Transmitting tacit knowledge

13 Apr, 2026

Nate Meyvis makes the very good point that a lot more tacit knowledge than we recognized is built into everything we do, and thus prompts for Claude Code (or to another human) that might seem extremely simple and direct actually come with large knowledge prerequisites.

1. Nate’s analogy is to showing a child how to use a knife; the real-life example that brought this home to me was trying to teach a child how to throw a baseball. Despite knowing exactly how to do it, I had close to no idea where to even begin in explaining the mechanics of it, and even less ability to assess and correct the child’s initial difficulties. I had never considered it as a function of multiple variables; “throwing a baseball” was essentially an irreducible function itself.

2. The vital role of tacit knowledge hits home the hardest when teaching a teenager to drive a car. Until they can stop consciously thinking about what they are doing with their feet and hands, they are completely overloaded and overwhelmed; once they do move those mechanics to their automatic mental systems, they improve rapidly.

3. Now that I'm in the midst of teaching a second teenager to drive, I'm (selfishly) interested in the transmission of tacit knowledge, and strategies for effectively doing so. It's not obvious. Unlike throwing a baseball, I do know the mechanical details of how to drive a car. But that's a separate question from how you efficiently convert those details into background tacit knowledge with someone.

4. I also find tacit knowledge and its creation to be an underrated skill in card games. Naturally, the more tacit knowledge you have hard-wired into your decision-making, the more room you free up in your conscious mind for other considerations, and the less taxed you will be by the stuff in your automatic process. A lot of what we think of as wizardry at a bridge table is probably just well-calibrated tacit knowledge.

5. That said, a lot of people who are trying to get better at these games strive to keep a ton of information in their conscious systems. The result is unintentional-but-purposeful overload, and I think it ultimately makes people worse players. This is especially problematic in poker right now; the wealth of solver-based information available has people wildly trying to consciously work out decisions. It's probably true that they should spend more time figuring out how to hard-wired such things into their tacit knowledge.

6. I'm working with some bridge beginners now, and this problem keeps coming up, over and over again. There’s an insane amount of information you can take into account when playing a hand, but if you try to consciously keep track of all it, the result is almost guaranteed to be worse. You have four suits to track. Two hidden hands worth of cards. Inferences from bidding. Signals from opponents. Potential lines you might consider. It’s a ton. If you try to do it all, not only do you crash in any individual hand, but you also don’t get any better at it.

7. There is also a teaching/practitioner divide here, since competent practitioners (like a Dad teaching baseball throwing) might have the least insight as teachers.

8. Some of it is just reps, of course. This is partly why I think the shift in poker toward studying vs. playing might be overrated; I see people advocating for 50% studying and 50% playing. But maybe that’s off for the average person trying to get better; my hunch is that most of the tacit encoding happens in the process of doing, not studying.

9. I do not have a theory of efficiently transmitting and hard-wiring tacit knowledge, for new drivers or bridge players. If you do, I would love to hear it.