Mike Tyson once said, ‘everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.’ Wendell Berry says something quite similar, or not, regarding hospitals and medicine – and by logical extension, science in general. This is also a good quote regarding tacit knowledge:
For in the hospital even the professionals are involved in experience; experimentation has been left far behind. Experience, as all amateurs know, is not predictable, and in experience there are no replications or ‘controls’; there is nothing with which to compare the result. Once one decision has been made, we have destroyed the opportunity to know what would have happened if another decision had been made. That is to say that medicine is an exact science until applied; application involves intuition, a sense of probability, ‘gut feeling,’ guesswork, and error.
– Wendell Berry, Another Turn of the Crank, p. 106
