This is Part 4 in a series on tacit knowledge. Read Part 3 here.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://commoncog.com/youtube-learn-tacit-knowledge/
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://commoncog.com/youtube-learn-tacit-knowledge/
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This post of mine aggregating YouTube videos with tacit knowledge got attention again on Twitter today and reminded me that it could be useful for people to share here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SXJGSPeQWbACveJhs/the-best-tacit-knowledge-videos-on-every-subject
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@parconley thanks so much for sharing, this is a goldmine.
I often think of YouTube as a return to “show and tell” style learning, like most humans did pre printing press.
Video is such a high fidelity medium of knowledge transfer. We see a general shift in behaviour here too, with younger generations relying solely on YouTube (or TikTok?) for recipes, instead of a cook book.
Wonder what that means for the future of books – will they be relegated to the hipster corners of Brooklyn, just like vinyls did? 
I hope not.
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I found the post-gutenberg epistemology paper this in thread to be fascinating: https://forum.commoncog.com/t/researching-cft-training-systems/801
Resonates with some of your speculation. If you have any thoughts on it, would be curious to hear!
(Getting access to that thread was the original reason I bought a commoncog membership! Great decision in retrospect. 
)
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Hopefully the number of people who go looking for what is actually tacit knowledge in books will round to zero sooner rather than later, since it is getting easier to discover that books don’t include tacit knowledge
I suspect the demand for books in their role as time saving functional reference will hang around for a long time, in whatever form is most functional for their owners
I’m doing my annual personal library assessment right now, and weeding my paper book collection. I find myself hanging on to more nonfiction volumes than I thought I might, because DRM is a sticking point, and replacement cost is a sticking point, and ebook indexes are a sticking point. Many ebook indexes are still overlooked and thus not useful: keyword searching has proved repeatedly to me to not be a true replacement for a good index
Edited to add an example:
If one owns and maintains a Honda Super Cub, one is likely to be able to get in touch with an expert who can pass on tacit knowledge, find enthusiast forums for help, find plenty of useful YouTube videos, etc. Still, having a shop manual at hand is likely to be a big enough time saver to be worth the cost of personal storage, digital or physical
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Fascinating! Unsurprisingly, I agree with their view.
I think LLMs have helped text hold it’s ground temporarily (users can ask hyper specific, context dependant questions) which are especially useful for ill structured domains BUT it makes you think what will happen when multimodal AI becomes good enough for a ChatGPT-esque YouTube?
Hyper personalized video tutorials for your specific use case, rendered near instantly?
Big blocker to this reality is good training data - currently we don’t have a high fidelity mechanism to capture the complex chaos of reality
reminds me of this tweet:
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Question for you @mgoodrum - do you think a RAG-based approach could be more efficient?
Upload the ebook version of the shop manual to Claude / ChatGPT, and ask a specific question based on your problem?
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In many cases, yes
I’d still want the full text directly available, for two scenarios where prompt writing adds time to the process:
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In the early, steepest part of my learning curve, when I don’t know what I’m doing, and haven’t yet figured out how to write good prompts
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As I approach mastery, when I know what I’m looking for, and prompt writing takes longer than going to the right place in the book
That leaves a big chunk of the distribution of use cases available for RAG to shine
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The tacit knowledge of how to not get your hand ripped off by an alligator
(Warning: video of someone getting their hand bitten by an alligator)
What I find particularly interesting about this video is that Clint is basically doing the Critical Decision Method (CDM) with Lindsay. (CDM is a type of Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA), and is the major approach used in NDM to understand the tacit knowledge of experts)
Some things to note about Clint’s technique, with the caveat that Clint is making an educational YouTube video, and so is under different constraints that I am typically under.
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He is asking very informed questions. That makes this interview more similar to the 15th interview than the 1st interview in a new domain (your first interview is always lots of dumb questions as you just try to learn the basics).
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He too often assumes he understands what she is saying, or understands the situation. I would want him to be less assertive in his description, and let her describe it. If you think you understand, frame your assertion as a question. For example, he asserts that the gator didn’t know it bit her hand, and is the first to bring up the death roll when instead he should be pushing her to bring up those things.
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He is not following an interview script, but forming a frame as the interview progresses, and then asking about gaps and confusions in that frame. Gary Klein would approve. Interview transcripts are there to remind you in case you forget to ask something, not to dictate the interview. Follow your curiosity, not a transcript.
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He pauses the event moment by moment in order to make sure he understands what is happening, and also to get her assessment. When we don’t have a video, we write down a timeline and ask about the event minute-by-minute, or even second-by-second to get the same thing. But a video is always great because you can get even more specific.
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He is repeating back to her what he thinks he understands to make sure he is tracking. I do this as well. I know some people dislike this for methodological reasons, but personally I always feel a little unsure about my understanding unless I can repeat it back to them and get their confirmation.
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He is a little too eager to jump in. If I were coaching him on how to do CDM, I would recommend sitting in silence a little more often, and giving her more time to reflect on if there is anything else she wants to say.
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The event itself was probably a minute and a half. Even with Clint trying to speed-run the interview, as well as all the edits in the video, the interview is an hour long. This isn’t too surprising. The people we interview are always shocked that they could talk for 2 hours about small events. But it really does take that much time to surface all the tacit knowledge.
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There is tons of tacit knowledge he is not surfacing. For example, he could ask more deeply about the gators behavior prior to the event to better understand why she wasn’t concerned, and how she determined whether what she was doing was safe. But maybe he already knows enough about that topic, or it’s not part of his research question, or its idiosyncratic between alligators and so there isn’t a need to ask about it. You can’t ask about everything, and so you need research questions to direct you.
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He also doesn’t ask about the action of the guy who moves her up into the position where she can get legs around the gator. Asking about the actions of team members is important, and I would like to know more about whether that helped or not. It seems like a worse position to me.
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When words are not enough, he points on the screen, and uses his body and hands to model the interaction. I wish he would have her doing that more often than himself. But again, its YouTube.
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A big part of her expertise comes from having mentally simulated this scenario before, and I am glad Clint asked her about it.
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He is able to make her comfortable about an event that could potentially be traumatic. He does this partly by re-asserting her expertise. He doesn’t say, “you are an expert,” but instead just allows her to explain her expertise. He is the learner, she is the expert. That is the correct dynamic, and you can see it in his body language and his deference to her. He does occasionally throw in some extra tidbits of knowledge - but I am not going to count that against him as he is trying to make a YouTube video. He also reminds her what she is accomplishing with the interview; helping to save alligators - something she is passionate about.
There is a follow-up interview, and you can watch how comfortable Lindsay is with Darth Gator, even after it tried to take her hand as if he thought he were in a Star Wars movie.
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