Tacit Knowledge

Johannes Vermeer, The Art of Painting

I felt a sense of recognition when I read these words from Ava yesterday:

In the same way that people who’ve been married for twenty years tend to give out pithy aphorisms when asked what’s the secret, there are certainly types of knowledge that simply can’t distilled very effectively.

Knowledge transfer feels so fraught; it feels like a miracle that we can collect and share knowledge with any degree of accuracy at all. Look at all of the ways that knowledge might be lost:

I experience something —[POTENTIAL LOSS]—> I have thoughts about it —[POTENTIAL LOSS]—> I transmute my thoughts into words —[POTENTIAL LOSS]—> I tell those words to someone —[POTENTIAL LOSS]—> They form a felt understanding of the words I told them.

Four! Four potential sources of knowledge skipping town, grabbing a bindle and hopping on a boxcar and laughing all the way to Timbuktu! And my representation there must be incomplete. There are more than four, to be shore.

I feel for the deeply religious, who know beyond a doubt that God is real, not just real but here on Earth too, in everything we see and touch and experience. But a pastor might struggle to convey this knowledge to their congregation, let alone an atheist.

Tacit knowledge is deeply, deeply personal. One day you’re gifted with a hint of an understanding about what’s really going on after hours or years of offering up your attention. With additional focus, this knowledge expands and clarifies, and it may become as real to you as the more commonplace facts known by the collective. But there’s one stark difference — it resists being shared. Sure, you can tell someone, tell everyone, but will they believe you? Why would they? They haven’t dedicated the hours or years that you have. Their primary interactions with it are the distorted funhouse versions that make the news or go viral online or are told secondhand by a friend.

I think there are outlets for anyone with the desire to share their tacit knowledge that might be more effective than direct transfer. You can let yourself be seen, joyous and glowing and peaceful, and the curious may come to inquire about it, and you can gesture in the general direction of the rabbit hole. You can make art about it. You can seek out the others who know what you know and collaborate on something that could only be birthed from the synergy, something that could not have happened through any of you alone.

You might also have a sense of humility about it. Perhaps someone else knowing what you know would divert them from their life path. Perhaps it would be harmful for them to know as deeply as you know. Perhaps you come to understand that others have tacit knowledge that directly contradicts your own, and you wonder what lessons are there for you to uncover.