It’s really interesting to see the evolution of Hacker News comments over time.
My article on tacit knowledge is on the front page of HN again. The last time it was on the front page, a good chunk of the comments argued that tacit knowledge didn’t exist.
Conversation
Now they mostly argue that deliberate practice is a completely orthogonal thing that leads to tacit knowledge. (Accurate, but misses the point!)
Perhaps tacit knowledge is now more palatable to the HN commentari?
2
7
Altogether now: if 👏 you 👏 don’t 👏 have 👏 good 👏 pedagogical 👏 development 👏 in 👏 your 👏 field 👏 you 👏 can’t 👏 do 👏 deliberate 👏 practice!
5
4
28
Replying to
Can you elaborate more this? Any articles links on this concept that “if you don’t have good pedagogical development in your field, you can’t do deliberate practice”?
2
If I’m remembering the commoncog tacit knowledge series right, the argument is that deliberate practice requires legible knowledge of what expertise looks like, out of the heads of experts
If you just have expertise you can’t explain, then you can’t do deliberate practice.
1
1
“Expertise you can’t explain” is tacit knowledge.
One connection that highlights the distinction for me: not all domain experts are good teachers. You can have tacit knowledge of a field with solid pedagogy, without knowing the pedagogy.
2
3
Actually the claim is more specific. Ericsson’s definition of DP demands that it be performed under guidance of a coach, in a domain with an established body of pedagogical techniques.
(See: Peak).
Anything less than this is considered ‘purposeful practice’, not DP.
2
1
As a result of this requirement, you cannot do DP if: a) you want to get better at a skill with no good set of pedagogical techniques, and b) no set of coaches who can use those techniques on you.
Think of skills like playing org politics, code taste, or M&A negotiations, etc
1
1
3
Right. It's key to note that the issue here is partly definitional—i.e. deliberate practice is *defined to be* practice with this set of properties. But it's also practical: without those properties, you need some other way of attaining expertise (through practice or otherwise).
1
3
I think what’s really interesting is that expertise research seems to have branched into two paths: one focuses on DP, which demands pedagogical development, and the other seeks to do identify and extract tacit knowledge from the heads of experts, to turn into training programs.
2
5
Feltovich is particularly interesting to me because he starts out in the DP camp, and over the years moves into the expertise extraction camp. One of my todos is to go spelunking in his research history to figure out why he switched.
somewhat related: you had mentioned enrolling in cta.institute/self-study/ a while back. how'd it go? am v interested in signing up.
1
2
2