As a biologist, I want to zone in on one particular part of the post here because I find it very off base.
Whatever expert interviews were done to get the list of "tacit knowledge" seems deeply flawed, as the difficulty of the listed examples is overstated by orders of magnitude. I get the impression that this list was compiled by talking to ancient PIs that haven't done experiments in decades and have lost much of their sense of proportion. This is a semi-common phenomenon.
Specifically,
Pipetting isn't difficult. You push a button up and down. Students get it in a few tries. Pipetting volumes extremely precisely requires some days of practice but is practically never necessary.
Fragile materials exist but are pretty rare and honestly not mythically difficult to handle. The one case I encountered came down to not using the vortex machine on it and pipetting it slowly. This really isn't relevant all that often and it's not super severe when important.
Most biology works fine or a bit less effectively, if the concentrations are off by 20%. If it's not working you just vary the concentrations in a "grid search" till it works
Contamination is a regular problem in lots of wetlab settings. It definitely requires some practice to keep things sterile consistently. That said, students in university microbiology lab classes routinely pull this off first try with just a Bunsen burner.
It's true that much (but by no means all) biology work requires weeks or months of finicky optimization before you can get it working reliably, but this has little to do with these (to me bizarre) claims.
As a biologist, I want to zone in on one particular part of the post here because I find it very off base.
Whatever expert interviews were done to get the list of "tacit knowledge" seems deeply flawed, as the difficulty of the listed examples is overstated by orders of magnitude. I get the impression that this list was compiled by talking to ancient PIs that haven't done experiments in decades and have lost much of their sense of proportion. This is a semi-common phenomenon.
Specifically,
It's true that much (but by no means all) biology work requires weeks or months of finicky optimization before you can get it working reliably, but this has little to do with these (to me bizarre) claims.