Originally written in French. Translated by AI — the meaning has been preserved, not the prose.
Short definition
Knowledge that cannot be taught and doesn't reduce to a procedure — built by a person's experience, intuition and lived context.
Full definition
The phrase comes from Naval Ravikant, who sets it against formalizable knowledge: what is learned from a manual, documented as a procedure, and therefore externalized. Accounting is taught, formalized and automated; the aptitude that makes a person excellent in a domain without anyone knowing how to reproduce their result is not.
In the articles on this blog, the term serves to delimit what stays on the human side once the production of content moves to the machine. What is formalizable — aggregation, formatting, writing from existing information — is delegated; the rest is this specific knowledge, and it shows itself through an opinion: cross-referencing quantitative and qualitative signals, and ending up holding a conviction the data doesn't yet validate.
Used in this sense, it doesn't describe a level of competence but a property: what has no procedure has no recipient to be passed to, and stays attached to whoever carries it.
Usage in the field
Used to name the part of a product manager's work that doesn't transfer to an assistant, and to explain what gives a software vendor a colour its competitors don't copy.
Synonyms and variants
"specific knowledge"; "the knack" when the emphasis falls on the gesture rather than on judgment.
Not to be confused with
- domain expertise — mastery of a field, transmissible by training, frameworks and mentoring. It is documented and distributed among several people.
- tacit knowledge — knowledge unformulated but formulable, which making explicit can bring into writing. Specific knowledge resists being made explicit at all.
- Context — a durable workspace gathering, around a goal, sources, notes, decisions and drafts. The context is what can be written about a situation; specific knowledge is what remains once everything has been written.
Examples
Deciding, in a startup, to accept a one or two per cent chance of becoming a unicorn against a ninety-nine per cent chance of dying: the analysis can be worked through, the bet cannot be formalized.
Ambiguities / debates
The term serves as much to protect a position — what I do can't be formalized, therefore can't be automated — as to describe a real limit of formalization. Nothing in how it is used distinguishes the two, and the disagreement bears precisely on what belongs to one or the other.