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sixes_and_sevens comments on Open Thread, July 1-15, 2013 - Less Wrong
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I've been thinking about tacit knowledge recently.
A very concrete example of tacit knowledge that I rub up against on a regular basis is a basic understanding of file types. In the past I have needed to explain to educated and ostensibly computer-literate professionals under the age of 40 that a jpeg is an image, and a PDF is a document, and they're different kinds of entities that aren't freely interchangeable. It's difficult for me to imagine how someone could not know this. I don't recall ever having to learn it. It seems intuitively obvious. (Uh-oh!)
So I wonder if there aren't some massive gains to be had from understanding tacit knowledge more than I do. Some applications:
What do you think or know about tacit knowledge, LessWrong? Tell me. It might not be obvious.
That isn't the standard use of "tacit knowledge." At least it doesn't match the definition. Tacit knowledge is supposed to be about things that are hard to communicate. The standard examples are physical activities.
Maybe knowing when to pay attention to file extensions is tacit knowledge, but the list of what they mean is easy to write down, even if it is a very long list. Knowing that it valuable to know about them is probably the key that these people were missing, or perhaps they failed to accurate assess the detail and correctness of their beliefs about file types.
Unfortunately, everything I know about tacit knowledge is tacit.
How do you know that?
Not everything I know about what I know about tacit knowledge is tacit!
This conversation just metacitasized.
It's okay, I'll show myself out.
Sir, you are wrong on the internet. A JPEG is a bitmap (formally, pixmap) image. A PDF is a vector image.
The PDF has additional structure which can support such functionality as copying text, hyperlinks, etc, but the primary function of a PDF is to represent a specific image (particularly, the same image whether displayed on screen or on paper).
Certainly a PDF is more "document"-ish than a JPEG, but there are also "document" qualities a PDF is notably lacking, such as being able to edit it and have the text reflow appropriately (which comes from having a structure of higher-level objects like "this text is in two columns with margins like so" and "this is a figure with caption" and an algorithm to do the layout). To say that there is a sharp line and that PDF belongs on the "document" side is, in my opinion, a poor use of words.
(Yes, this isn't the question you asked.)
I'm not sure I want to get into an ontological debate on whether a PDF is a document or not, but I believe the fact that it's got the word "document" in its name and is primarily used for representing de facto documents makes my original statement accurate to several orders of approximation.
Uh-oh indeed. Like most statements involving the word "is", this is probably one of those questions that should be dissolved. Thus I will ask:
What do you mean when you say document? I.e. what are the characteristics that a document has which a JPEG file does not, and which a PDF does have? Why is it wrong for something that is an image to also be a document?
This seems to be actively running away from the point. Also, see the other response re: my lack of interest in this particular ontological discussion.
In my example, there's also a concrete reason to distinguish between images and documents. The image is going to be embedded on a webpage, where people will simply look at it. Meanwhile, the document is going to be printed off as an actual physical document. Their respective formats are generally optimised for these different purposes.
I'll try: You don't need OCR to get the words out of the document. An image is just dots and/or geometric shapes. (Which would make a copy-protected PDF not a document.)