Knowledge how—what psychologists call procedural knowledge—is the knowledge that enables a person to be a skilled musician, to return a serve in tennis, or to move the tongue properly when saying the phrase “frightening witches.” Procedural knowledge is difficult or impossible to write down and difficult to teach. It is best taught by demonstration and best learned through practice.
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Practical knowledge defeats rationalized systems.
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But a practical problem can only be solved by action itself. ... The kind of practical judgment which immediately precedes action must be highly particular. It can be expressed in words, but it seldom is.
One powerful indication that they all require mētis is that they are exceptionally difficult to teach apart from engaging in the activity itself. One might imagine trying to write down explicit instructions on how to ride a bicycle, but one can scarcely imagine that such instructions would enable a novice to ride a bicycle on the first try. ... If your life depended on your ship coming through rough weather, you would surely prefer a successful captain with long experience to, say, a brilliant physicist who had analyzed the natural laws of sailing but who had never actually sailed a vessel.
Medicine and surgery, more than many other areas covered in this book, rely heavily on implicit or tacit knowledge—something you have learned how to do but would find extremely difficult to successfully convey to someone else in just words or pictures. In Britain, it takes up to a decade of medical school and on-the-job learning in a hospital to achieve competency as a registrar doctor (the equivalent of a US fellow in a subspecialty), all of this with training and hands-on demonstrations provided by someone already proficient. If this cycle of knowledge transfer breaks with the collapse of civilization, it will be impossible to teach yourself the necessary practical skills and interpretative expertise from textbooks alone.
There is nothing mystical about an accurate intuition like the fire commander’s. It’s pattern recognition. ... Whether intuition generates delusion or insight depends on whether you work in a world full of valid cues you can unconsciously register for future use.
When I was at what I would consider the peak of my abilities, I had extremely trustworthy intuition. I would do things and they would just turn out right. ... Some of it, I'm sure, was experience that had simply gotten internalized so far down that I didn't have conscious access to the process.
We’ve forgotten that in an age before machines, “craft” was the only way anything of any quality was built. It turns out, however, that traditional craft still matters, because CAD tools haven’t brought about the ability to simulate our mistakes before we make them.
But I also believed there was a certain critical complexity above which a more centralized, a priori approach was required. I believed that the most important software (operating systems and really large tools like the Emacs programming editor) needed to be built like cathedrals, carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before its time. Linus Torvalds's style of development-release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity-came as a surprise.
The capacity to export told politicians in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan what worked and what didn’t and they responded accordingly. ... But this term does not describe what happened in successful developing states in east Asia. In Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China, the state did not so much pick winners as weed out losers.
After all, even the cleverest in-house programmer is unlikely to be as smart as the collective efforts of ten thousand users at the ‘bleeding edge’ of a new idea. ... In product after product on the internet, innovation is driven by what Eric von Hippel calls ‘free-revealing lead users’: customers who are happy to tell manufacturers of incremental improvements they can suggest, and of unexpected things they have found they can do with new products. ... The world is turning bottom-up again; the top-down years are coming to an end.