Tacit Knowledge

You recognize your friend’s face among thousands. But could you describe it well enough that someone else could pick them out of a crowd? Probably not. You know the face, but you can’t say what you know.

Michael Polanyi called this tacit knowledge — knowledge that’s real (it produces results) but resists being made explicit.

I think this explains a lot of things that otherwise seem mysterious.

Why can’t you learn to ride a bicycle from a book? Because the knowledge of how to balance isn’t in any sentence you could write down. It lives in your body. The book can tell you to turn the handlebars the direction you’re falling. But knowing when to turn them and how much — that’s not in the book.

Why do research labs have such strong cultures of apprenticeship? The paper describes the method, but the method isn’t quite in the paper. Something transfers only through watching the senior researcher’s hands.

Why do some skills resist automation while seemingly harder tasks succumb? Chess fell to computers. Folding laundry didn’t. Chess is explicit rules. Knowing how cloth drapes is tacit.

Polanyi noticed something interesting about attention. When you hammer a nail, your focal awareness is on the nail. Your hand is in subsidiary awareness — you feel the hammer’s weight, sense impact, adjust force. If you shift attention to your hand, you lose the nail.

The tacit knowledge works precisely because it’s not explicit. Making it explicit sometimes destroys it.

This creates bottlenecks. If expertise can’t be written down, it can’t be scaled. You need the master present. The tradition persists in bodies — books can’t hold it.

I think Polanyi’s deeper claim is right: all knowledge rests on tacit foundations. Even explicit rules require tacit understanding of when and how to apply them. The explicit floats on a sea of the tacit.

Which means knowledge is more fragile than it looks. Break the lineage and you lose things that weren’t written anywhere.

Go Deeper

Books

The Tacit Dimension by Michael Polanyi — The 1966 original. Short, dense, foundational. Start here.
Personal Knowledge by Michael Polanyi — The fuller treatment (1958). Argues all knowledge rests on tacit foundations.
Making by Tim Ingold — Anthropologist explores how knowledge lives in materials and practice.

Films

Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011) — Watch tacit knowledge in action. Ten years to learn to cook rice.