Posted by alexandra_k on November 26, 2016, at 18:52:04
In reply to Re: Walking..., posted by hiddenhurt on November 22, 2016, at 9:17:52
Thank you :)
I found "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". It is a book that I remember from my childhood. We always had it in the house. I think it was one of the books that I picked up occasionally... But I could never get past the first paragraph or so. I'm pretty sure... I'm pretty sure I never read it. Didn't even know what it was about. I think I thought it was about a road trip on a motorcycle, which seemed uninteresting to me.
Sometimes when I read... I read looking for something that speaks to where I'm at. My predicament. Like how many people read the Bible, I suppose.
Anyway, quite a lot of it spoke to me. The superficial subject matter, and the deeper ones, too. I have never thought about this notion of 'quality' but it seems to be something like the notion of 'value'.
Wittgenstein was infamous for telling his students they should go and be engineers. His students were logicians, admittedly.
There is something in / to that.
Motorcycle maintenance... The stuff he said about that.
About the difference between an artist... A welder as an artist... And a disconnected hack. About starting out repairing motorcycles and then getting a hankering to modify / make / repair them better. About getting interested in the mathematics and physics that helps one do that.
About... The classical view of a motorcycle that you see in manuals. The different parts and so on... And then about how you generate hypotheses about what is wrong. And then about the problem of infinite hypotheses... About how you select intelligent hypotheses...
Maybe... If only you had enough computational power then you could just kludge through all the hypotheses...
How well is that working out? It is generating a lot of publications... People rotely applying the scientific method and coming up with a publication that is fairly indistinguishable from one produced by a machine... Even in social science fields. Perhaps especially in social science fields. Make it all about proper grammar and footnotes and... Indistinguishable from post-modernist essay generator... There are expensive books that publishing companies are selling that are that... People as machines...
And now (of course) I'm thinking about the art of medicine. And about machine diagnostics.
Robert M Pirsig
Robert M HsuingThe theraputic potential of the internet...
How f*ck*ng creepy similar is all of that???
The therapeutic potential is the art.
They are trying with the symptom checklist... Trying to make it all machine tractable...
Quality...
Value...
Meaning...All of these things drop out.
It is just... Freaky. It would make more sense if I had read it as a kid and if it had lodged itself deep down... But, I guess, We are products of our times. A lot of the same issues are still around. Technology... The neutrality of it... Ones relationship to it...
And then, of course, there isn't much of a step from there to people maintenance / medicine.
And it helps me understand what I've found so very hard about public health. I get, now, why I was so bothered that he thought there was something... On the down low... About my being a consumer. It was because nobody else in the room was or was expected to be. It was all about coming up with a system that other people and other people's kids would get to use.
I really do think that an awful lot that is wrong with public health would be put right if the people designing it were required to use it as well.
On the other hand... There are a constituency that seem attached to life being nasty bruitish and short. Life is about taking whatever you can get away with. They don't see any problem with their kids being subject to that, either. This becomes more true the more kids they have...
I need to not engage with this for too long.
I'm getting a motorcycle :) Just a baby one (Suzuki GN125). Enough to get my full on over the next couple years. Might see about maintaining it... That's what got me started on this... After my 6 month maintenance on my bike resulted in the seat being overgreased and the disk brakes continually shrieking. If you want something done properly...
It's hard to find a knowledgeable artist.
I miss you Dr Bob.
poster:alexandra_k
thread:1093190
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20160906/msgs/1093256.html