Tacit vs. explicit knowledge (take III)

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Mark Baker: <<Physiologists now have a pretty good understanding of the
physiology of walking. They know how walking works and how we do it. But
none of us learn how to walk by reading physiology textbooks.>>

If you've ever taught a child how to walk, you know that most of it comes
from experimentation (we've already agreed that for many things you must
learn by doing), but you also know that a little theory comes in useful at
times. I've found advice such as "stop dragging your feet--pick them up",
"roll your weight from your heel to your toes", and "swing your arms in
opposition to your legs" have proven useful for a few kids, including my
son. That's particularly true for running--which, to extend this analogy, is
a more advanced form of walking (analagous to a more difficult or faster or
more effective kind of writing?).

<<Perhaps an elite athlete may be able to eek out a improvement in
performance based on the knowledge gained by the study of the physiology of
walking, but most of us are not going to walk any better whether we study
physiology or not.>>

That would be "eke" out, and it's not just elite athletes that can benefit.
Have you ever hiked with a heavy backpack? Have you noticed that for long
hikes, it's much easier on your body if you place one foot more nearly in
front of the other rather than moving them in parallel, as you do when
walking without a pack? Most people don't notice that walking "in line"
causes much less bobbing up and down, and thus less fatigue. Walking is one
of those things we all learn to do--but do inefficiently if we don't bother
looking for those theoretical improvements (which I first heard of from a
biomechanist who explained how African women can carry huge weights on their
head without dropping them). It's implicit/tacit knowledge that is easy to
transfer once you understand how and why it works.

<<Is my knowledge of how to walk simply the unexpressed equivalent of the
physiologist's knowledge of how people walk? If it is, then a competent
knowledge engineer or technical writer should be able to elicit the
physiology of walking by interviewing me and asking the right questions.
Somehow I doubt it.>>

The physiologist is only describing what you do. They may not get that
information by interviewing you, but as I noted in previous messages and in
the abovementioned backpacking example, they can discern it by watching how
you walk. You used the example of an elite athlete, and that's a telling
example; the average joe just flails about the same way they always did and
hopes that practice will make perfect, but the winner does indeed study
their own motion and work with trainers to improve it. Why is is so hard to
imagine that other skills (e.g., writing) can't benefit from similar
theoretical insights?

<<The two-year-old's knowledge of walking and the physiologist's knowledge
of walking, though they share a common object, are two different kinds of
knowledge. You cannot get one kind from the other kind, in either direction.
And the same is true of many other areas of human performance.>>

My point remains the same: studying the theoretical basis can lead to
significant improvements (your point about elite athletes), but the only way
to actually learn is to do. You can often (not always) learn to do something
better if you know some of the theory or absorb that theory in the form of
acquired wisdom by someone who can already do it better. It's not an
either/or situation. Perhaps the reason we're disagreeing is that you're
considering theory (in the PhD sense) very narrowly, rather than expanding
the definition (as I have done) to include "best practices"?

In any event, that's my third posting on the topic, and further words are
more likely to increase the noise than the signal. I leave the last word to
you.

--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
(try ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca if you get no response)
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada 

"Wisdom is one of the few things that look bigger the further away it
is."--Terry Pratchett