Short definition

Knowledge that cannot be taught and doesn't reduce to a procedure — built from a person's experience, intuition and lived context.

Synonyms and variants

"Savoir spécifique" in French texts; "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 through training, a reference framework and mentoring. It can be documented and spread across several people.
• Tacit knowledge — knowledge not stated but statable, which making explicit can put into writing. Specific knowledge resists being made explicit at all.
• Context — a durable workspace gathering sources, notes, decisions and drafts around a goal. 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 percent chance of becoming a unicorn against a ninety-nine percent chance of dying: the analysis can be informed, the bet cannot be formalized.

Ambiguities / debates

The term serves just as well to protect a position — what I do can't be formalized, therefore it can't be automated — as to describe a real limit of formalization. Nothing in its use separates the two, and the disagreement bears precisely on what belongs to which.

The reference test has moreover changed opponent. In Naval Ravikant, the replacement is a human trained through the same channel; with a general-purpose assistant, the threat bears on everything that can be described well enough to be handed over, including what was taught nowhere.