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by ubermonkey 1253 days ago
It's topic drift, but this is a great example of a scenario that I think is interesting: the apparent existence of a skill that you cannot articulate.

Usually, if you're better than someone else at something, there are things you KNOW you are doing differently, and you can give pointers/instruction, right? In my bar-going youth I was a better than average pool player, but I could also help YOU with YOUR pool game by showing you what I was doing, right?

But sometimes these things exist at an unconscious level. The main example of this in my life is animal interaction, which I am pretty sure is due to countless inarticulateness lessons I learned from my dad, and by working with him at his veterinary clinic in high school.

I have joked for decades that I simply inherited the Kindly Veterinarian Vibe, because while I definitely CAN tell you simple things to do if you have trouble connecting with a dog or cat, but I can't transfer everything because I don't even know everything that I'm doing. A huge chunk of it is understanding the animal body language, and it seems like lots of people just suck at that, e.g.