Dune (all 6)

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig

Manufacturing Consent

The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan

If This Is a Man, Primo Levi

Light, M. John Harrison

EDIT: Jeez, downvoters clearly have never read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

A very interesting read for hackers.

I wouldn't say I agree with all of it, but its a great read nonetheless.

"Beautiful Data", a couple of chapters, i like the "Beautiful" series cause you can take any chapter as a more or less isolated topic.

("Culture-bearing," BTW, I got from Pirsig's afterword to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, yet another book I will never regret reading. :-) )

The Richest Man in Babylon - George Samuel Clason

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert M. Pirsig

How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie

This is such a beautiful thread!

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&camp=...

Reading this besides something like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a good exercise in seeing the world a little more clearly.

Thanks for your feedback man; your input on making the design more homogeneous is certainly worthy; I didn't notice it from that perspective. And umm, well, Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance is kinda more of a philosophical / metaphysics of quality book :p

Cheers,

Dhaval

When you start your workday, work, even if only for a little bit. That is, don't start your workday by checking email, HN, Facebook...

Everyone knows about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM). Lila is not as well known, but it's fun to read if you really enjoyed ZMM. https://www.amazon.com/Lila-Inquiry-Robert-M-Pirsig/dp/05532...

* The miracle of mindfulness - Thich Nhat Hanh

* Letters from a stoic - Seneca

* Amusing ourselves to death (Neil Postman) (combined with 1984 by Orwell and Brave New World by Huxley)

* Zen mind, beginner's mind - Shunryu Suzuki

* Walden - Henry David Thoreau

* How I Became Free in an Unfree World by Harry Browne - I read this years ago, but decided to re-read on a whim and it's surprising how relevant it still is.

It appeals to a certain type of thinker. For me, it was for confirmation that there was another individual in the universe whose brain worked like mine. This alone was a revelation, even aside from the book's profundity.

Being an extravert the book inspired me on how to get energy from my inner world of ideas and images during quarantine. Beautiful metaphors and philosophical inquiries into values.

Perhaps I should read it again to get a deeper appreciation for it

2. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

3. Siddhartha

4. Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

5. The Blind Watchmaker

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Philosophy).

I am a bit biased as someone who is fond of motorcycles, but they're both excellent without that, I think.

I'm a bit surprised this book doesn't come up more often in tech circles. Has quite a bit of overlap with the philosophical questions we face daily.

I really enjoyed the parts of that book that were actually about the motorcycle trip. Pirsig's thoughts on quality didn't resonate with me, at all.

They mentioned Castaneda (The Teachings of Don Juan) in the article, I also thought of The Magus by John Fowles, The Glass Bead Game by Hesse and of course Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

What others are out there?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_%28Plato%29

There, I've helped answer the question for 30k of your 5mil, I'm sure others can help with the remaining 4.97m :)

Seconded. I think this one does a good job at resetting one's worldview to the state of 'what do we actually know?'

The Fountainhead

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

It was recommended by several friends, and I finally got around to reading it. Helped, along with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to work through my personal thought process. Highly recommended.

- The New Capitalist Manifesto - Umar Haque

- Net Smart - Howard Rheingold

- Delivering Happiness - Tony Hsieh

- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert M. Pirsig

Is that you, Mr. Pirsig?

Serious question, though... have you read Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?

Coupla magazine subscriptions since I don't really want much else right now.

By the way, just finished Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance a few weeks ago. Great read even though I don't agree with it all.

- 'The Selfish Gene' - Richard Dawkins

Grokking the concept changed the way I thought about life forever.

- 'Quantum Reality' - Nick Herbert

One of the best introductory level books on quantum physics mysteries. No nonsense.

- Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig

The book that introduced me to Kant, Hume and philosophy of science. Just for that, I'm forever indebted to it.

Some favorite fiction books -

- Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
Loved 'Snowcrash' too.

- 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress' - Robert Heinlein

- Anything by Kurt Vonnegut, Milan Kundera, Somerset Maugham

If you consider abstract mathematics, it is easily seen that many mathematicians find most of their inspiration in the aesthetics of their ideas. Somehow the way we teach maths obscures this fact from the students.

Oh, and if you didn't already: Read «Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance». Aside from being a great story, it goes into detail about how technical work becomes art when done with Quality in mind.

When you do things for yourself, not only do you gain the experience when you have the agency and skills to add a layer of self-reliance, and not only do you have the beautiful experience of learning and appreciating the ins and outs of the things that contribute to your existence, but often when you achieve some degree of master of something you'll be building or maintaining things to a higher standard because you have a vested interest in keeping the tools around you that way as opposed to relying on a division of labour.

I've also assumed that this was the moral of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance though I've never read it.

(I have my own rituals.)

[0] Not mentioned on the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_rock_garden

Apparently the inspiration of both might have been Zen in the Art of Archery, which some say is better than either of the previous two, but I've never read it.

This discussion leads to him mentioning a favorite excerpt from some instructions he came across: "assembly of a Japanese bicycle requires great peace of mind."

EDIT: Also, The Phoenix Project is very very good if you are into IT management: funny, and although a novel then the content will make you want to fix your company and perhaps even think bigger about your carrer. But this one won't last you a summer since if you read it that slow you'll forget what was going on. :)

Robert M. Pirsig: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig: Lila - An Inquiry Into Morals

Eliezer Yudkowsky: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

I used to read a lot, but over the past few years I've read less and less. 2020 was definitely not a good year for deep reading.

That being said, I think Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is an important read for anyone in technology. It changed how I approach and appreciate technology.

In my opinion this single topic is impossible to fit in a presentation. A book is more reasonable format. I would recommend "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"

"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert Pirsig

You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Just make yourself perfect and then paint naturally. That's the way all the experts do it. The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isn't separate from the rest of your existence. If you're a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you aren't working on your machine, what trap avoidances, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh? It all goes together.

The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be "out there" and the person that appears to "in here" are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.

I really enjoy the service. Mostly go through all the top books and see if anything calls out to me, and so far the site has done really well at keeping the informal contract of "I give you my email, you don't spam me".

What would you recommend I read / watch / do if I want to learn about technical writing?

P.S I remember that Robert Pirsig, the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was a technical writer in his dayjob.

The only question is if you can afford hiring a few gods for the task or you are rather satisfied with whatever falls off a truck and in reality is completely uncapable of inveting universe (or even capable of baking).

At the end the customers digestive problems are those that do matter. And you can get sued for food poisoning.

I personally love apple pies and am just not satisfied with plastic taste of supermarket frozen, microwave oven heated "products".

“When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.”

― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

. Programming Clojure

. Little Schemer (re-reading)

. Evidence-Based Technical Analysis: Applying the Scientific Method and Statistical Inference to Trading Signals by David Aronson

It's a nice fiction book that goes into how different people view the world. At least that's what I've gotten out of it so far, I'm only about a quarter of the way through it so I might be missing some of the things it covers.

The driving metaphor comes from the contrast between (effectively) renting a BMW motorcycle (since they are hard to repair), and owning a simpler model that can be maintained by oneself.

The stated benefit is greater autonomy and satisfaction derived through taking ownership and solving one's own problems - a more classical approach to life. Rather than taking a "fix this for me" attitude, you see the world as something that you have control over.

Personally, I've found it very satisfying every time I'm able to repair something in my car, which I've owned for 8 years.

These concerns with modernity go pretty far back in our history, and some very smart people have come up with workable solutions you can adopt as an individual without needing to go change society.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicurus

The Anarchist's Cookbook

Industrial Society and Its Future (the Unabomber Manifesto)

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

A powerful excerpt from the book:
'So the thing to do when working on a motorcycle, as in any other task, is to cultivate the peace of mind which does not separate one’s self from one’s surroundings. When that is done successfully then everything else follows naturally. Peace of mind produces the right values, the right values produce the right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.'

Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance was one of the first books on philosophy that I read outside of my philosophy curriculum at university and it stayed with me.

It's a great book discussing the metaphysics of quality, but not just that. It's written in a captivating way, mixing both the 'food for thought' as well as a pleasant narative about a father and a son on a motorcycle trip.

It's one of the philosophy books that I can recommend to people who are not directly interested in philosophy as well, which gave me some quite fun discussions with my friends about the topics in the book without being too deep into the philosophy itself.

Someone hasn't read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Never really been one to enjoy popular books on philosophy (Alchemist was overrated, Monk who sold his Ferrari cliched, The Secret just boring ...IMO) and picked this up at a used book store. The book truly put a new perspective on life for me.

Perhaps it was a combination of the time when I read the book: Undue stress, massive imposter syndrome, that feeling of not moving ahead in life, and the oh-so-messed-up quarter life crisis, but this book was an absolute eyeopener for me.

Find your own meaning in life, and live your own philosophy instead of aping a "master" (spiritual or otherwise) because a "master" is someone who has shaped his own philosophy and that will almost NEVER completely apply to you. In the book, when the titular Siddhartha realises this and starts off on his own journey, something clicked within me and I started making genuine attempts to get past my (mostly) self-imposed problems in life. Can easily say this book helped me get through confusing times and come out better on the other side

Truly a life-changing book for me, and no wonder it's been popular for over half a century!

----

The Art of War, The War of Art (except the final bits of the book) and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance come in a close second, each having shaped the way I look at decision making processes and influenced my general life strategy

Long before Pirsig begins asking fundamental questions like, “What can we know?”, and “What is the meaning of Quality?”, he mentions the seed of his destruction — his realization when studying biochemistry that there were an infinite number of possible theories that he could propose to explain any observation, and that there was no way he could ever know which theory was right, nor would he live long enough to soundly validate any hypothesis he might invent of his own.

Pirsig's ensuing battle with subjective thinking and eventual mental decline as he lost faith that objectivity was fruitful as a way of life, much less realizable... This was my first glimpse into the futility of pursuing a life dedicated to exploring objective reality, i.e. science.

In the 30 years since, I can only confirm that epiphany — there is far more to be gained by telling people what they want to hear and by self promotion than in persisting with reality. Storytellers are far more beloved than are sticklers for the truth.

I had an interview for a "digital interactive agency" where a 24-year-old lectured me this and that and how great she was. She was flabbergasted to find out I had more people working under me than were in her entire company.

At the end of all this she says--"Do you think you are ready to step up to X quality?"

I had just finished my yearly reading of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZAMM), and I was pretty annoyed with her, so I asked, "How do you define quality?"

ZAMM is about a philosophy called the metaphysics of quality-- I knew that no matter what she said, I would have an advanced argument from ZAMM to belittle her with (the interview was just a formality at this point).

She replied, "Hmmm, I'll have to think about that." And I never heard from this individual or agency again.

I would like to think that day she learned not to say stupid things. Not to insult people over when you really don't even know what you're saying.

But I doubt it.

We weren't allowed to read or do anything but sit in boredom during suspension (school rules) but he made an exception for me if I wanted to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (at his recommendation).

I bought a copy and brought it to suspension the next day, read the whole thing that week. Good memories thanks to the room monitor dude and an excellent book.

The post makes a wonderful connection between Quality, which became an
increasingly abstract thing for me, to something very concrete.

Older generations doubt the ability of the young to "get things right"...to keep the society they are familiar with on track...

Younger generations, with fresh eyes, wonder how older generations let things "go so wrong"...with an eye toward improving the society they've inherited...

An excellent book, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals, by Robert Pirsig, explores this and other phenomena in great depth...

It's a semi-sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance...

I recommend it...

Favorite quote from the book —

“Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you’re no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow.”

Other influential books: 1984, The Fountainhead, and Siddhartha

Yes but then you miss out on an almost "bonding" experience with the machine and feeling of intimately understanding it. That's why I do most of my own car repair, even though it takes me longer than a shop would take.

Read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance about the "Romantic" vs. "Classical" approach to such things.

His description of the feeling that something is going wrong, and of the emotional shift required to change frame before making the problem worse, that's saved me from more bad decisions than I could count.

Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - at it's core I felt it was about systems and how we can never truly eliminate or remove them from our lives but only replace them with other ones. A hard lesson for me to learn but I feel it really changed the way I look at the world.

The Book of Five Rings - it's a book written by a masterless samurai duelist about his thoughts on dueling. But there was one statement in it that changed how I looked at everything, he basically broke down how we shouldn't have favored tools but rather use the ones that are best suited for the task at hand. Which had a profound impact on me.

there are more but I'll need time to think about it some more

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is always good for a mind-bending read. All of HP Lovecraft's work is excellent. Anything by Arthur C Clarke or Isaac Asimov or Ray Bradbury. All of Ayn Rand's stuff (the philosophy is flawed, but the plots and writing are something to behold).

As another reviewer said, this is a love letter from the author to mathematics. But, like most love letters, if you are not the sender or the receiver, it won't make a great deal of sense. There are many anecdotes from the life of a mathematician here, and many short vignettes of mathematics. But not enough details about either to make some kind of autobiography or some kind of informative math book. Unfortunately, since I'm neither the author nor Mathematics, I'm left with nothing but the feeling that I've been reading something that was not intended for me.

Here's one example of the former: "I once went to a party and decided to try an experiment: I refused to tell anyone what my job was. Telling people you're a mathematician produces all sorts of odd responses. Some people become afraid, and extract themselves very quickly, but others immediately start trying to demonstrate how 'intelligent' they are. Yet others immediately start trying to belittle me...." Unfortunately, she never tells us what happened in the experiment.

Maybe, as philosopher Robert Pirsig theorized in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", you must rely on Quality!

The book looks at what it means to say something has 'quality'.

It didn't teach me any new philosophical methods or theories, but it did make me look at my own work differently and start asking: how can I make something with the highest quality? What compromises that quality? What is a method that leads to the highest quality?

Translating that to my business life: in the startup scene I've scene a lot of startups treat lean as gospel (myself included at one point), and as a result they compromise on the quality that both themselves and their customers are happy with. So I certainly found it useful to have a book that made me think about this.

Object-oriented programming has its drawbacks, of course.

But your monologue here is a bit grandiose. It reminds me of the narrator in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as he reached the pinnacle of his insight into metaphysical Quality. He was actually just going mad, of course.

Maybe you had communication difficulties with other people because you were having a severe case of burnout that verged on a nervous breakdown? In any case, I'm glad you're feeling better.

I would reread

"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"

http://www.amazon.com/Zen-Art-Motorcycle-Maintenance-Inquiry...

before I woud crack GEB open again. In fact I discarded GEB. My belief is that the Devil himself collects these discarded old volumes and passes them out as reading material to nerds in Hell.

For 8 years you've been wasting your free time. Sell the GEB and read Nagel's "Godel's Proof" (see my other post for URL) instead.

No I mean "we". This is a huge collaborative effort. We wouldn't be getting anywhere if not for the help of many dozens (more like hundreds, at this point) people helping out.

> "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance"

I have that book, I can't remember reading it, however. Thanks for the rec. I'll give it another look.

> Don't read it for the theory but the slow decent into madness.

The reason why you see my name everywhere and no one else's is merely because of comments like this. I have very thick skin and can take it, but I don't want to subject my friends and collaborators to this kind of gaslighting. We are almost at the point where the evidence is overwhelming that this theory is correct, and we have peer-reviewed papers in the works (with dozens of collaborators with fancy edu positions whose full names will be on the paper), and then it's game over. In the meantime you can either look at the increasing piles of extraordinary evidence (for example, I made a language today called Dumbdown in less than an hour http://treenotation.org/designer/#standard%20dumbdown that I would not be surprised if a variant evovles to be bigger than markdown) and think about things for yourself, or jump to a (wrong) conclusion simply because this is a low probability/black swan/outlier event.

Black swans are rare. But they do happen.

Or, you could check out my personal introduction to the Tao... The Tao of Pooh. I read it when I was a teenager, thinking it positively absurd that anyone would create a book attempting to explain an ancient school of philosophy through Winnie the Pooh. It's not absurd. I found it sublime, and the idea of taoism made a powerful impression on me and probably played a sizable role in driving me to further study of philosophy.

Does anyone know whether Pirsig got the idea from Luhmann, Luhmann from Pirsig, both from someone else, or if both invented it independently?

Namely, the division between people who just want things to work and hope "somebody" else will step in when a fix is needed, and those who understand the abstraction sometimes leaks, and you need to be able to dig in and at least know how to solve some problems "under the hood". He makes a whole philosophy of "romantics" vs "classics" out of it, but I think that's irrelevant here: what matters is that no-one should be forced to be powerless about the hardware they own.

This is obviously related to the right to repair. Pirsig wasn't thinking of Apple, but he does mention John Deere!

You seem like you're trying to get back in touch with the idea of 'Quality' as it applies to life, and he does a good job at walking a reader through it. I won't bother going into what I got out of it, as most philosophy is best experienced without preconceived expectations

Nowadays, you have to slow down. Most tech businesses thrive on shallow thinking to drive engagement, and try to tweak every little heuristic to "get a click" to justify their own existence.

By all means, take a break, but understand as well that as a practitioner you are part of the problem every time you refuse to say no to some dark pattern B.S.

I've started measuring every software pitch against my first set of Encyclopedia of the Natural World CD's from back in the 90's.

No phoning home. No ads. No engagement metrics
No dark patterns.

Just an encyclopedia of 0's and 1's.

It is amazing when you look at most software nowadays, and realize that a large proportion of it (especially on mobile) is trying to convert user->value instead of providing value->user.

"Guidebook to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance":

http://www.amazon.com/Guidebook-Zen-Art-Motorcycle-Maintenan...

Both Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the Guidebook are highly recommended. Just read.

So, if I may ask someone who cites it as his/her favorite book: would you mind writing up a comment with why you found it so profound and enjoyable?

I'm really curious because I feel like I'm in the minority for not appreciating it.

It's been quite a number of years, and memory fades somewhat, but for me, Zen was one of the most profound reads of my life. I just checked the Wikipedia page for Pirsig, which states (somewhat unclearly, with regard to what "Board" is being described):

Pirsig's publisher's recommendation to his Board ended with "This book is brilliant beyond belief, it is probably a work of genius, and will, I'll wager, attain classic stature."

That was certainly my impression. I should revisit Zen, as well. Unfortunately, my old copy -- full of my scribbled notes -- was I believe lost to water damage.

Reminds me of reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"

It might be explained by what is know as Yerkes–Dodson law[1], which describes how performance increases with mental arousal up to a certain point then decreases. If different types of tasks correspond with different arousal for different people, then the type of welder or developer one is is orthogonal to their fundamental skill. Instead it would mean that the first type needs to cast the problem as something novel in order to gin up the necessary level of concentration to get the problem done, hence the rock solid code that has sloppy/inconsistent style.

It makes sense that a good advocate would be highly skilled, but the type who has difficulty with necessary work that seems mundane. In other workplaces this might be the person who seems to have low output, but gets their coworkers past their roadblocks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes–Dodson_law

What it’s missing, is that in Pirsig’s eyes there are 2 essential different kinds of quality, Dynamic quality and Static quality. Dynamic being the change agent, while static clings to what’s good about the past. In his eyes, both are necessary for real progress. Too much dynamic = throwing the baby out with the bath water. Too much static = living in the past.

Thinking about it like a machine learning problem, dynamic quality steps out into the unknown, searching for quality paths not yet travelled. Static quality is the machine’s memory of what’s worked well thus far.

Occasionally, a step into the unknown is so good, that huge amounts of machine memory seem irrelevant / obsolete. In these moments, humans are prone to wanting to wipe the whole past, without preserving the half or more that’s still an essential piece of their progress thus far.

On the other side, humans are prone to tell their peers to stop stepping out into the unknown and argue that we should just go back a step / stay where we were indefinitely.

If that’s at all intriguing, feel free to go read my favorite book, Lila. You’ll want to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (where he recognizes quality) first, if you haven’t already.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Pirsig

Those at the top are, for lack of a better term, at one with their profession, and programming is certainly no different. A good programmer can feel, in a very visceral way, the difference between good and bad code, in the same way that the average person can feel the difference between Michelangelo and street graffiti. I consider myself to be only a very mediocre coder, and yet every now and then, I see a program that is just... beautiful. Aesthetically pleasing. And I couldn't tell you why.

Things like that can't be diagramed or taught; it's up to the individual to grow that seed of what Pirsig calls 'Quality' within themselves.

Listening to audio books has allowed me to relax, enjoy the reading, and get to work excited about the day.

I treat the time as a chance to "read" those books which I wouldn't normally spend either my work hours nor my free time hours on. It's a chance to get informed on topics that are only slightly related to work, but expand your mind in ways that will make you a better thinker, and thus a better programmer.

The books I've found particularly good on audio are:

* Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

* Thinking, Fast and Slow

* How Not to be Wrong

* Ready Player One

* Neuromancer

(somewhat cliched but) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

GEB.

1. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; I have no words for this except that it was profound and I was ready for it.

2. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team; a classic where history knows better than we do.

3. Special Topics in Calamity Physics; a fictional tale that shows you how damn easy it is to get lost in conspiracy and speculation.

4. House of Leaves; you can't beat a mind-bending horror like that. I live for this stuff.

5. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse;
It's 50 pages long, just read it.

6. Tantra Illuminated;
A well researched and academic study into the history and the beliefs of Tantra

7. The King in Yellow and its derivatives; The Hanged King lore in the SCP universe is obsessively fascinating to me.

* "Alice in Wonderland", Carroll

* "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid", Hofstadter

* Either "His Dark Materials", Pullman; or "Illuminatus!", Shea and Wilson

* "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", Adams (all of its sequels are also good)

* "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" and "Lila", Pirsig

* Either "Watchmen", Moore and Gibbons; or "1984" or "Animal Farm", Orwell

* "Neuromancer" or "Pattern Recognition", Gibson

Be wary of anybody who recommends self-help, attitude improvement, psychology, business/management, or similar genres.

Also, I notice that some folks have recommended the official Steve Jobs biography. From my biography shelf, I humbly recommend instead "iCon", by Young and Simon, which is unauthorized and much more detailed.

In many cases, what a high GPA shows is that you've got a highly developed ability to get along with the system. For positions in which that's important, you'll get higher consideration than someone with a lower GPA.

There are a lot of observations about how grades don't correlate well with innate ability. There are several well-known cases of highly successful tech entrepreneurs who'd dropped out of college (Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg). Though I can also think of many who've completed undergrad or advanced-degree programs as well. Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance notes that his best students (he was a college professor for a time) got the worst grades. Of course, the worst students did as well, so don't be guided by false equivalence. My experience is that if you're actively and directly questioning material, you may well find your nominal academic performance suffers for it.

For tech in particular, execution matters far more than GPA, and having a solid project or projects under your belt will amount for far more than a high GPA. I know and have worked with many people who lack a formal college degree but who were absolutely brilliant in their work. Sadly, the lack of degree can limit opportunities and/or upward mobility in many firms, though this may change, particularly with recent trends in college costs and financing.

In my experience, most people cannot break things down logically nor do they appreciate what it takes to provide clear instructions. There is an emphasis in the world on communication which is a fine start, but being able to convey an idea clearly really only becomes helpful once you understand the idea clearly.

Besides programmers and mathematicians, the only people I've met with the faculties to properly break things down are lawyers*. Law school trains you in the ability to approach an idea from different angles in order to identify attack vectors. As such, lawyers tend to be highly capable of feats of logic but are equipped in such a way that they are almost entirely adversarial and deconstructive.

So while I completely agree with Chris's point and understanding that this is a banner he raises constantly, I'm a little disappointed to see him attack this initiative to get more people into coding. I'm all for better modeling tools and better teaching practices but I think teaching people to code is a wonderful solution in the interim. Framing an argument like this will only stir controversy in an otherwise worthy cause.

edit: I've met plenty of people who aren't programmers, mathematicians, or lawyers that are logically capable. But as a general rule of thumb, those are the only three professions I've interacted with personally that have consistently shown that aptitude. Either way, please don't let this personal anecdote distract from the overall message, I only left that comment in there because I wanted to emphasize how rare the ability is across most disciplines.

(Also on the topic of debugging, if you replace "motorcycle maintenance" with "computer software debugging")

But I'm saying, when you're measuring quality objectively, it just doesn't matter. What matters is the thing itself. The created object. The outcome.

I'm not simply incorrect—I'm simply correct. My argument has the constraint of simplicity. It is defining the basic existence of a thing which we know exists, namely Quality. When you add complexity, yes, the definition is no longer sufficient to describe the entire process; but I'm not claiming that perfect code and perfect coders are possible in reality. I'm saying: start with simple and true definitions so you understand what quality is by itself, so that once you add situations and reality to it you can still try to achieve something close to "good." It is a matter of scope.

This isn't an argument. Quality exists. Defining it is hard, yes, but it's not impossible to understand that one thing can be better than another by many measures, and we say that thing has higher Quality.

Read "Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance," it'll twist your brain up some more.

What you're going to say next is of course that you're right and that devolving into silly philosophical arguments doesn't mean anything to real-world work, so yes, I guess I'll agree with that.

It's not about Zen or motorcycle maintenance. However, it _is_ a book that will make you think about the nature of work and how one way of looking at work collides with another.

  For this you keep a lab notebook. Everything gets written down, formally,
  so that you know at all times where you are, where you’ve been, where you’re
  going and where you want to get. In scientific work and electronics technology
  this is necessary because otherwise the problems get so complex you get lost
  in them and confused and forget what you know and what you don’t know and
  have to give up.
  
  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
  Robert M. Pirsig

That's not to say that you wouldn't gain SOMETHING, nor that it's a bad interview question. I actually like it. It's just not terribly productive, in an engineering sense.

I was given it as a gift from a friend and have seen it recommend here on HN

One which I really enjoyed was:

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycl...

I don’t know of many others like it.

I’d really like to ‘get into’ the classics, but it’s like I need to onboard by reading a bunch of contemporary motorcycle style versions first, so I have some familiarity with the concepts.

https://www.amazon.com/Finite-Infinite-Games-James-Carse/dp/...

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

https://www.amazon.com/Zen-Art-Motorcycle-Maintenance-Inquir...

“Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristic of quality.”

― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“You’ve got to live right, too. It’s the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts. You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That’s the way all the experts do it. The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isn’t separate from the rest of your existence. If you’re a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you aren’t working on your machine, what trap avoidance, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh? It all goes together ... The real cycle you're working in is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be "out there" and the person that appears to be "in here" are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.”

― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you to get you get a bad grade. Here in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's. Originality on the other hand could get you anything --- from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.

The book of course is all about Quality, Creativity, and Innovation. Highly recommended.

Books by Bradbury
Books by asimov

Just starting Antifragile and it might make the list

"Mr. Bloomfield's Orchard" - a fun book about fungi from a mycologist with a solid sense of humor.

"On the Move" - Oliver Sacks's biography. Insightful and uplifting, especially if you enjoy writing.

"Ready Player One" - a dystopian cyber thriller. Reminded me of Snow Crash. Good stuff.

"The Last Place on Earth" - a good (if labored) summary of the races to the north and south poles and their geopolitical impacts.

"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" - been on my list for years. Long but good.

"Steve Jobs" - needs no introduction. Got me interested in Isaacson's other books.

"Hallucinations" (Oliver Sacks) - insightful analysis of the prevalence and for-reaching effects of hallucination. It's a lot more common (and puzzling) than most of us realize.

This is a really interesting category. Makes me think about other books I've read that are a bit like that. I'd probably put Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance in there. Maybe Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan as well.

Highly recommended to anyone who likes reading. It's not just the philosophy and it's not just the story, it's the way they are part of the same whole, with deep roots in the American landscape, that makes this book so special. Now I want to revisit it and see if I can pick up his later work as well.

If you still haven't read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, do yourself a favor and pick up a copy.

Pirsig's concept of "quality" sticks with me in every decision I make as a parent, engineer, and product manager.

RIP, Mr. Pirsig.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_...

There's something satisfying about doing things the hard way. If this stuff were easy or fun all the time, it would get boring.

The difficult part is maintaining that drive to do things the hard way. When hard things get harder, and then impossible, its hard not to start to feel depleted. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance[1] calls this reservoir of inner strength "gumption" and points out that you have to make an effort to keep the tank full. I see it as a kind of faith, not in God, but in yourself; faith that you can and will overcome whatever insurmountable obstacle you face. I try to keep that tank topped off by running, reading, and, despite how hard it is, taking regular vacations where I step away to disconnect altogether. That way, I can feel anticipation in the face of a challenge rather than fear or despair; anticipation of a journey that won't be easy, but will certainly be rewarding.

[1]http://www.amazon.com/Zen-Art-Motorcycle-Maintenance-Inquiry... - I read this book every 5 years and each time I find something completely new. It's a remarkable work.

When I got older and moved away from home, I began to better understand "The Absurd" that Camus talks about. I had been struggling with the idea that I sought a logical reason for absolutely everything, but was unable to find one in many cases.

The acceptance of "The Absurd" allowed me to deal with the fact that meaning is often obscured or unattainable. I find it much easier to accept the world as it is without burdening myself with attempting (futilely) to logically explain everything. Things just are.

That being said, I don't reject logic at all; a question I was struggling with was "logically, why should I value logic?" Camus helped explain to me the absurdity of this question, and existence, and to accept that it would remain unanswered.

Camus also helped me to find joy in struggle. He says "The struggle to the summits suffices to fill the heart of man. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." I now accept that there isn't any deeper meaning to struggle and it's important to live in the moment. Everyone is struggling in their own way. Everyone is struggling for their own desires, and at the deepest level, there is no reason for it.

Another book I recommend for the same reasons as above is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Finance/statistics :
The Black Swan by Nicholas Nassim Taleb
The Drunkards Walk by Leonard Mlodinow

Math/science history :
Euclid's Window by Leonard Mlodinow
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Physics:
Newton's Principia for the Common Reader by S. Chandrasekhar

Lit:
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Philosophy:
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki
Any of the upanishads but probably Kena Upanishad, Isha Upanishad, or Prashna Upanishad at first (selected for (relative) ease in readership by yours truly)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig (for a gentle introduction into Eastern thought)

I'm missing countless others but this is what I have right now. Thanks for the prompt and happy reading! :)

“The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

Not only that, but open-mindedly exploring new ways of doing things once will make you a better web dev, make it easier to learn the next thing, and keep you from getting stuck in an identity trap, i.e. "I am a COBOL developer" rather than "I know lots of COBOL (but moved on when the market did)"

Just watch out for the typical 'developer new to a language and tries to make everything just like their old language' trap.

...and the 'I now know a dozen architectural approaches to solve this problem so suffer from paralysing indecision' trap.

Also, recommend reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". It's short and has a nice take on skill transferability

Life of Pi - Bought it following the buzz of the movie. Read the book first, then saw the movie. A good simple read. Sort of reinforces, the 'various models' idea of the 'Zen...' book. Found the movie slightly better than the book, which was a surprise. Ang Lee has made subtle changes, which makes the story more peppy.

Perfect Rigor - Captures the story (and math) behind, the turning down of a million dollar prize by Gregory Perelman. The genius Russian mathematician, who solved a 100 year old standing problem, of the missing proof of the Poincare Conjecture. It was perhaps my best technical read of the year.

I am feeling Lucky (by Doug Edwards): Google's emplpyee number 59, writes about his experience at Google. I found it the best book on Google. Better than some of the others, which seem a bit like officially authorized versions.

Below ones I read it in 2011. But haven't posted here, so here goes:

Born to Run (By Chris Mcdougall): A health book. Has really helped my running. Highly recommended to all.

A guide to a good life: The ancient art of Stoic Joy (By Joseph Irvine): A very good book on philosophy. Read it on the reco (http://sivers.org/book) of Derek Sivers.

I also totally agree on the thing with working with your hands – it turns out we at least partially think with our bodies. Howard Gardner also made an interesting case for that in his book the Seven Intelligences, but okay – the source much matter who wrote about it: I've experienced it first-hand.

Doing yoga when I've been strained about something often results in what can only be described as a stream of insight and ideas. The same thing with running. We (i) have so much to learn.

Don't believe me? Consider Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for a second. The main character of that book is mechanically inclined. But are you? Could you, for instance, explain how a simple mechanical device like a differential works? Probably not. Therefore in some sense you fail to be the kind of person that Prisig was describing. Not because you lack interest, but because your interest is in a different area.

(BTW if you're curious, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYAw79386WI has an excellent explanation of how a differential works.)

When you start doing this, you may find something interesting. You'll notice that people like tptacek, whose actual skills should properly impress you, have great respect for people like patio11. Why? Because tptacek recognizes what patio11 is better at than he is, and can respect patio11 for that, at the same time as patio11 is very clear on what he is and isn't good at.

So what is patio11 good at? It is very simple. He's good at figuring out how tech people can market themselves. This may not be a skill you care about. Not one you wish to learn. But one that tptacek sees value in.

And that is how life goes. We each specialize. Some things we choose to learn. Other things we need to know who is good so we can know who to go to to do it. And the whole is bigger than the sum of the parts.

Just make the transition from looking down on people who choose to be good at things you don't, to accepting and respecting them for what they are. You may be surprised at how much of your life smooths out.

Or you can choose to sit in your little corner, on top of your mountain of specialized knowledge, sneering at the world to make up for the fact that others don't respect you in the way you think you deserve to be respected. And then wonder why people don't enjoy being around you.

- Total Freedom by J Krishnamurti

- Wit and Wisdom from Poor Richard’s Almanack: Benjamin Franklin

- Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio

- The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius by Marcus Aurelius

- 10% Human: How Your Body’s Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness by Alanna Collen

- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert Pirsig

- What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir by Haruki Murakami

- Damn Right!: Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger by Janet Lowe

- Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Harari

- The Complete Adventures of Feluda (Volume 1) by Satyajit Ray

To do that, start with a customer profile. Answer the following questions:
What is the problem? How is it solved? What is needed to implement the solution? Who can implement it (are there any barriers like equipment, technical expertise)? How do you reach them?

Once you know who to contact, it is a great deal easier to find them. Contact those people. Listen to what they say about the problem. Ask yourself – does my code address this problem? If not, fix the code, or call a different potential customer (actually, do both).

Document what people say. You'll learn what the real pain point is, you'll learn how other people have dealt with it, and you'll learn whether you are contacting the right potential customers.

If your product does address the problem, ask the person to buy your solution. You can offer a discount rate for being a trial customer. Get their feedback. If you can sell it, as is, to 1% of the people you contact, then you have a business (which is a whole new set of problems). If not, restart at an earlier stage. Maybe the code doesn't solve the right problem, or maybe you pitched the wrong customers?

It should be a creative learning process, and you seem to enjoy that already. If you want to bounce around more ideas, feel free to get in touch.

If Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance isn't required reading anymore, this could be a sign that it should be.

Best fantasy in terms of most imaginative and full of wonder: The Neverending Story by Michael Ende. (I know, everyone saw the crappy movie; it simply does not do the book justice.)

Best Scifi: The Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons

2. "The art of war" by Sun Tzu

3. "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius

It has shaped my thinking on 'what is good' or 'what does quality' mean. As an engineer it is easy to appreciate the author slowly going insane about the details he keeps coming back to, and as a human it is invaluable to have an understanding yourself of when something is 'good'.

Highly recommended.

I clicked the link thinking it wasn't that. Because I know and love that book. For those that haven't read the sequel Lila, I highly recommend it also. It goes into what Quality actually is in enormous detail, how it works, the different types and levels. While ZAMM is typically concerned with relatively simple systems (like a motorbike) and how humans interact with them, Lila is more the biological, social, societal systems humans are a part of, anthropology/anthropologists trying to study them, and how those systems work, how each has its own Quality.. (long story!)

A few years ago I read Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and was immediately struck by, well, the form is exactly the same as Pirsig's books - nature/observation writing interspersed with slabs of philosophical/theoretical. Lila is even mostly set on a boat going down a river also. Thoreau probably does both styles better, but Pirsig has a focused theme - 'has something to say'. So if you like Pirsig, you'll love Thoreau's travel books.

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us -- Dan Pink
(http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Surprising-Truth-About-Motivates...)

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? -- Seth Godin
(http://www.amazon.com/Linchpin-Are-Indispensable-Seth-Godin/...)

The Laws of Simplicity -- John Maeda
(http://www.amazon.com/Laws-Simplicity-Design-Technology-Busi...)

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance -- Robert M. Persig
(http://www.amazon.com/Zen-Art-Motorcycle-Maintenance-Inquiry...)

Invisible Man -- Ralph Ellison
(http://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Man-Ralph-Ellison/dp/0679732...)

How to Win Friends and Influence People -- Dale Carnegie
(http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/06...)

The Kindle app has really got me buying a lot of books that I now need to finish...

When I was 15, my dad and I bought an Austin Healey Sprite from a junkyard, which in addition to the engine under the bonnet also happened to have a complete spare engine in the passenger seat.

We made a blind guess at which engine was "better", and overhauled that one. It was a great opportunity to learn practical things about cars, but also deeper lessons in patience/gumption (Robert Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, comes across someone who is purchasing an entire motorcycle in loose parts. "He'll know something about motorcycles before he gets those together....and that's the best way to learn, too.").

The only problem was that on reassembly, we couldn't get our newly overhauled engine to start. We tried everything we could think of. We were unfamiliar with the peculiarities of British cars of that era, and it took us more than a few hours to notice and comprehend the words conveniently printed right there on the speedometer: "Positive Earth".

We switched the battery wiring so that the positive terminal connected to the car's ground, and she fired right up....at 2 o'clock in the morning in our suburban garage. What a great memory.

We hadn't yet hooked up the exhaust, so the throaty roar of the engine awakened more than a few neighbors.

Unlike the video shown, we ended up with more than a few leftover parts.

The little 4-cylinder ran just fine without them.

- Last year, I read both Das Kapital by Karl Marx and The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes.

- Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Note that these are classic works (Zen is the newest, from 1974), but they haven't lost their relevance yet. Zen is a journey in your mind, disguised as a journey by motorcycle by a father and his son. Das Kapital and GToEIM offer deeper insight in why our economy works the way it does, and I especially liked the contrast between the two books. Walden is difficult to classify. It changed the way I look at things, but I can't say exactly how. Sometimes I encounter a situation and a quote or scene from the book pops up in my head. Highly recommended!

"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert M. Pirsing

It's a thankless job. The developers I worked with directly loved me -- the best of the lot did, anyway. (My observation in turn of their abilities and professionalism.) But management had no clue (and refused to get one). And many developers outside of my exclusive little clique had to be brow-beaten into some level of compliance.

Speaking generally: You say you want quality. But your actions belie this.

P.S. If you're concerned about "quality", amongst other things you should read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". To understand the importance of and drive for quality amongst those who really care.

"The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of "style" to make it acceptable. And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes it all the worse. Now it's not just depressingly dull, it's also phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized homes. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents. You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. It's the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don't know where to start because no one has ever told them there's such a thing as Quality in this world and it's real, not style. Quality isn't something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start."

(At least, I assume that's what he means.)

I was told there were two types of people: those who were messy and those who were tidy, and that I should discover which I was and become comfortable with it.

I'm also not sure it's a good idea to metaphorically base life lessons from what people teach kids. I remember one kid being hit for using the wrong hand for writing. What was that meant to teach him? To value other people's judgement over his own?

Here what I mean, in a quote from the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

> Inside I see that Bill is a mechanic of the “photographic mind” school. Everything lying around everywhere. Wrenches, screwdrivers, old parts, old motorcycles, new parts, new motorcycles, sales literature, inner tubes, all scattered so thickly and clutteredly you can’t even see the workbenches under them. I couldn’t work in conditions like this but that’s just because I'’m not a photographic-mind mechanic. Bill can probably turn around and put his hand on any tool in this mess without having to think about where it is. I'’ve seen mechanics like that. Drive you crazy to watch them, but they get the job done just as well and sometimes faster. Move one tool three inches to the left though, and he’ll have to spend days looking for it.

It feels awfully 1984 for me.

I live in China and I can tell you it is painfull, sometime, when someone else chooses for you what you are allowed to do. I'm reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", and heck, this guy is right, you have those losers who fear and get used by technology, and the other guys who don't fear and use technology.

The cynic (borderline totalitarian) approach is to say that people should be divided between those clever hacker who have control and the rest, which should not be given "too much" control, because their are not clever enough, or don't need it, or what.

The humanist (democratic, cf "Enlightment") is the opposite: human being are clever, and should be given control on their life, on their tools, should be given choices, etc.

It seems to me that too many people have forgotten the we gather here, on HN, on the free, interesting and open parts of the Internet, because we like to control our shit, and ALSO we prefer the common people to be educated and control their shit. Especially when it come to so personal matters as their own files.

Sorry for the rant. I hope I'm mistaking, but from my recent reading of HN I feel there is a progressive shift toward more "Gruberness" which is questionable in its hypothesis and conclusions.

Its a good book. The philosophy is internally consistent, and interesting, as long as you don't mind a few Eastern ideas. And if I remember correctly he had quite a bit to say about documentation and engineering.

You'd enjoy the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/zen-motorcycle.pd...

I only try to minimize doing what in nothing contributes to my life or the others around me. That's why, for example, I like to read books that in someway intersect what I do in my job. But that doesn't mean that I never try new stuff and read a good one like "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance".

And for me, the best way to not "waste time" is by trying to merge your job with what you want with your life, since we already spend so much time on it.

I do not have kids. I've recently started a relationship, and I admit that I've been asking myself what's the best way to balance these. I get your point.

> Work that serves absolutely no purpose other than putting food on your table might fall into this category.

Have you read 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'[1]? The discussion on the concept of Value may challenge this idea that you have put forward.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_M...

Every year or two I give a light reading to Andy Hertzfeld's compilation "Revolution in the Valley", which is a print edition of many (and probably some extras) of the stories available on www.folklore.org

I am also midway through "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (Robert M. Pirsig) and I must recommend it. It's got a lot of philosophy in it that I think is both accessible and transcendent all at once. It's actively changing my world view.

In terms of skills acquired, I don't typically read for that purpose. I learn skills primarily by active work, not passive ingestion of information.

Take a look at the original studies, or the Scientific American article for a quicker read. (I read it in paper form, so you can probably find it as easily as I can).

As for deliberate practice, the idea sheds some light onto the right and wrong ways to do it. It seems to come back to the theme of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Deliberate practice is paying attention to the quality of the practice, and continuing to improve the quality. If this is accurate, then it should increase the differences in skill, as the individuals address their own various physical limits. It seems that the difference in the quality of the practice is one of the reasons people pay more for experts to teach them. I think the Olympics can just as easily be used to support the idea, as everyone's practice routines will vary.

Furthermore, studies of conventional wisdom often reveal conventional wisdom to be wrong, so I can't dismiss them. If the results make it easier for people to successfully perform "deliberate practice", then they will probably be well worth the money spent.

I'll also add another vote for The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus and for Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig.

On a darker note, if you had any illusions left, Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.

Cute. There's an odd, and I would say silly, obsession amongst some tech-obsessed people to claim the soon obsolescence of things like libraries and universities.

It's wonderful the recent huge push and availability of online materials and courses from big universities and others, especially for those who otherwise could not attend a university for whatever reasons, but to dismiss universities as a singular blob shows a certain misunderstanding and appreciation of what they are actually for and for teaching in general.

I'd recommend sitting in on various mentoring services, other student services, practicals and other things and also to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

You should read "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance", it a autobiography of a man who develops a meta-physical system existing of the holy trinity of a thing, the representation of a thing and the essence this representation is missing. Don't read it for the theory but the slow decent into madness.

Alain de Botton: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_de_Botton#Publications

Essay on Criticism: http://books.google.com/books?id=KFc7AAAAYAAJ&printsec=f...

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig

The Tao of Physics, by Fritjof Capra

Dancing Wu Li Masters, by Gary Zukav

The Naked Ape, by Desmond Morris

The Road to Serfdom, by Friedrich Hayek

The Worldly Philosophers, by Robert Heilbroner

The Story of Philosophy, by Will Durant

Grammatical Man, by Jeremy Campbell

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig

Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

I don’t think I really ever grasped the concept of relativity fully until reading that book — at least the aspects of time. [edit: well, not “fully”, I’m sure — but at least a lot more than I have in the past.]

At the same time I read the Dalai Lama’s, “Universe in a Single Atom”, which focuses on his love of science / physics, and was a very good pair to Rovelli’s book. It made me really think about the role of subjectivity in terms of Relativity. It also made me think about life, and consciousness, broadly.

That led to the Dalai Lama’s other book, “A Profound Mind”, which helped me really understand the Buddhist concept of “Emptiness” for the first time.

So here you have Uber, which has always been in the business of ferrying people around, but tries hard to separate itself from the business of ferrying people around. "We're not a transportation company, we're an app." "They're not employees of Uber, they're contractors." "They're not taxis, it's ride-sharing." "Uber's not liable for this tax, the driver is." It's not us, we're not the ones, we're not doing it, we're not involved, we're not responsible. The ultimate schism between the doer and the act. They're not exactly rushing forward to integrate the whole system under a unifying banner of Quality, are they?

If anything they're the epitome of the rationalist/analytic view of reality complete with all its schisms, all of which results in the kind of drab ugliness (on the human end mostly) that makes people want to shoot themselves in the face. Ugliness (poor quality) papered over with cheap stylistic embellishments that make it "not just depressingly dull, [but] also phony."

I loved it and will always remember it when I have forgotten many other books. It is not a 'philosophy' book but it is quite philosophical.

It's worth a read but it's slow in parts. Push yourself through or skip a few chapters.

Like many other readers my favourite part is the drink can as shim.

I've been really taking my time with this one, lots of annotations, lots of re-reading passages and pages.

I'm not done yet, but what I've read so far has really spoken to me and provided a lot of clarity where I previously had trouble filling in the blanks.

Personally, I'm not a Marxist, but I think he was right about this.

Whatever that intangible human aspect it is he was talking about -- At some point tech and science is probably sufficiently abstracted from normal human experience such that this concept is no longer relevant.

Also, on this topic I really recommend reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a thought-provoking book on quality of life in our age of human interaction with technology.

Frank Herbert, Dune - Changed my outlook on politics and complex systems full of complex issues.

Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Got me to understand why West is so different to the East and what is the true root cause to our current Western problems.

Sun Tzu, The Tao of War - If there was one and only one book I could have, this would be it.

- Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy

I'd recommend reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance though. It covers exactly this topic, the advantages of the scientific method, and where philosophical methods can work better.

The physicality of such jobs will make you appreciate and regain a sense of "real" work using your body, without all the information economy knowledge work stuff crammed in. People aren't just heads with bodies attached. Recommended books along this line of thought:

- Shop Class as Soulcraft

- Anything by Kerouac (he worked various odd jobs)

- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Asterix in Britain - Goscinny, Uderzo

You can go bonkers defining quality.

I once flew from Dali, Yunnan to Chengdu, Sichuan. From the plane's window we saw the moment we entered the enormous, province-sized sea of gray clouds over the Sichuan basin, leaving behind us blue sky and sunny hills. At the airport, the Sichuanese people said weather was really much better here. They actually prefer year-long heavy gray sky!

No kidding.

People complaining about their weather is not related at all to the quality of their local weather, which is not easy to define anyway. It is more a consequence of their way to see things. (Currently reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it resonates...)

The way the author explains how to go about to find the issue, fix it, etc. has made me much calmer about finding my own bugs and fixing them indeed.

I also have taught English to novice speakers and sometimes am struck by such questions they receive, sometimes being all of: obtuse, irrelevant and pedantic at the same time. But that is their primary objective: to sell tests and teaching materials to their tests, not direct competency.

Speed of learning is much harder to quantify because people aren't uniform in the experience they already bring to the table. So you'd have to administer tests of some sort across a wide variety of things to encompass things they do and don't already know.

But the talk of "objective metrics" for the "quality of developers" sounds a little bit leading, making this whole question seem a bit off-putting. You might be well-served by reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", especially the parts where Pirsig describes the difficulty of assessing Quality without already being an expert in the subject.

I think the best way to understand "Dune" is in historical context. Few SF books before then considered the ecology, or used Middle Eastern influences. These fresh ideas bowled over a lot of people at the time.

I re-read Dune when I was about 30, and thought it was nothing special, and a bit simplistic. Thing is, its existence helped change SF to expect more complex stories.

FWIW, I strongly dislike "STEM" as a term because it makes no sense to me in an educational or philosophical sense. I see it more as an attempt to lower the cost of hiring engineers and scientists by increasing the supply. For example, compare the funding going into getting more programmers and EEs, vs. marine biologists and paleontologists, even though all of them are STEM.

To clarify "no sense to me", I despise Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" because of its insistence on a clean division between romantic and classical views. I view "STEM"'s treatment of the rest of the liberal arts as being similarly incorrect in its dichotomous classification. Eg, mathematics is important for the humanities too.

But it's clear what _def is talking about by "STEM", and there's no need to suggest we or modern culture are following along with a perversion because the conversation isn't aligned with your personal views.

I would recommend semi-autobiographic books by sick minds.

Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, by Robert Pirsig who was actually treated by electrotherapy in a psychiatric ward. He ended up writing a not so sick book with a philosophy I find a lot more convincing than Ayn Rand's.

Valis, the novel in which Philipp K. Dick describes how he more or less fails to make sense of his religious (or whatever) experience. It's sold as science fiction, but that's just a weak way of saying that book is completely crazy. Since it is semi-autobiographic, the characters are much more alive than in anything else I read from Philipp K. Dick.

And if you want to know why Howard Roark has a low life expectancy:

Loneliness, human nature and the need for social connection, by John T Cacioppo and William Patrick. This is non-fiction.

100% with you on that. But it's not just a recent development. Robert M. Pirsig's book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" from 1974 deals with exactly that "problem" or attitude many people have nowadays. The book is in some parts kinda slow and hard to read, but I still recommend it to everyone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_M...

Books should not be downloading content to your brain. They should be more of a conversation. TV is only fun when you're asking questions back - that's why things like anime, drama, and Marvel movies have such dedicated fandoms.

There's the Pirsig's brick principle. To quote a site: https://www.thestrategyexchange.co.uk/2014/05/pirsigs-brick/

"There’s a point in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance where the author, Robert Pirsig, is describing semi-autobiographically his experience teaching English ('Rhetoric') at a college in Bozeman, Montana. One of his students, a clever but unimaginative girl, has set herself the task of writing an essay on the US. Pirsig gently suggests that she try narrowing her focus a little, perhaps to an essay about Bozeman.

A few days later the girl is back, quite upset this time, because she’s struggling to get started, and she can’t understand why she should be able to write about a small and incidental town like Bozeman when she’d wanted to write about the US.

Pirsig, angered, tells her to write about a street in Bozeman, about one building there – the opera house – and to start with the upper left hand brick.

Puzzled she goes away, and a few days later turns in a lengthy and outstanding piece of work. She had sat herself in a coffee shop across the street, started writing about the brick, and it was like taking a cork out of a bottle. She couldn't stop writing."

Wow. That's really interesting. I was actually going to give this a try because of Robert Pirsig, who wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Here's how he did it:

In a 1974 interview with National Public Radio, Pirsig stated that the book took him four years to write. During two of these years, Pirsig continued working at his job of writing computer manuals. This caused him to fall into an unorthodox schedule, waking up very early and writing Zen from 2 a.m. until 6 a.m., then eating and going to his day job. [1]

Funny he also writes technical literature (computer manuals versus technical magazine editor).

> the early hours are definitely some of my most creative time

This is something I've noticed too. When writing (usually essays, but sometimes code), I'm almost always more productive very late night/early morning. I don't know of any reasons (other than the obvious: you're not being distracted), nor do I know of any studies. Are there any out there?

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_M...

You might want to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which digs into this fallacy.

You might also be surprised how misleading objective IQ benchmarks are; the post processing in the camera's JPEG (and RAW processing... raw hasn't been raw for a long time) does a lot of stuff which is not well reflected by photographing a Siemens star.

I can't think of any better activity to spend my time on than reading. Eloquence in writing and speaking is built partially from reading, reading can make great practice for formal reasoning, it helps me think of creative solutions. So much so that often, when I'm stuck, I will sit down and read a couple of pages, maybe a chapter, before going back to what I was working on.

I went to high school with a classmate who used to have the Pirsig family over for dinner fairly regularly. Robert Pirsig's father Maynard Pirsig was a law professor at the University of Minnesota, where the classmate's father (and, years later, I) studied for a law degree. I think, having read only Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance among Robert Pirsig's writings, and after limited personal acquaintance with Maynard Pirsig, that Robert Pirsig takes a lawyer's "that's debatable" attitude as he approaches scientific and philosophical questions, which bogs down his quest for certainty.

AFTER EDIT: I've seen an interesting pattern of drive-by voting on this comment, but I'd like to know more about what other people who are acquainted with the writings of Maynard Pirsig (father) and Robert Pirsig (son) think about the influence of the one writer on the other.

Sometimes books simply aren't worth the shelf space.

I eventually felt the same about a $50 guitar that I bought out of musiciansfriend catalogue when I was 16. Tuning pegs that wouldn't sit still, poorly aligned frets… the rosette was printed onto a piece of paper. It's hard to believe that something as beautiful as a musical instrument could be built so poorly.

Short answer: The feeling of high quality occurs when perception exceeds expectation; the feeling of low quality occurs when perception does not meet expectation (wikipedia).

You're absolutely right. These things seem to make the assumption that you can't get the same satisfaction from crafting something digitally as you can from say working on a motorbike.

I would be interested to see a study, if it's not already available, on the psychological experience between people carrying out both, and the sense of satisfaction received when they determine a "job well done" in either medium.

But that's not to say I don't agree with him in many ways. I'm a software developer and often, and as I'm getting towards my 30s now, feel like I've totally surrounded myself in the digital and have put the physical on a shelf that is only continuing to gather dust.

I find myself yearning for something more "substantial" and to be able to come to old age knowing I've done more than written a few programs or whatever but then I find myself so distracted when it comes to actually seeking out things of substance, often simply falling back on the comfort of the digital.

I've a massive stack of books I've been trying to get through and can see myself adding more to it with this, and probably some similar books like "The Shallows" and "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance".

I'm glad to see this sort of content appearing on HN regularly though, as it's a sign I'm not alone in how I'm feeling and that others are working through the same issues.

Between things like this, the massive growth in interest in craft beers, the middle class worker fueling an interest in things like drinking in warehouses, farmers markets, etc. there is obviously a significant amount of people in the rat race who are grasping for something of "substance" and not the bland, mass produced, formulated and heavily marketed lifestyle we've somewhat fallen into in the last few decades.

"Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories and hypotheses it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple, indeterminate, relative ones. The major producer of the social chaos, the indeterminacy of thoughts and values that rational knowledge is supposed to eliminate, is none other than science itself."

I used to think (10 years ago) he was wrong or concerned about something that would happen far in the future beyond my lifespan.

Agreed...it's the fluid center, the moderate, the worker ant that actually moves things forward by taking the best the extremes--idealists, pragmatists--have to offer and making things work on a practical level...the "persona #3" you allude to...

I'm reminded of a quote from Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance...

"The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed."

That tranquility...that satisfaction...that's it in a nutshell, whether the "machine" is simple or complex...the route to producing that machine doesn't much matter...the end result does...

Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance": For letting me know I was/am not alone (even in my alone-ness).

Upon reflection, I guess these books haven't changed my way of thinking. But they've influenced them. Perhaps Heinlein helped me to change from approaching the world as it was presented to me to approaching it as I actually saw and see it. Pirsig helped me recognize and... formalize[1], at least for myself, some of my thoughts on quality.

Emily Dickinson: Less really can be more. So much more.

--

EDIT: Re [1], perhaps "explore" would be a better word.

From Wikipedia: "In the book, the Narrator describes the "Romantic" approach to life of his friend John Sutherland, who chooses not to learn how to maintain his expensive new motorcycle. John simply hopes for the best with his bike, and when problems do occur he often becomes frustrated, and is forced to rely on professional mechanics to repair it. In contrast, the "classical" Narrator has an older motorcycle which he is usually able to diagnose and repair himself through the use of rational problem solving skills."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_M...

Not my actual favourite but worth mentioning as a marker in my thinking is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Party_Reptile

For me it was the catalyst for the transition from the heart centric youth to the head centric adult.

It amazes me every now and then how smart people can get lost. I have and I'm not that smart. But I am smart enough to know that many of the attempted arguments in this essay are off.

Consolidating the history of a field of thought to a few authors and blaming one of the "fathers" as making a mistake is a false argument. It doesn't address the core framework of the field or address applied thinking. Philosophy is about logic and understanding how to get to a point where one human can explain to another in clear terms what that means.

I enjoy Mr. Graham's articles and read all of them, in this case I would avoid reading this and instead read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance instead.

> One of Phaedrus' realizations was that quality is neither subjective (depending on the judge) nor objective (an objective fact, like the mass of a book in kilograms).

Sounds like a contradiction in terms, like a binary value that's neither true nor false. Unless the conclusion was that quality is a composite of some objective properties and some subjective ones.

2. Could it be that we're on a 35-year, say generational, cycle? It's about that long since _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_ came out.

3. Don't underestimate the trades' exposure to the larger economy. In Washington, DC, where the economy remains relatively stronger, the best builders stay busy. But I hear it is not so elsewhere, and here a lot of the less-skilled manual workers are out of work.

"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" had a similar effect, though with the Classicist/Romanticist split more than any other part of the book. Also: "Itty-bitty rules for itty-bitty people" made quite a few things make sense.

___
“Okay,” I say. I tell him getting stuck is the commonest trouble of all. Usually, I say, your mind gets stuck when you’re trying to do too many things at once. What you have to do is try not to force words to come. That just gets you more stuck. What you have to do now is separate out the things and do them one at a time. You’re trying to think of what to say and what to say first at the same time and that’s too hard. So separate them out. Just make a list of all the things you want to say in any old order. Then later we’ll figure out the right order.
___

Pirsig is talking about writing here, but he also applies it to motorcycles and it can apply equally well to programming. The key thing is that stuckness is inside your head, and having tools to get yourself unstuck is vital.

My vote for must read is: "Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance" - Pirsig

I recall there being some comments about how she had to narrow her focus, because when you think of a city you can only think of all the things you've ever been told about that city, or ever heard about that city. Even when you think of a building you can only think of what other people have said about that building. When you focus on a single brick, it becomes clear that no one has ever said anything about it; so you clear your mind and think and write your own thoughts...

Point being, limiting yourself can get rid of certain distractions and make it clearer what your task actually is.

This advice of breaking down the problem to its smallest domain of attack has been around for a long time.

Here’s a TED talk by Csíkszentmihályi (2004): http://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow.htm...

Also worth reading: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig, 1974), The Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche, 1872)