# Most human knowledge is not encoded Everything from “how do you do politics” to “how do you hold your hand just so when you’re soldering this tiny part on this specific pcb” isn’t written down. Instead it’s talked about in abstractions. There are different reasons why [[Staying at the top of the ladder of abstraction is mystifying]] Many fields of study and projects have the underlying assumption that written works (or worse, published papers) span human knowledge. Especially [[Undiscovered public knowledge discovery (UPKD)]] as a whole. These projects will either go nowhere or focus on specific domains that are well-documented. [[Streetlight Effect]] to the max. Another key piece of information that is often not encoded in ‘the literature’ is a direct synthesis of two opposing arguments. [[You need a human to resolve conflicting information]]. Needing someone to resolve conflicting information is one reason why [[Just having the piece of literature doesn’t solve the problem]]. The prevalence of videos on the internet has “encoded” a lot of previously unencodable knowledge. Especially physical “how to” tasks. ### Related * ‘Process knowledge’ talked about in [[Dan Wang 2019 Letter]] * ’Tacit Knowledge’ talked about in [[Science Business - Book]] * [[Joel Chan Podcast 27/2/20]] * [[Researchers are more important than the research]] * [[Heuretics come out of people’s brains (TECHNOLOGY IS PEOPLE)]] * [[There are many pieces of equipment or tacit knowledge that only exist in one or two places in the world]] * [[Process Knowledge]] <!-- #evergreen --> [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Most+human+knowledge+is+not+encoded) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Most+human+knowledge+is+not+encoded)