When we speak of a man as skilled in any way, we do not mean that he knows the rules of doing something, but that he possesses the habit of doing it. Of course, it is true that knowing the rules, more or less explicitly, is a condition of getting the skill. You cannot follow rules you do not know.
Hidden Structure
Copying forms without understanding structure guarantees failure.
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The knowledge required to ride a bicycle can’t be fully captured in words and conveyed to others. We need “tacit knowledge,” the sort we only get from bruising experience. To learn to ride a bicycle, we must try to ride one.
The premise behind what are tellingly called work-to-rule strikes is a case in point. When Parisian taxi drivers want to press a point on the municipal authorities about regulations or fees, they sometimes launch a work-to-rule strike. It consists merely in following meticulously all the regulations in the Code routier and thereby bringing traffic throughout central Paris to a grinding halt. The drivers thus take tactical advantage of the fact that the circulation of traffic is possible only because drivers have mastered a set of practices that have evolved outside, and often in contravention, of the formal rules.
Norsemen with their own heavy wooden rowboats and their own techniques for hunting walruses and seals must have recognized the superior sophistication of Inuit light skin boats and hunting methods: the Inuit were succeeding at doing exactly what the Norse hunters were trying to do. When later European explorers began visiting Greenland in the late 1500s, they were immediately amazed at the speed and maneuverability of kayaks and commented on the Inuit appearing to be half-fish, darting around in the water much faster than any European boat could travel.
At the one end lies “blueprint copying,” when you copy or modify an available detailed blueprint. At the opposite end lies “idea diffusion,” when you receive little more than the basic idea and have to reinvent the details. Knowing that it can be done stimulates you to try to do it yourself, but your eventual specific solution may or may not resemble that of the first inventor.
Unfortunately, the software industry has churned out a whole lot of these shallow specialists, who use the term specialist as an excuse for knowing only one thing. In the medical industry, a specialist is someone with a deep understanding of some specific area of the field. ... I wanted someone who, when dealing with high-level abstractions, would understand the low-level details
The idea that rich Western countries should provide large amounts of “developmental aid” in order to solve the problem of poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, Central America, and South Asia is based on an incorrect understanding of what causes poverty. Countries such as Afghanistan are poor because of their extractive institutions—which result in lack of property rights, law and order, or well-functioning legal systems and the stifling dominance of national and, more often, local elites over political and economic life. The same institutional problems mean that foreign aid will be ineffective, as it will be plundered and is unlikely to be delivered where it is supposed to go.