Oddbean new post about login | logout its enlightenment, not apocalyptic. if we uncover and study this hidden knowledge, it just becomes good ol science and epistemology. I think the emphasis on “hidden” is trying to categorize things that are not commonly studied or looked into. Like who is running the study on street smarts? I’m sure there is an insane amount of complexity to explore in that space, but there’s no obvious way to study it.
The issue is to assume that through that “study” - and that’s a can of worms on its own - it necessarily follows that systematizing the lived experience into some information system will render any greater insight. For example, it is clear that explaining all about a sport like basketball doesn’t make the person that doesn’t practice that sport into a good basketball player. Learning, as a form of encyclopedic knowledge, is not a complete knowledge. The same reason as simply reading about religion is not the same as practicing a religion. The Truth is not encoded into systems of knowledge, but in lived experience, and trying to convey it through systematization is always a lower resolution version of that.
I think a lot is kind of muscle memory. You can't put it into words for reproduction but still you can study it in words. I imagine that humanoid robots will quickly gain street smarts like autonomous cars are learning the unwritten rules of human interaction. The latter probably do so very explicitly, with engineers approving changes to how the car should behave that were not clear before actually getting into the street. I wonder what Tesla knows about how people expect you to drive according to your location. They must have hard data where humans only have anecdotes.