Tacit knowledge is knowledge that cannot be captured through words alone.

What is more important is emulation, and action — that is, a focus on the embodied feelings necessary to ride a bicycle successfully.

tacit knowledge instruction happens through things like imitation, emulation, and apprenticeship. You learn by copying what the master does, blindly, until you internalise the principles behind the actions.

if you ever hear someone explaining things in terms of a long list of caveats, the odds are good that you’re looking at tacit knowledge in action.

Learning this type of complicated judgment — this instantaneous solution selection that happens to balance dozens of considerations against each other — this is what is valuable to learn. And it is almost impossible to learn it through explanation alone.

“Yes, in principle it is possible to do so. In practice it is very difficult.” My take on this is that it is so difficult that we shouldn’t even bother

What many researchers found in the wake of that fad was that it is extremely difficult to encode all the possible branches and gotchas and nuances from a human expert into an expert system.

giving people a list of procedures to execute, blindly, denies them the ability to build expertise, which in turns prevents them from doing the sorts of creative problem solving that is common amongst expert operators.

We should act as if tacit knowledge were a fact, because it is more useful to think about ways to gain that tacit knowledge directly, instead of hoping for some breakthrough to make tacit knowledge explicit.

I explained that deliberate practice is defined as possible only in domains with a long history of well-established pedagogy. In other words, deliberate practice can only exist in fields like music and math and chess.

The process of learning tacit knowledge looks something like the following: you find a master, you work under them for a few years, and you learn the ropes through emulation, feedback, and osmosis — not through deliberate practice. (Think: Warren Buffett and the years he spent under Benjamin Graham, for instance). The field of NDM is focused on ways to make this practice more effective.

Keep an eye out on NDM methods, and watch for things that focus on tacit knowledge. They are — in this writer’s opinion — the most interesting, overlooked topic in expertise today.