[hide1713]

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

[aristofun]

I've never understood what engineers find in this book. It looks like a shallow kitchen philosophy of a guy next door to me.

What you think is so good about this book for engineers, in a nutshell?

[borlanco]

Pirsig's book is not really about engineering, but about how we engineers relate to the world.

In engineering school I was taught to see the world in a special and unique way, to be able to solve engineering problems as a professional. In the book, this worldwiew is very well laid out.

An example:

  > Precision instruments are designed to achieve an idea, dimensional precision, whose perfection is impossible. There is no perfectly shaped part of the motorcycle and never will be, but when you come as close as these instruments take you, remarkable things happen, and you go flying across the countryside under a power that would be called magic if it were not so completely rational in every way. It's the understanding of this rational intellectual idea that's fundamental. John looks at the motorcycle and he sees steel in various shapes and has negative feelings about these steel shapes and turns off the whole thing. I look at the shapes of the steel now and I see ideas. He thinks I'm working on parts. I'm working on concepts.

[hosh]

The core thing is exploring just exactly what is subjective and what is objective, and whether quality is subjective or objective. Pirsig came up with an answer, and then goes on to talk about excellence (arete). Thinking back, this discourse seems like it was deliberately embedded in a kind of every day, guy-next-door narrative in order to touch on lived experience of "quality".

Although Pirsig didn't explore it, quality is very much at the heart of any engineering, particularly when you try to quantify it. How effective is ISO-9000? GE was big on that. Boeing measured quality of their builds, until they compromised the process. What about Deming's approach (Total Quality Management)?

What is quality in software engineering? (We often sidestep that question and call it Software Craftsmanship instead). And there's a whole can of worms when we try to apply this to AIs.

[tarjei_huse]

For me, the way he approached debugging was worth it. The way he went about creating hypotheses and testing them is something I've gone back to again and again.

[__loam]

It's about how quality is fundamentally unmeasurable.

[hyggetrold]

Did you read the whole book yourself or just skim it? (asking sincerely)

[timeagain]

+1. It can become a ramble at times and full-time philosophers seem to hate it. On the other hand, there is a lot of practical wisdom in the first half of the book, and what I consider to be a good payoff if you stick through to the end.