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

title	date	topics	related	abstract
Tacit Knowledge and the Testing Checklist	2026-04-20	philosophy craft epistemology		Polanyi's claim that "we know more than we can tell" is the best available account of why experienced testers catch what juniors and certifications miss. Phronesis cannot be handed to a new hire via checklist, and certainly cannot be handed to a language model.

Tacit Knowledge and the Testing Checklist. Polanyi's The Tacit Dimension¹ — "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.

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1. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo6035368.html ↩︎