellectual threshold beyond which they cannot progress farther in (memory, spatial reasoning, logical reasoning, learning speed, etc.) Logically there are genetic and natural components to this threshold. I also think part of what makes a lot of modern life so disastrously ineffective is the belief by those running society that everyone can reach a similar intellectual level given the right "system".

However, I think modern schooling is so brutally ineffective that barely anyone in school is operating near the real limits of their intellect. What do you think was holding those kids back? Lack of motivation, poor knowledge of fundamentals, or do you think basic high school concepts actually had maxed out their intellect?

In English especially where we have problems with vowel shifts multiple source languages and frankly stupid spelling of some words by ignorant prescriptivist Latinophiles, it is really rote memorization.

Math is like playing the guitar or skiing, it takes practice to be good at.

But if you aren't good at memorization of concepts you don't understand, the typical response is to make people spend more time with memorization.

This simply doesn't work and students start to believe they aren't smart enough and give up, because they aren't offered tools to adapt and it is easier to just be thought of as stupid or slow.

Mathematics, logic, and scientific reasoning are learned skills and while everyone will have ultimate limits to their abilities, they are hard for all humans but in different ways.

But you are right, most this is tactic, people just ignore factors that often aren't even learning disabilities, but are advantages some students have due to their history and exposure.

Moravec's paradox is probably a good analogy, where what we think is easy is only easy due to previous experience.

Many authors like Ernest Hemingway and Agatha Christie were horrible at spelling and grammar but had good editors.

Assuming that being bad at spelling and grammar indicates an 'intellectual threshold' is a dangerous path.

Calculus is a filter class because it is taught in a way that favors rote memorization of unexplained concepts, but introduce some abstract algebra concepts to a student or coworker and many can move forward.

Rote memorization does have value, but equating memorization skills wilh ultimate intellectual ability leads to far lower educational attainment for many people.

Great guitarists and other difficult skills are far less about 'natural abilities' than it is about hard work and being exposed to an environment that does discourage that hard work.

Stem is the same as is creative writing or effective communication.

It is hard for everyone to learn, but people forget how much effort it took.

One explanation of Moravec’s paradox is based on evolution. Human skills are implemented biologically with mechanisms that have been shaped by natural selection. The older the skill, the more time natural selection has had to shape it. Abstract thought is a recent development, so we should expect the current implementation to be relatively inefficient.

Well, it's a nice belief to have, even if it's not true. But I think what's worse is the belief that everyone can reach a similar intellectutal level given the same "right system".

I'm pretty sure no system could teach me how to say draw legible sketches of pretty much anything, a valuable, intellectual skill. I'm ok with that and will move on with my life. But I'm even more sure a system that could teach me that skill would be unable to teach very many others. If you want to get everyone to the same intellectual level or maybe to at least some specific level, you've got to be flexible about how and what to teach and how long it's going to take.

I know plenty of people who can do basic 3d sketching with no specific instruction, but that's not me. I've got things I can pick up too. Some people are going to need a lot more time for things...

But schools will say they want to do flexible, student driven teaching, but then it's more of the same one size fits some.

I used to think that I am tone deaf and have no memory for melodies. Bu t after I forces myself to spend a lot of time singing, playing guitar and listening to music it occured that I just lacked some basic skills that combined suddenly creates magical ability of recalling melodies in my head and even repeating them. The same was with drawing and public speaking and general movement coordination (strength training can do wonders in this department).

This made me believe that some of problems of education system comes from general inability to convince students to spend more (dozen times more) on practicing basic skills (being this writing, small/big motoric skills, logical thinking oraz even some seemingly unimportant stuff like voice emission)

1. No amount of practice will enable me to break the 100m world record - or even probably be within 30-40% of it.

2. However, training would dramatically improve my time.

3. Most importantly, in life I could beat Usain Bolt by simply starting running 5 seconds earlier - ie for most things peak performance isn't what matters - it's effort/persistence.

And basing my intuition on example of one (me) both visual and tone imagination and memory can be developed from almost zero.

I am a musician and I'm keenly interested in music education. I believe you when you say that you lacked some basic facilities; I think it's rare, but more common than people think that someone is genuinely tone-deaf, or can't "visualize" pitches and intervals, or can't memorize songs, or can't feel a rhythm. I always wonder if those deficiencies can be overcome. I'm really interested in your tale, if you wanted to write more privately, would you consider sending me an email? It's in my HN profile.

It is really hard to answer this question because it seems that they were an emergent property of dozens of hobbies that I had (I tend to be seriali hobbyist). Seems like trying to explain how I did learn to ride a bike - I can name few basic skills that are required, but showing which exact part of learning bike riding made it stick is no easy task for me (I remember it as trial and error process and this was the same with my children - they just practiced riding bike and the skills developed thanks to them sticking to the practice). It all looks like a kind of tacit knowledge that can only be developed by pure practice (melodic memory through remembering and playing songs, aesthetics through creating your own compositions, logic through solving problems)

My own story is rather simple - I used to play guitar, a bit of keyboard, sing using karaoke, listening to songs paying full attention and than playing guessing games aking to local tv game called "What melody is this?". At first I was awful at this. But then something changed; I started to notice that I can recall melodic and rhythmic structure of some songs - and this was totally new ability to me (I remember that as a kid I was made fun of by my peers that I could not recognize any songs and my singing voice was wildly out of tune).

One caveat though - It's not like I am any good at music - I estimate that getting to level where others would tell "wow you are good" will take at least another 10 years (and it is not that important because I prefer the journey part, not the destination). But still I know I was a lot worse before forcing myself to learn. And probably if I would get a teacher that would motivate me and give feedback I would get here a lot faster, but as I said - it's the journey, and I really like to learn everything myself.

The message here is that I do not think that most people are unable to learn this kind of skills (those being music, logic or even simple aesthetics). The problem is that most do not have the drive, will or simply the time to stick with practice to overcome their own limitations.

False on absolute terms and useless for most "real life" training. Time to learn/master a subject is an enormous competitive advantage to foster, as "talented" people will always have an edge over "clumsy" people. Mediocre people can only beat a genius trough effort of luck IF the genius is lazy and/or unlucky.

> students who struggle with spelling

The ability to spell correctly is not tacit knowledge.

>> Tacit knowledge is not documented because it is undocumentable

Spelling is thoroughly documented.

While "i" does come before "e" nearly 75% of the time—even after "c" it is a probabilistic rule and not particularly useful.

So not so well documented.

Or how about the false rules that people tried to copy from Latin to English that don't really apply like double negatives or split infinitives.

Shakespeare loses most of its humor in modern edited versions, he used spelling and homonyms artfully when he cared at all. Look at the first folio version if you haven't.

Standard spelling is useful, but neither fully documented nor close to logical.

I think you will find that actual linguistic scholars error twords descriptivism vs prescription.

Only the less informed population of lay people stick to the prescription model as a proxy for intellectual ability.

> While "i" does come before "e" nearly 75% of the time—even after "c" it is a probabilistic rule and not particularly useful.

That's only the first part of the rhyme. The second part is "or when sounded like 'a' as in 'neighbor' or 'weigh'", which handles most of those exceptions.

There's even a third part I remember hearing once, but can't remember it now.

Most English spelling/pronunciation rules are never explicitly taught, but they do exist - it's why "ghoti" isn't pronounced the same as "fish", to get that pronunciation you have to break at least two rules.

Years ago I found a page that listed like 40 or so English pronunciation rules that had to do with combinations of characters and where they appeared in words, it was really thorough and I wish I'd kept a link to it.

You're criticizing a rule of thumb, here. Sure, the rule of thumb isn't perfect … but it also never claimed to be.

But from that, you're drawing the illogical conclusion of "spelling isn't documented", which … the aforementioned rule has no logical connection to.

Plenty of dictionaries exists, good ones, ones that even document non-standard spellings or local variants.

> I think you will find that actual linguistic scholars error twords (sic) descriptivism (sic) vs prescription.

I'll highlight the irony, but this is besides the point, but doubly so when teaching someone how to write. You start with the prescribed spellings, and once the skill is mastered, or the language evolves, then either they know when to break the rules, or the new spelling is simply trending towards prescribed.

… it's the same for a lot of pursuits: in dance, we teach footwork first. Later, you learn when to bend the rules, and when to outright break them. I'd say it's the same in music, too.

> Only the less informed population of lay people stick to the prescription model as a proxy for intellectual ability.

This really isn't what upthread is trying to say, at all. If I had to rephrase it, they're suggesting that, when you teach spelling, some "get it", some don't, even repeatedly, and questioning whether there is some tacit knowledge that the first group has formed that the latter is struggling with.

I taught CS, and I'd say there is a similar pattern amongst students there. Some intuitively seem to get it — particularly, once given the rules for syntax, ifs, while, etc., how to synthesis new programs to solve until-then unseen problems. Yet other students struggle with this. (The closest I've come is "the former have a decent rule system/model in their heads, and the latter are just trying to bum by on heuristics.)

"Prescriptivism is the term used for approaches to language that set out rules for what is regarded as “good” or “correct” usage. Descriptivism is an evidence-based approach to language that describes, in an objective manner, how language is being used. Most contemporary academic linguists are descriptivists, but prescriptivist approaches abound in schools, style guides, internet comment threads, and parental chidings. This case examines attempts to govern, reform, and/or reimagine English."

https://exhibits.lib.ku.edu/exhibits/show/english-language/g...

English is my second language so I tried to make some funny mistakes above due to the topic, but there might also be some unwanted/undocumented ones thrown in for good measure.

At least in my native language, I can typically explain the rules why a word is spelled the way it is. The simple reason for this is that I am interested in the structure of languages. The typical reason that I experience among other people why they spell words wrong is that they are less interested in this topic.

Of course, tons of everyday great spellers don’t know about any of this stuff explicitly. They just seem to tacitly have a “feel” for the language of origin and are thus able to spell many words when first hearing them.

Scissors, Island, Ache, and Could; were all from old English with random letters added by people in the 15th century who mistakenly thought they were from Latin.

Etymology is hard, and most textbook writers and teachers who invented the rules weren't qualified to actually find the true origin.

English accumulated a multitude of inconsistent spelling patterns, some from loan words, some from shift how words pronounced from vowel shifts, yod-dropping, and random reform attempts which weren't often based on rigourous evidence of origin.

It was an etymological fallacy that drove those spelling reforms to 'correct' the spelling anyway.

There is no real value in keeping the k in knife when the sound was dropped as an example.

That's true as well.

It was an etymological fallacy that drove those spelling reforms to 'correct' the spelling anyway.

There is no real value in keeping the k in knife when the sound was dropped as an example.

To me, these two statements suggest opposite recommendations. The first tells us that we should be cautious of prescriptive changes to spelling. The second that we should go ahead and drop the k in knife (and presumably change the spelling on all other words to be more phonetic).

I am inclined to be conservative here [1]. I found Mark Twain's satirical piece on the issue [2] rather persuasive. Like it or not, those old prescriptivists' changes have become part of the etymology. Making further changes for the sake of easier spelling would only complicate the etymology even further, and make it even harder for future English-speakers to read the texts of today.

[1] https://xkcd.com/927/

[2] https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.html

It’s quantifiers, and bound and free variables.

When giving advice, I'm often tempted to point to a given situation, and to explain what rule of thumb I used to solve it.

But then I would see a junior programmer applying the rule of thumb in a completely different situation and I'd want to say, "No, that will end in tears!" And I realized that a lot of my rules of thumb were really dumb when taken out of context.

As far as I can tell, a huge part of expertise is having a large set of mappings like:

- In contexts like "C1", use rule of thumb "R1" or "R8".

It's very tempting to talk about R1, R2, etc. You can write blog posts like, "How R2 will transform your team!"

But a lot of real expertise comes from being able to say, "Oh, this is a combination of C7 and C78, so I should consider rules of thumb R7, R49 and R102. Ah, wait, no, R49 is just gross here."

So I've learned that, when mentoring, I need to spend a lot more time talking about the context before proposing any rules of thumb.

This article confuses tacit knowledge for the phenomenon most eloquently described by a former (superb) sysadmin colleague “documentation is the enemy of job security”.

Only when you become replaceable at a certain task (or able to delegate it) you can progress to do new (more interesting) things.

Being fired from such a place might actually be a blessing, not a curse.

From my point of view, the lack of documentation might be a reason to fire someone.

Where does this idea come from other than good engineering practice?

If you work with smart, talented people in a fast moving world it seems, as you say, inevitable that you face the "problem" of tacit knowledge and manage it positively.

In Designing Sound (and my lectures on sound design) I researched and wrote about this as "ineffable knowledge". My observation in arts and design through the 90s and early 00s was that we regularly get people who are x100 superstars but they're unable to articulate exactly how they do things and pass that knowledge to others (I was researching this from a UI/UX point of view). That is /talent/ and it's why we value people as more than just interchangeable cogs. Much process knowledge, and crucially problem-solving knowledge in any project will reside in the heads of individuals.

(TBF I think the article is more about tacit cultural knowledge within the team as a whole)

Sure if we lose key individuals the project is threatened, but on the other hand trying to get them to do a full knowledge dump, such that any replacement would be frictionless, is a fools errand.

Treating "information" that way and ignoring people is one-dimensional thinking.

So I don't think it's helpful to talk about tacit knowledge itself as "dangerous". What is more dangerous is composing mediocre teams only from replaceable workers and spending too much of their time on documenting as a safety net when they should be pushing forward. Meanwhile a danger is in treating valuable people so badly their continuity is not assured. Far fewer people fall under the proverbial bus than simply leave for better jobs.

So we could take the view that over-cautious self-reporting and documenting is a sign of, and attempt to manage, low commitment business attitudes, poor wages, conditions and low job-security.

First, you have to have someone constantly making sure it's up to date in the case of software. Really easy for it to go stale and just be wrong, and possibly actively harmful.

But then telling someone "RTFM" has a different quality if you're talking about 50 pages or 50,000 pages. Cool, I'll get back to you in a month.

While I agree with the distinction you made (Last paragraph is excellent), there is this grey area : Because in the digital era almost everything is recorded (oral meetings/written chitchat...), there is a huge quantity of information that is neither in the "Guts" nor in the "docs". To join others in this thread, I guess LLMs will play a big part in making this grey area usefull and in a certain way bridge the gap (partially) between what is tacit and what is formally documented.

It is not that any tacit bit of knowledge eludes articulation, it is the whole that is problematic. Nothing is truly undocumentable, but its like the specs for microsoft word: its just so much you already need to be an expert to navigate the whole of it.

Thats the distinction and LLM of course of very good at processing vast amounts of bits and pieces.

I'll just add that the author did not seriously grapple with the fact that leaving at least some explicit knowledge undocumented is inevitable. There is no sharp divide between "explicit knowledge every programmer should know" and "explicit knowledge that only makes sense in our organization". Documenting is costly to produce, and documentation is costly to maintain even after it is produced. (If nothing else, more documentation makes it harder to search.) This holds even if it's simultaneously true that large organizations usually document insufficiently because of laziness and bad incentives.

Some of this is outlined in Snowden's (not that Snowden) Laws of Knowledge Management.

http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/km-seven-princ...

These two are especially relevant:

2. We only know what we know when we need to know it.

7. We always know more than we can say, and we always say more than we can write down.

The key insight (which I agree with!) is that some kinds of knowledge are undocumentable. The challenge - at least for those charged with ensuring processes are documented - is deciding what is and what isn't documentable.

And yeah, the real insight is not the definition but the fact that tacit knowledge is inevitable and important, and that trying to eliminate it will be actively counterproductive.

This[1] article that was on HN front a few months ago and I could only agree with it.

I've seen teams trying to micro-document their way to inefficiency. Forcing doers to document every darned small thing is the surest way to get them to lose interest. By now I've realised that regardless of documentation it takes around 6 months for a s/w engineer to be fully productive at a new company and start creating value.

[1] https://commoncog.com/tacit-knowledge-is-a-real-thing/

Donald Schön’s work on this topic is really enlightening. It’s not just that there’s knowledge in the heads of people that can’t be linguistically expressed well, but also that expression of it requires interaction with a specific situation.

This is also represents a massive gap for AI systems to become actual in-the-world problems solvers.