Masters of Merit / Learning by Proximity

Why a master often cannot explain what they do

Expertise tends to become automatic, and automatic things resist description.

Ask a very good practitioner how they made a particular decision and the answer is frequently unhelpful: it looked right, it felt wrong, you just do it a bit less. This is not evasion or mystique. Skill that has been worked at for long enough stops being held as a set of steps and becomes something closer to perception. The person no longer chooses between options because they no longer see the options; they see the situation and one response. What has been lost along the way is exactly the layer of description a learner needs, and it is not recoverable by asking harder.

The consequence is that the best practitioner is not always the best explainer, and the best explainer is not always the best practitioner. Someone who struggled with a technique and had to build it consciously often teaches it better than someone for whom it was never a problem, because they still hold the intermediate steps. A learner is usually well served by having both nearby: one to show what the standard is, another to describe how to get there.

It also changes how a learner should use access to someone very good. Asking for a rule tends to produce a poor one. Asking them to do the thing while you watch, or asking about a specific case in front of you both, tends to produce something real, because the knowledge is bound to situations rather than to principles. The useful question is rarely how do you do this. It is more often what are you looking at right now.