Alex WellersteinVerified account

Wow, Alex, there's a lot there! Do you mind if I jump in? Seems to me there are two kinds of tacit knowledge related to instruments. One is, as you say, buying versus making.

Another is between tangible units of measure (length, mass) and abstract ones that rely on instruments.

*cough* You don’t use instruments to measure a foot? Not a ruler? Or a laser beam?

I am saying that in addition to the measuring instruments, I have a sense of what they are measuring and can estimate from that. Or that the measurement tells me something I can feel.

I consider "judgment" and "experience" to be forms of tacit knowledge. But my main point is, if you have good/reliable instruments, you can rapidly skip over steps that previous people needed tacit knowledge to know.

Example: to identify what isotope a given radioactive source was used to take quite a bit of careful work. Today you can use "off the shelf" (though not cheap!) counters that instantly compare the gamma spectra to a database.

That means that what used to be a somewhat laborious and expert step is reduced to pushing a button. It doesn't eliminate the need for expertise at all, but it means that sort of thing is no longer a serious barrier.

In the context of proliferation, it is the difference between having to invent or fabricate a krytron from scratch and the ability to buy one from a wholesaler. It reduces the tacit knowledge needed dramatically.

2) Lack of appreciation of fact that tacit knowledge *can* in fact be transmitted and taught. It is what it means to become an expert. Takes 5-10 years when working from scratch. (i.e., grad school.) It is not at all an insuperable barrier.

I just finished Collins’s “Rethinking Expertise”. It was worth reading (for me) and I get the desire for normatice theories of expert