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Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

It's sad but at the same time there is a sort of optimization that tends to occur each time the magic trick is rediscovered.

Often it is not possible to separate the technique from the man. Things like riding a bike or flying a helicopter come to mind. A lot of what makes a master good cannot be written down anywhere. There isn't anything tangible to actually lose.

How would you write a document that describes to someone how to ride a bike or dig holes efficiently? You could explain the principles and general ideas, but the apprentice is going to need to get scraped up a bit before they actually learn anything that matters. The apprentice willing to suffer repeated failure is where most of the heavy lifting occurs. The master is mostly a backstop to keep the apprentice alive.

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You speak of tacit knowledge[1]

Worse is that they who have the knowledge don't realise that others don't know what they know, it's completely automatic and ingrained to the owner.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge

I think they're touching on multiple things that typically happens between an apprentice and master, not just tacit knowledge. Also implicit learning, procedural / nondeclarative memory, expert intuition and metacognitive feelings, all very hard to quantify into a written document, but put two people together where one learns from the other, and all these somehow gets transferred over time.

"Always two, there are. No more. No less. A Master and an apprentice."

Sounds great, looking into it, maybe less great. Apparently from Star Wars, about the Sith :)

> The Rule of Two did away with Sith Academies. From your very first steps into the Dark Side, you work with your Master and only your Master. You are not responsible to other Dark Side users. You are not expected to delve into the secrets of the Dark Side and give that knowledge to Force-users other than your Master (or hide it from him). You're expected to do what you can to keep other potential Force-wielders from usurping your position, including kill them. You're expected to learn what your Master teaches you, but also to hide from him in order to overtake him.

Ideally your real-life experience with apprenticeship has been/will be slightly different than this!

There's nothing implied about tacit knowledge being knowledge that you don't know others don't have. For instance in chess mastery, one is fully aware that you simply see the board in a different way. It's not like you're aloof of your own 'advantage', but then in lessons you work to gradually, step by step, instill such in the student. Some of the most successful teachers are those who themselves learned the game a bit later than average, enabling them to draw more heavily on their own path. For instance Mark Dvoretsky only earned the IM title when he was 28!

28? You make it sound like he was 90!

haha, well his methods, that live on after he's gone, are a big part of the reason people are now making GM at 12.

It's unclear whether these sort of players will do as good a job at handing down their knowledge though. Think about how little you remember, in much detail at least, about stuff before you were 12 - and now imagine you were already master strength by then, let alone a grandmaster. I'm a later starter and can still vividly remember when I barely knew how the pieces moved, and I think that gives me a huge edge over most players in terms of teaching.

> How would you write a document that describes to someone how to ride a bike or dig holes efficiently?

You don't. You put these people together for some years to work on stuff together, and a small percentage of this "intangible" feelings, knowledge and experiences you cannot write down somehow magically passes over to the other person.

Of course, the apprentice will still require their own repeated failures and uphill battle even getting close, but having someone who mastered the craft near you as you go through this, makes the whole process a hell of a lot faster.

This is why I do not fear the ALI/LLMs will take over everything about Software Engineering anytime soon, if ever.

The amount of tacit knowledge I am applying to the architecture of my projects is probably too deep for LLMs to even approach, IMO. It takes very little to have Opus or even Fable make a mess that is obviously bad to anyone who understand even the first thing about effective software architecture.

You don't need to write it down to pass the knowledge down to an apprentice.

Your bicycle case is a great example. People don't learn to ride a bike from a book. They receive in-person instruction of exactly the type the comment you're responding to was writing about.

The blurb here might be of interest to expand on what you're saying: https://eagleman.com/latest/the-mystery-of-expertise/

One interesting thing about riding a bike is that to turn right, you must initially turn the handlebars to the left (called countersteering). This is subconscious, not explicitly taught and virtually everyone disbelieves this at first when told. But it's something that needs to "click" in order to ride a bike. It's the reason it is so hard to ride a carnival trick bike with a gear added to reverse the handlebar/steering relationship; you don't consciously know how to change your input. There's even some videos by bike youtubers that learn to ride a bike with reverse steering, including the subconscious countersteering part. When they switch back to a normal bike, it once again takes time to relearn.

To relate this back to the comment thread, people don't even always know the full extent of what they have learned.

It is interesting that you picked "riding a bike". If anything, there has been a generation leap in how fast children can learn to ride a bike. Get them started on a Strider bike with no pedals. Once the child is large enough to ride a bike, they can teach themselves in about one or two days. (Numerous parents in the 2020s have confirmed this pattern to me.) Something about the Strider bike teaches them a lot about how to ride a (pedal) bike when the day arrives. When I grew up, I didn't have a Strider bike (I'm not sure they existed where I lived). Learning to ride a bike was tough and took a lot of practice with my father.

That's why this is speaking about apprentice and not about lectures in an university.

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