🌲 The Fastest Way to Learn Depends on Circumstance

What desert engineering and Paul Atriedes can teach us about tacit knowlege.

I stumbled across this collection of The Best Tacit Knowledge Videos on Every Subject thanks to LessWrong. I didn’t actually watch any of the videos — I don’t do well with audiovisual learning, for the most part, and I don't much care about the specific examples they share. Watching somebody else take notes, or learn physics, is probably valuable for some people but I feel like I got enough from that in school. But it has been rattling around in my brain for weeks now. The article is right that sometimes you need a video, or to see something done in person, or for someone to actually hold your hand. Before I read this article, I didn't have a good, succinct term for this phenomenon. Now I do, yay!

The article defines tacit knowledge as “knowledge that can't properly be transmitted via verbal or written instruction, like the ability to create great art or assess a startup.” Compression speed matters, and I type faster than I talk, and I read faster than other people talk. I occasionally tolerate listening to books via text to speech in the car, but I rarely listen to podcasts and I almost never watch videos.

The almost, however, is key.

The other day, when I was out walking the neighborhood with my family one evening, we noticed a new retaining wall a street or so over from our house. It doesn’t really impact us, but I was still grateful for the 13-minute Practical Engineering episode I once watched, which explains how retaining walls work and why they collapse.

I once watched this video on skinning a crocodile over ten times in a row because I was writing a chapter about butchering a desert wyvern and I wanted the details to feel realistic. I resorted to it after several abortive attempts to learn how to butcher a reptile from articles alone. Given that I was, myself, explaining the process in prose, I thought using textual explanations would be the best way to learn about it — but I was wrong.

I work in quality assurance, and every now and then someone sends in a bug report I can’t make heads or tails of until I get a visual. For me, engineering is one of those things where a picture is worth a thousand words.

Take the Pre-Columbian puquios of the Nazca. They’re spiral-shaped holes that push water from underground reservoirs into canals using wind pressure. Try to picture that in your head for a moment, then click through to the link. Does it match what you imagined?

Ancient Persian Qanats represent one of humanity's most ingenious adaptations to desert life. They predate Roman aqueducts by nearly a thousand years. These underground irrigation channels, which Frank Herbert explicitly referenced in Dune, allowed Persian communities to transport water for miles through the desert without losing it to evaporation.

The picture I had in my head after reading Dune bears absolutely no resemblance to the reality.

What I find most interesting is that these weren’t built with industrial technology or elaborate machinery — just organized labor and geological knowledge. The qanat builders had to understand water tables, rock formations, and gradients with precision that I would struggle with even with an education grounded in higher-level math. They even functioned as early air conditioning systems, cooling the air as it passed through the underground channels.

Speaking of Dune, my dad has been reading Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East, so I picked it up too. Partly because it gives me something to talk about with my dad, but mostly because I’m always curious about people, places, and events that inspire books I like, and I’ve heard before that Dune is basically Lawrence of Arabia in Space.

It totally is.

Early Scott Anderson's biography, he describes Aaron Aaronsohn, the Jewish agronomist who became “the most famous scientist in the Ottoman Empire” for his work cataloging Palestine's flora and discovering wild emmer wheat:

A committed Zionist, as early as 1911 Aaronsohn had begun to articulate a scheme whereby a vast swath of Palestine might be wrested away from the Ottoman Empire and reconstituted as a Jewish homeland. Other Zionists had expressed this vision before, of course, but it was Aaronsohn, with his encyclopedic knowledge of the region’s flora and soil conditions and aquifers, who first appreciated how it might practically be accomplished, how the Jewish diaspora might return to its ancestral homeland and prosper by making the desert bloom.

This immediately made me think of Liet-Kynes, the Imperial Planetologist in Dune who dreams of transforming Arrakis into a green paradise. Both men were outsiders who became experts on their adopted desert homes, both believed in the power of ecological transformation, and both were functionally revolutionary spies.

Herbert borrowed extensively from desert cultures, although — real desert peoples with the values and technology of the Fremen would never waste the water contained in a human body. Fremen walking into the desert to die, in my opinion, contradicts the water-conservation ethos that defines their culture. But after a mere 8% of the book, it is exceptionally clear to me that Dune really is Lawrence of Arabia in Space.

Paul never does much with desert engineering, but he does learn a great deal over the course of the book. The tacit knowledge example that sticks out most to me is the way he learned to walk in the desert. Oh, sword and knife fighting is one of those things that is really hard to learn from a book (or even a video; I suspect that it’s like physical therapy in that having someone there to physically move your body helps a lot) — but the scene where Paul and his mother Jessica end up in the desert, trying to learn to walk through sand in a way that doesn’t summon a giant sandworm to devour them, is to me one of the most striking moments of the book.

It shows us one of the most well-bred, well-educated, well-read boys in the whole universe. He’s physically dynamic and in full control of his body to a degree that is typically attained only by Buddhist monks, if at all. Presumably he’s done a fair amount of studying about his new home before he arrives. But it still takes a combination of watching and the act of doing for him to gain the knowledge of how to walk safely through across Dune.

Something to think about the next time you’re learning — or teaching — a new skill.

I’ve been trying to pick up knitting, but most of the videos I’ve found assume that I enjoy counting or that I want to make something fancy. I’ve mostly figured out casting on thanks to this video, by dint of the same method that got me through swing dance classes: ignore what they say and do what they do.

I took a ski class once, years ago, where the instructor gave me the most profound bit of teaching advice I’ve ever heard. He said: “We used to try to explain exactly which muscles to move in order to turn safely. Now we just tell you to point in the direction you want to go. It works better that way — your body figures it out better than your brain can.”

Further Reading

• For more thoughts on learning efficiency, check out my article about acquiring passive ‘background’ knowledge that might be useful later.

• To read about how stories and fiction are another very useful way to share and gain knowledge, check out my article Sensemaking thru Fiction. I just updated the links and removed the paywall.