Two stories about tacit knowledge

A few years after that, when Project Orion was canceled, he stopped working on nuclear reactors. He said it just wasn't fun anymore. And I imagine he's right; since about that time, working on nuclear reactors enmeshes you in the national security state, where promotion depends on political favor as much as technical competence, and rank is measured by headcount and by project classification level. There's a certain kind of person that's fun for, but it's usually not the kind of person who spends his Christmas vacation working problems from a calculus textbook. It's not the kind of person who discovers a lot of new things. Atomic Energy merit badges went out of style.

About 20 years later, at the end of the 01970s, the costs of building new nuclear reactors started to skyrocket, which is another way of saying that our productivity at building nuclear reactors started to collapse.

I just read Atlas Shrugged, which tells a story of a technological society strangled by regulation, unpredictable kleptocracy, and a brain drain ("draining the brains", the book said, 6 years before the Royal Society coined the term "brain drain"). This aspect of the book resonated with me, although many others did not, perhaps in part because I live in Argentina, whose technological development is strangled by regulation, unpredictable kleptocracy, and a brain drain, though the brain drain is to the US and Europe rather than to a secret conspiracy. We had a famous fusion energy program, Project Huemul, which turned out to be a scam.

I wonder if the same thing happened to nuclear engineering? Maybe the potential Tellers and Freeman Dysons born in the 01960s and later never got involved in nuclear physics, except for David Hahn, who ended up with paranoid schizophrenia after his mother committed suicide, and died at 39 of an overdose of opiates. Maybe nuclear engineering had a brain drain to electrical engineering, computer science, and related fields.

Explicit knowledge can be codified and easily expressed. Tacit knowledge is not codified and not easily expressed. Given the details of story one (they went to a library and researched a variety of topics), that seems to clearly be referring to explicit knowledge. The second story is lacking crucial details about why it took a decade and $70m to replicate the foam, but we can assume that there was some reproducible process behind the original foam that was lost and required a great deal of effort to reproduce. Again, that would be explicit (not tacit) knowledge. The only way that it would not be is if there were individuals with a technique that was not codified and easily expressed that the original foam depended upon.

No, they didn't. They designed a nuke. Not the same as actually building one. Designing a nuke is not at all difficult, and indeed the linked article describes how they decided to design a plutonium-based implosion device rather than a uranium-fueled gun-type device specifically in order to make the project more challenging than it otherwise would have been.

> Turns out it's really bloody hard to replicate an organisation. You can call this irreplicable part culture, because that's what it is. Which is a way of saying sure you can hire some folks with some data but that's not gonna help you build a self driving car. That's why the loss of a person hurts so much, because they take knowledge with them that's not only not written down anywhere but can't be written down. And yet, just because it hurts the poachee doesn't mean it will help the poacher. The exciting stuff is all culture, which is as numinous[1] and emergent and intangible as it is real.

Of course we know that losing a strong colleague or employee is a terrible experience, because they know more than they could ever share through documentation. The novel bit for me is thinking about that employee’s next employer. There’s no guarantee they can make the same outcomes happen again.

[1] “having a strong religious or spiritual quality; indicating or suggesting the presence of a divinity.” Context had me thinking this word meant “myriad” but I’m glad I looked it up.

The second team was asked to produce a much more precisely specified thing, which may only have been possible to make with one process.

So the two teams had different tasks, and the difference is not implicit vs process. It's many ways to many things, vs few ways to one thing. The latter problem sounds much harder to me.

> It's worthwhile noticing that this propensity to leap ahead, self experiment and generally operate outside established strictures has always been a key feature of science!

Maybe we shouldn't glorify what sounds a lot like academic / grant fraud.

. . . and art, business, sport, entertainment, politics….

Flocks of seagulls and pigeons do it too. A small percentage feeds on the outside of the flock. Many go hungry. Some die. The few that strike it rich through serendipity prosper. Some form whole new flocks with their generations of offspring.

And so it goes.

I wouldn't be surprised if the foam was made far harder to reproduce by obstructionism of the actual warheads in question, too because of the pathological secrecy in governments for matters of far lesser stakes.

However, biology also has the ability to adapt to its circumstances and replicate itself. Though that ability is usually annoying, it just might enable manufacturing/scale up that is easy to copy, something that is fundamentally different from all other kinds of high-tech manufacturing.