>>6478There's tacit knowledge that A) is tacit because it just hasn't been formalized and stored in documents and it it's trivial to do that; there's tacit knowledge B) that could be easily formalized like that in theory, but the people who could do it have vested interest in not doing it (keeping their skill set scarce), and then there's tacit knowledge C) where it seems hard to impossible to actually do that, even with people who are both unusually bright and unusually generous about sharing information (for example, I may remember very well how somebody looks like, but communicating that information is tedious). I don't think shouting "tacit knowledge" is really a great argument for
capitalism as it actually exists, the rhetoric seems to be focused on a sort of
rare Renaissance Man, a fabulous small-business guy who is both engineer and manager. Most managers are not like that. And a capitalist can be somebody who isn't just a bit ignorant about what's going on on the shop floor, a capitalist can be an entirely passive investor. If anything, tacit knowledge should be the buzzword of the syndicalists and not those shilling for the existence of stock markets (which is what they do, even if they rarely bring up the stock market while they make the claim with tacit knowledge, because deep down they know that wouldn't convince anybody).
We have already talked about the issue in the various cybernetic socialism threads. The following problems and ideas for minimizing them are all from older threads:
1. A jury rates products or performances or whatever by average rating. A small dishonest minority can get disproportional influence by using tactically exaggerated ratings. Solution: We use an aggregation method that is less influenced by outliers, the most extreme option here is using the median.
2. Some resource is available in limited quantities and allocated without use of budgets. When the sum of requests exceed the available amount, each request is scaled down proportionally. People can anticipate the down-scaling and make exaggerated requests, which leads to anticipation of more extreme down-scaling and bigger exaggerations and so on. Solution: We either use budgets or another method of reducing amounts which is not sensitive to this exaggeration: allocating one additional unit per agent per round. However, if this method is used and the resource is not tracked well, they might still exaggerate above their own direct needs in order to use it for barter, unlike with budgets.
3. An ignorant bureaucrat sets an absurdly tough standard for some type of physical work. Solution: People tasked with setting a quota for physical labor have to demonstrate fulfilling it themselves. (The devil is in the details. There's still an issue here that being able to do something for a very short amount of time does not imply that it's possible to do long time, but it's something.)
4. A remuneration standard for a particular activity is lowered, causing social unrest and protest against bureaucrats living in a different world. Solution: Only people who themselves can be drafted for the activity can be involved in the decision to lower the remuneration for it.
5. An electronic questionnaire takes a small eternity to be finished because there are so many questions, so it takes a long time to send information. Solution: Get away from the paper metaphor in electronic documents and enable instant uploading for every tiny piece of information rather than only whole finished documents of several virtual pages. A document that is only 10 % done might already contain the most important information for the people awaiting the answers.
6. A lot of learning happens in contexts where the "pupils" are not in some sort of official learning phase and the "teachers" are not officially teaching them, and it happens in small daily interactions in person. This knowledge transfer is lost when group members are replaced in big batches rather than continuously. Solution: Avoid big batch changes. A trivial insight, but it is not actually followed everywhere. In particular, many elected bodies have batch replacement.