Easier Done than Said

Posted: 08-02-2017 11:51:20 UTC

Yo! Fellah. Straight up: how did you do that trick?” I got asked this question last night out skating. Older skaters get it all the time. The kid who asked was a beginner (a “grom”, as they’re called in the wild) and my reply the usual: “sorry, but I don’t know. Tricks are easier done than said.”

This is not just me being a nark. The brute fact is I really can’t articulate how tricks are done. And that’s because my knowledge of how to skate is what Michael Polanyi called “tacit knowledge”.

Many tasks in life — from tying shoes to spotting tumours — draw on tacit knowledge. Its opposite is explicit knowledge: the definite facts produced by rational enquiry. In principle, these fields’ conceptual tools could describe skating. You could, say, capture the perfect kickflip with a formula. But I am not solving anything in my head when doing one¹. And a formula is not the kind of knowledge groms want.

What groms want is tacit knowledge. They want the feel of a kickflip. But this means their questions are futile, because tacit knowledge is inarticulable. You learn to skate much as you learn to bike — through watching, experimenting and repetition. Learning a trick by talking makes no more sense than learning math by dancing. As older skaters know. We all get Polanyi’s point that “We know more than we can tell.”

So why don’t many other people?

Tacit knowledge is increasingly ignored; ours is an age of the explicit. Economies basically run on codified knowledge now — how many companies do R&D? — and the same goes for social life. Many people have therefore become blind to tacit knowledge. Worse, they think all knowledge is communicable.

This has costs. Consider:

—- It degrades craft-based education. Increasingly, schools teach to test. Written tests can only assess explicit knowledge, and so subjects requiring tacit knowledge suffer for this trend. You can program decently not knowing computer science; you don’t need to study literary theory to write good stuff; and you can master an art ignorant of formal aesthetics. When Barnett Newman said that “aesthetics is to artists as ornithology is to birds”, he was highlighting the broad irrelevance of theory to craft. The DfE would do well to think hard about the truth in his words.

—- It encourages knowledge loss. Explicit knowledge can be set down. This is helpful, but has some costs. One is we are less alert to knowledge loss. Losing knowledge can harm us (look at scurvy). It’s also common. One plus of tacit knowledge is that it reminds you of this. Tacit knowledge is wetware bound. If the brain goes, it goes. And memory always fades. When I don’t skate much, tricks feel dimmer. I recall how fragile knowledge actually is. Explicit knowledge — text on my phone say — rarely has this effect. Mostly it just gives an impression of permanence.

—- It harms productivity. Tacit knowledge is important at work. Salespeople have non-verbal hunches about how to treat clients. Scientists often can’t say how they knew a result was off, and so on. Assessment of ability, however, often ignores tacit input. Exercises like the REF and performance reviews make people justify their worth in words. This can promote adverse selection: productive but inarticulable jobs get cut, articulable but unproductive ones retained. Somewhat paradoxically, organisations may actually select for people lacking human capital, at least some of the time. What can be said, doesn’t always matter. And what matters, can’t always be said.