work-blog/articles/drafts/tacit-knowledge-checklist.md

Tacit Knowledge and the Testing Checklist. Polanyi's The Tacit Dimension[1] — "we know more than we can tell" — is the best available account of why experienced testers catch things that junior ones (and ISTQB certifications) miss. This dovetails neatly with your Competent Tester / Spolsky post and gives you ammunition against the Claude-first mandate you've worried about elsewhere: phronesis cannot be handed to a new hire via checklist, and certainly cannot be handed to an LLM.

[1] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo6035368.html
feat(drafts): add initial drafts for philosophy-inspired testing articles Introduces nine new draft articles exploring intersections of software testing with philosophy, epistemology, and related concepts: - On Flakiness (Heraclitus and non-deterministic tests) - Popper and the Risky Test (demarcation criterion) - Regression as Institutional Memory (Wittgenstein's On Certainty) - Tacit Knowledge and the Testing Checklist (Polanyi's tacit dimension) - Test Environments as Platonic Shadows (Plato's cave allegory) - The Tester as Witness (legal metaphor and testimony) - Testing Probabilistic Systems (ML and statistical testing) - The Oracle Problem (oracles in testing frameworks) - When Quality Becomes Quantity (Goodhart's Law and metrics) 2026-04-20 08:28:28 +00:00			`Tacit Knowledge and the Testing Checklist. Polanyi's The Tacit Dimension[1] — "we know more than we can tell" — is the best available account of why experienced testers catch things that junior ones (and ISTQB certifications) miss. This dovetails neatly with your Competent Tester / Spolsky post and gives you ammunition against the Claude-first mandate you've worried about elsewhere: phronesis cannot be handed to a new hire via checklist, and certainly cannot be handed to an LLM.`

			`[1] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo6035368.html`