Maybe I shouldn’t say things like this on my company slack:

…And this only counts the knowledge that could be documented in principle, but isn’t.

Even more lost — submerged in the oblivion of double-ignorance — is the kind of knowledge acquired only in apprenticeship — all that purely practical, entirely tacit know-how passed down from craftsperson to craftsperson.

Design craft is 75%+ intuition.

Wherever words are forced to intercede between hand and artifact, things get stilted and, dare I say it, corporate.

Or this:

AI not only privileges explicit knowledge. It filters out everything except explicit linguistic knowledge, and makes everything outside the wordworld seem nonexistent. If you can’t say it clearly, it is not real.

But as designers know better than most, it is precisely what cannot be said that is most real — and most interesting.

Or this:

Fun fact: The philosopher who coined the term “tacit knowledge” is the same one who coined the term “polycentric”.

Michael Polanyi is one of the philosophers I recommend to designers who want to learn enough about what designers do, to be able defend our practice against conditions that undermine our work and after a point, make design work impossible. He’ll arm you with words that will help you ineffectively but vigorously fight the obtrusion of words. Of course, nobody’ll bother understanding a word of it once they catch a whiff of philosophy and start automatically dismissing it as irrelevant. But you’ll at least have the satisfaction of speaking truth to power, albeit a deaf and numb one.

All this was in response to a pretty okay LinkedIn article “The Ground Remembers: Tacit Knowledge in the Age of AI”.

I say okay, although the author’s explanation of why we use cinnamon and cloves in apple pies exemplifies wordworld theorizing running amok. Really? The taste considerations were only a pleasant side-effect of the antibacterial function of spice chemicals? We keep using apple pie spices when baking apple pies primarily by force of habit? We follow apple pie recipes out of brainless conformist momentum?

Only a business consultant who’s gone intuitively numb from too many decades of peddling disruptive innovation could make such groundless claims without embarrassment. Ironically, the brainless momentum of conformity in the author’s own habitual application of constructionism and functionalism seems to illustrate his own point better than the baking of apple pies.