The knowledge required to ride a bicycle can’t be fully captured in words and conveyed to others. We need “tacit knowledge,” the sort we only get from bruising experience. To learn to ride a bicycle, we must try to ride one. It goes badly at first. You fall to one side, you fall to the other. But keep at it and with practice it becomes effortless—although if you had to explain how to stay upright, so they can skip the ordeal you just went through, you would succeed no better than Polanyi.
