Tacit knowledge is knowledge that can’t properly be transmitted via verbal or written instruction, like the ability to create great art or assess a startup. This tacit knowledge is a form of intellectual dark matter, pervading society in a million ways, some of them trivial, some of them vital. Examples include woodworking, metalworking, housekeeping, cooking, dancing, amateur public speaking, assembly line oversight, rapid problem-solving, and heart surgery.

Because of this intensely local nature, it presents a uniquely strong succession problem: if a master woodworker fails to transmit his tacit knowledge to the few apprentices in his shop, the knowledge is lost forever, even if he’s written books about it.

This ability to transmit visually apparent tacit knowledge at scale has only recently become technically possible as a result of the convergence of four factors:

Quality digital cameras have become cheap enough for mass use. This happened due to incremental technological advancements, as well as the economies of scale, driven by mass consumer demand. It is still expensive to buy a camera good enough to record video that is pleasant to watch, but it is not expensive to buy a camera that provides enough information for us to track natural facial movement and fine hand gestures. The availability of such cameras distributes the means of documenting activity to all the nooks and crannies of society that might store tacit knowledge.
Mass broadband internet access. It allows us to watch recorded video on demand at sufficient quality.
Search engines. Only a tiny fraction of the great mass of video content produced and consumed due to (1) and (2) is of value. Imagine a society that has digital cameras and mass broadband internet access available, but no way to search through the videos. Somewhere in there might be exactly what you need, but if all you did was replace the cost of finding so

Early results of this knowledge-transfer revolution are easy to find, like an explosion of at-home science in domains such as dermatology. Such efforts combat industries with incentives to advertise pseudoscience to consumers.

Can this growing corpus reshape knowledge inside established institutions as well? Take academic science, for example. The ongoing replication crisis is after all partially the consequence of the questionable assumption that every procedure and observation can be expressed in exact scientific writing. What if the scientific literature shifted its balance much more towards visual documentation?