I’m gonna quote from this article about why you’d prefer to learn tacit knowledge from “believable people” i.e. those who have 1) a record of at least 3 different successes and 2) have great explanations of their approach when probed.
Believability works for two reasons: a common-sense one, and a more interesting, less obvious one.
The common-sense reasoning is pretty obvious: when you want advice for practical skills, you should talk to people who have those skills. For instance, if you want advice on swimming, you don’t go to someone who has never swum before, you go to an accomplished swimmer instead. For some reason we seem to forget this when we talk about more abstract skills like marketing or investing or business.
The two requirements for believability makes more sense when seen in this light: many domains in life are more probabilistic than swimming, so you’ll want at least three successes to rule out luck. You’ll also want people to have ‘great explanations’ when you probe them because otherwise they won’t be of much help to you.
The more interesting, less obvious reason that believability works is because reality has a surprising amount of detail. I’m quoting from a famous article by John Salvatier, which you should read in its entirety. Salvatier opens with a story about building stairs, and then writes:
It’s tempting to think ‘So what?’ and dismiss these details as incidental or specific to stair carpentry. And they are specific to stair carpentry; that’s what makes them details. But the existence of a surprising number of meaningful details is not specific to stairs. Surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality.
You can see this everywhere if you look. For example, you’ve probably had the experience of doing something for the first time, maybe growing vegetables or using a Haskell package for the first time, and being frustrated by how many annoying snags there were. Then you got more practice and then you told yourself ‘man, it was so simple all along, I don’t know why I had so much trouble’. We run into a fundamental property of the universe and mistake it for a personal failing.
If you’re a programmer, you might think that the fiddliness of programming is a special feature of programming, but really it’s that everything is fiddly, but you only notice the fiddliness when you’re new, and in programming you do new things more often.
You might think the fiddly detailiness of things is limited to human centric domains, and that physics itself is simple and elegant. That’s true in some sense – the physical laws themselves tend to be quite simple – but the manifestation of those laws is often complex and counterintuitive.
The point that Salvatier makes is that everything is more complex and fiddly than you think. At the end of the piece, Salvatier argues that if you’re not aware of this fact, it’s likely you’ll miss out on some obvious cue in the environment that will then cause you — and other novices — to get stuck.
Why does this matter? Well, it matters once you consider the fact that practical advice has to account for all of this fiddliness — but in a roundabout way: good practical advice nearly never provides an exhaustive description of all the fiddliness you will experience. It can’t: it would make the advice too long-winded. Instead, good practical advice will tend to focus on the salient features of the skill or the domain, but in a way that will make the fiddliness of reality tractable.
In practice, how this often feels like is something like “Ahh, I didn’t get why the advice was phrased that way, but I see now. Ok.”
Think about what this means, though. It means that you cannot tell the difference between advice from a believable person and advice from a non-believable person from examination of the advice alone. To a novice, advice from a non-believable person will seem just as logical and as reasonable as advice from a more believable person, except for the fact that it will not work. And the reason it will not work (or that it will work less well) is that advice from less believable individuals will either focus on the wrong set of fiddly details, or fail to account for some of the fiddliness of reality.
To put this another way, when you hear the words “I don’t see why X can’t work …” from a person who isn’t yet believable in that domain, alarm bells should go off in your head. This person has not tested their ideas against reality, and — worse — they are not likely to know which set of fiddly details are important to account for.
I’m gonna quote from this article about why you’d prefer to learn tacit knowledge from “believable people” i.e. those who have 1) a record of at least 3 different successes and 2) have great explanations of their approach when probed.