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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

"Tacit knowledge cannot be externalized" is a cruel thing for me to hear when it comes to social skills.

Ty Tashiro writes about how "awkward" people

https://www.ted.com/talks/ty_tashiro_why_we_re_socially_awkw...

need things to be spelled out and made explicit. With that, we can function as well as anyone. Without that we suffer when we get advice like "be yourself", "read Dale Carnegie", etc.

Ty was lucky to have parents that understood that he needed this and made sure he got it. I didn't. Often it would take me a while to get what came naturally to the other kids and adults never seemed to recognize that, which made me feel really lonely.

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While I agree that tacit knowledge exists and is widespread, I think the author misuses the word "tacit" to mean unspeakable rather than unspoken.

Clearly unspeakable knowledge is a subset of unspoken knowledge, but there is definitely unspoken knowledge that is speakable if we take the effort to make it explicit.

"things awkward people need spelled out" is a great example of tacit knowledge that is often speakable (but we don't bother because the tacit assumption is that the tacit knowledge is shared by all.)

By conflating the unspoken with the unspeakable, the author fails to realize that a great deal of our tacit knowledge can be made explicit or at least partially explicit (and the value that can be captured by finding new ways to explicate the formerly unspeakable.)

I understand this to be "difficult to express in a usefull manner", and many soft skills fall into this category. Plenty of people who are goosld at it put together advise that is actually worthless. Many of them don't even know why they are good at it.

No, I don't think it's a misuse of the word "tacit". It's a spectrum which has boundary line on one side only, but is open-ended on the other side. The boundary between the unspoken and the codified knowledge is clear-cut. The unspoken and unspeakable are just one spectrum, and the author's model does not have a boundary between them nor does he seem interested in finding such boundary.

In other words the unspoken knowledge can be learned from two sides, not one. It's understandable that the author focuses on their side, but I don't think he does so with the intention to discourage "the effort to make [the knownledge] explicit".

The author doesn't acknowledge any sort of spectrum and makes a general statement that trying to make tacit knowledge explicit is so hard as to be pointless to try.

> My take on this is that it is so difficult that we shouldn’t even bother; assuming that you are reading this because you want to get good in your career, you should give up on turning tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge and just go after tacit knowledge itself.

Maybe it's just my reading, but what follows this excerpt puts it in context. I.e. we shouldn't bother with converting the entirety of unspoken knowledge in some field:

> Why do we know this? > [What many researchers found out] was that it is extremely difficult to encode all the possible branches and gotchas and nuances from a human expert into an expert system.

But the author doesn't say "don't only try to turn implicit knowledge into explicit knowledge", he says "you shouldn't even bother".

To me that sounds like a direct analog to "nobody will ever understanding everything about the source code without reading it, so we shouldn't bother with documentation".

Obviously we can't / shouldn't document everything, but creating documentation as you learn an undocumented legacy code base can be of great value (as can asking other developers to explicate their implicit knowledge).

Over and over the Author ignores the unexplicated but explicable and assumes that implicit knowledge is inexplicable.

"be yourself"

The most useless advise in history, closely followed by "just stop being depressed"

"Be yourself!" cried the attractive, socially adept and successful person to the pungent, unshaved, overweight college-dropout loser in a ratty Futurama t-shirt who lives in a friends' basement and struggles to pay the exceedingly lenient rent.

"On second thought," the savvy adept said, "Strive to become the person you wish you were and hope that people will like who that is."

> Ty Tashiro writes about how "awkward" people need things to be spelled out and made explicit. With that, we can function as well as anyone. Without that we suffer when we get advice like "be yourself", "read Dale Carnegie", etc.

As an awkward person myself this certainly rings a bell. But for me it's more about getting permission. Growing up in an abusive household, everything that I did was like walking in an open minefield. You're running and doing things intuitively and everything seems normal until you're hit with an explosion of verbal and sometimes physical abuse.

I can relate to this. The "permission" aspect also cuts both ways sometimes, because I learned to be cautious and then _that_ became the thing I was doing wrong, according to others, who berated me for not being assertive enough.

What's worse is that when I left my home and had finally the permission to go outside, at ~14 years old, I was basically unable to make any decisions or take any initiative. I literally had to relearn how to behave in society and at work, one hurtful mistake at a time.

This reminds me of this post: https://putanumonit.com/2021/09/10/rules-for-noobs/

I don't think the guy is any sort of "certified expert" but it rings true to me. And occasionally I've tried to give people related advice but found I couldn't. For example: How do you know when you you're close enough with someone that you tease them in a way that they'll take well vs badly? I'm pretty good at knowing it, but I'll be damned if I can explain it.

tl;dr of the article is that when people are learning then explicit rules and guidelines are helpful. Once you get better at it, they are unnecessary and even harmful. People in the latter stage tend to give crappy advice like "just be yourself" because it works for them now, they don't really exactly know what they're doing (ie, the knowledge is implicit) and they've forgotten what it's like to be totally incompetent.

Anyway, perhaps the point is that while it's difficult to externalize how to "not be awkward" (and indeed it would likely be different for every social group) you can probably use rules to get along well enough, for long enough, to figure it out the hard way.

Since tacit knowledge can be gained experientially, watching videos on social skills where the actions are demonstrated can build your social skills just like being instructed on how to ride a bike can make it easier for you to learn how to ride a bike.

> Without that we suffer when we get advice like "be yourself", "read Dale Carnegie", etc.

I've grown to appreciate such useless advice. It is useless in answering the question you wanted help with but it is a strong signal that you can prune the person who gave such advice out of your social graph without any negative repercussions.

Couldn't you argue the person you would be pruning is a person that is most likely to appreciate you just as you are?

It seems reasonable to argue that if they are indeed in your social graph and they give you that advice, perhaps they like you for who you are and thus the advice at least from their perspective is good.

Making an absolute was overstating my case. In the good faith scenario, the other person does appreciate you as you are. Not so worth it to burn that relationship. Probably wise to make a mental note not to ask them for advice, assuming your goal was for more than being accepted by the person you just asked for advice.

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