The Tacit Dimension: Why Your Best Engineers Can't Tell You What They Know (opens in new tab)

In 1966, a Hungarian chemist named Michael Polanyi published a short book called The Tacit Dimension. Its central claim is seven words long, and it is the thing the AI coding industry needs you to forget: We can know more than we can tell. Polanyi was a working scientist before he became a philosopher, and the question that bothered him was simple. How does an old chemist look at an apparatus and know it’s going to fail, before the symptoms appear? How does a surgeon’s hand find the right pre...