inarticulable knowledge
“Polanyi’s Paradox.” It can be summarized as “We know more than we can say.”
Tiago Forte • Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organise Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential
Polanyi observed that there are many tasks we can easily perform as humans that we can’t fully explain. For example, driving a car or recognizing a face. We can try to describe how we do these things, but our explanations always fall far short. That’s because we are relying on tacit knowledge, which is impossible to describe in exact detail. We pos
... See moreTiago Forte • Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organise Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential
Psychologists call this “tacit knowledge.” Widely understood as a key to human interaction—maybe even the DNA of interpersonal exchange—it depends on firsthand observation and interaction: sifting through the slowly accruing sediment of mutual experience. It’s the inverse of explicit knowledge—things you can learn about someone from a resumé or Wik
... See moreJoshua Wolf Shenk • Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs
And I realised that if you ever hear someone explaining things in terms of a long list of caveats, the odds are good that you’re looking at tacit knowledge in action.