Grandma’s Recipes
The importance of unwritten knowledge
Having grandma’s kitchen and recipes doesn’t mean you can reproduce her cooking. Practical experience and unwritten knowledge are important components in how science advances and how companies operate.
Simple, Not Easy
Pierogies are a simple food. The dough has four ingredients: flour, butter, egg, and salt. The filling has five: potatoes, onions, butter, salt, and pepper. But simple doesn’t mean easy.
Like many Polish grandmothers, my grandma made delicious pierogies. Yet despite their seeming simplicity, if you put me in her kitchen and give me her recipe, the output would be inferior. Part of what made her pierogies so good couldn’t be written down. As Dan Wang, an analyst focused on China’s technological progress and industrial policy at Gavekal argues, a big part of technology is the know-how in people’s heads.
Practical Experience
Wang sees technology as the combination of three different components: tools (lithography machines, stoves), written instructions (blueprints, recipes), and practical experience. He argues that the latter is what’s crucial. It’s the unwritten knowledge that makes grandma’s pierogies so good:
The most useful technology is not intellectual…
