8 ms·

My introduction to Quality Without a Name and motorcycling. I still ride and still appreciate engineering that somehow manages to be greater than just the sum o

My introduction to Quality Without a Name and motorcycling. I still ride and still appreciate engineering that somehow manages to be greater than just the sum of its parts: the Leica M3, the Blackbird SR71, the HP 12C.

Baeocystin 9y ago
It was Quality that helped my understand why, exactly, I was (and am) so attached to my old HP 48 SX.
- rout39574 9y ago
  Preach it! I now own four and have addicted my son to RPN.
  - Baeocystin 9y ago
    I have my main one + two verified working ebay specials within arms' reach. (HN being one of the few places I can not only admit this, but get good-natured grief for using the 'new' models. :D) I also have another saved up, ready to give my younger brother-in-law as he prepares for engineering classes. I plan on getting him as addicted to RPN as the rest of us.
- gonzo 9y ago
  HP 41SX? That's new! HP 41C!
DonaldFisk 9y ago
Quality without a definition, surely. Quality Without a Name was Christopher Alexander's idea, described in A Timeless Way of Building. Though the two are related. I've read both ZatAoMM and Lila, and can recommend both.
- camperman 9y ago
  Whoops - you're quite right. QWAN is Christopher Alexander.
- skilesare 9y ago
  Both Alexander and Pirsig are great and I think they have a lot of crossover. I actually just released my book this week that mashes their two ideas together. It is with sadness that I learned of his passing today and a bit ironic that the title of my book is 'Immortality'. Death can jump off a cliff. Http://skilesare.github.com/immortality
- chubot 9y ago
  I've read both books and I'd be very interested in reading how they are related. I do agree they are related, but though the use of the word "quality" in both contexts probably confuses issues rather than illuminates them. I agree with Paul Graham when he says that most philosophical discussions reduce to disagreements over the meaning of words: http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html It's also true that both Pirsig and Alexander are reluctant to define their respective "quality". I think there are profound core truths in both of their ideas, but I think they're also too ambitious. They're both trying to apply one concept to a multitude of things. It's almost religious -- there is one answer to all problems.
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    Good points. I was very heavily influenced by the book and still am in many respects, but ended up completely rejecting his conclusory argument. (Readers who don't want to spoil their experience of the book should move on now.) Where I think he goes wrong is his conflation of quality with desire, as summed up in the phrase 'quality is what you like.' Something about this gnawed at me because from an early age I noticed that that aesthetic quality and taste were poorly correlated for me; there are things I like that are objectively crap and conversely there are art objects of high quality that I don't like or were even hostile towards at first. My go-to example for this sort of thing is Francis Bacon, the English painter. I hate almost everything of his I've seen. It repulses me on a visceral level, such that I find his work almost physically painful to look at. But his painting is of very very high quality. Bacon was a true master of composition and other measurable factors of aesthetic quality. It is his mastery of those painterly techniques that make the unpleasantness of his work so impactful. I have my doubts about Pirsig's relationship to art. You'll recall the tale of when he was on the faculty at Boise, and his friend (an art professor) came around one evening for a social purpose, to find Pirsig wrapping a table in string for the eminently practical purpose of holding it under tension so that the glue he had just applied could set properly. The art professor is surprised and Pirsig decides to have a little fun with him by saying it's an art project, which naturally intrigues the art professor who begins evaluating it without any awareness of its more quotidian nature. this bothered me; Pirsig aimed to point out the arbitrary and unfalsifiable nature of art so as to disqualify it as a vehicle for truth, and indeed he is not alone; many people have such a reaction to modern art because abstraction or the fetishization of expression (in the MArxist rather than the Freudian sense) devalues the representational aspect, even though the latter is the easiest for people to evaluate by simply observing the degree of convergence between the quality of representation in the art work and their experience of the physical world. But Pirsig was writing from the perspective of a technician or engineer, in which qualia can be ranked objectively in terms of their contribution to some truth-seeking function, qua his masterful exegesis of the scientific method for solving ordinary problems like undesirable behavior of a motorcycle. Valuable though this is, it falls apart in three ways when Pirsig sails too close to the rocks of aesthetics: function, scope and intentionality. First, Pirsig has a poor understanding of artistic function; he doesn't seem to understand art in contexts other than pictorial. Art consists of implicit assertions about proportion and harmony which are more or less successful depending on the degree to which those assumptions reflect our understanding of nature. To an artist, the pictorial content of a work is often the least interesting aspect - it's not uncommon to evaluate a picture upside down or through squinted eyes so as to be able to see less of the distracting subject matter. We are often much more interested in the claims that are being made about proportionality or symmetry - spatial, chromatic, luminous, or other types. These things are what abstract art is about, and the clarity with which such assertions are made are what cause some people to rave about the quality of what may seem like random splotches or clumsy daubings to the unseeing eye. Education helps but I'm not sure you can teach taste; I knew what I admired from a very young age, decades before accumulating enough knowledge to be able to objectively explain why I liked it. By scope I mean the degree of universality in the cumulative assertions of the work, the specificity or generality of the truth it is asserting. This is very hard to put into words - and arguably the better the art, the less the degree to which the underlying concept can be expressed by other means, or it wouldn't have been necessary to go to all the bother of rendering it in paint in the first place. It is perhaps the degree to which the different elements of the work support and reinforce its central thesis, which extends to the semantic and symbolic levels. The last question, of intent, is an especially thorny one. For Pirsig, the professor's enthusiasm over the string table was foolish because Pirsig's intention was aesthetic rather than practical, and he assumes that aesthetic value stems from authority, that is the economic decision to create something at a cost in time and effort. But is it? This is a very tricky question and one that modernism has failed to answer. The most famous art example of this is Foundtain, which consists of a urinal which has been laid upon its back and declared an art object and duly signed 'R. Mutt', a pseudonym of the Dadaist artist Marcel duchamp. Or was it? There's evidence to suggest that both the submission and the signature were actually the product of his friend, the enigmatic Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and that Duchamp simply took the credit when the rest of the art world came around to his view that found objects could be art. Anyway, let us imagine a situation in which Pirsig, overwhelmed by amusement, suffered a heart attack and died immediately after conning the art professor into evaluating his String Table as art rather than furniture repair. Let us assume that the professor saw some or other formal quality about the work that made it attractive to his experienced eye, regardless of whether this aesthetic quality was the product of accident or some subconscious aesthetic impulse on Pirsig's part. Let us further imagine that Pirsig's tragic death by laughter following on the completion of his first and only artwork was sufficiently interesting to hook the attention of the art world, which then fell in love with the piece on its own merits, and that it now occupies pride of place in a great museum, viewed and loved by millions who know nothing of its provenance. Are they all idiots? I argue that art inheres in the work, regardless of the intention with which it was created. It is sufficient that it was wrought (natural objects are merely pretty), but Pirsig's artistic intention or lack thereof is irrelevant to the question of whether it embodies aesthetic truth. To see why, let us consider a parallel paradox of monkeys with typewriters. We are all familiar with the idea that infinite typewriting monkeys might reproduce the work of Shakespeare, but also with the extreme remoteness of such a possibility. But once you've persuaded monkeys to take up typing, it's not so hard to imagine that one might crank out 'E=mc^2' in a reasonable timeframe, say by Wednesday of next week. Would that be a valid theorem? Obviously the monkeys know nothing of physics and can only be persuaded to bang on the typewriter because I keep supplying them with bananas. Indeed we could dispense with the monkeys altogether and instead draw Scrabble tiles out of a bag or something to underscore the random nature of the process. But now here comes that bum Einstein, with his inchoate intuitions about the nature of space and time, perplexedly pondering the relationships between energy, matter, and the speed of light. The monkeys flee the scene in terror, crying 'Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair!' and the commotion distracts Einstein enough to look at their output, which equation results in his illumination and subsequent adulation. Chance favors the prepared mind, of course, and it is only because Einstein was obsessed with such topics that the random keystrokes on the page were imbued with meaning for him, and him alone - but thanks to your familiarity with relativity, that same page would be imbued with meaning for you too if you were to see, regardless of whether you knew about the monkeys. It happens to be true (assuming you believe in relativity), notwithstanding the fact that it was produced by a system that produced a mixture of both false and true theorems through a random process. Following Godel, we can not prove the truth of the assertion within the system that produced it due to its lack of a truth-selection rule, but this is no barrier to be it being recognized as true from within the confines of a more rigorous system where its truth could be rigorously asserted. I argue that it is this recognition of truth, however inchoate or hard to articulate, on the part of viewer that invests a constructed object with art value independently of the intention with which it was created. I do not meant hat truth shines out from art like a lamp, only that it is independent of the intent with which it was created. In this sense a piece of 'accidental art' would be a discovery rather than invention, but science and to some extent mathematics is full of such accidental discoveries, and we don't hold those discoveries to be any less valuable even if we sometimes suspect the discoverers of having been lucky rather than clever. I do think that ultimately Pirsig's argument is indeed religious, in that he equates successful function with mastery of Plato's ideal forms and the subsequent realization of the imaginary hypothesis - a conclusion that might reasonably be extended to the material world as a whole. In his follow-up book, Lila, he attempted to derive a moral philosophy from first principles and I feel his narrow determinism limited the scope of his exploration, though perhaps I'm associating his philosophical argument too closely with the bounds of the rover on which his houseboat was situated for that story, not unlike the freewheeling motorcycle journey that was nevertheless constricted by the necessity of staying on the road.
randcraw 9y ago
It's funny, but this book probably played a greater role in my getting into motorcycling than all those years of poring over enthusiast mags like Motorcyclist or Cycle World combined. The thrill of raw speed is fleeting, but an epiphany... that lasts. A bike ride on back roads is a surprisingly natural place to think.
- camperman 9y ago
  Amen brother. This right here: “In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You're a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame. On a cycle the frame is gone. You're completely in contact with it all. You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.”

Baeocystin 9y ago

It was Quality that helped my understand why, exactly, I was (and am) so attached to my old HP 48 SX.

rout39574 9y ago
Preach it! I now own four and have addicted my son to RPN.
- Baeocystin 9y ago
  I have my main one + two verified working ebay specials within arms' reach. (HN being one of the few places I can not only admit this, but get good-natured grief for using the 'new' models. :D) I also have another saved up, ready to give my younger brother-in-law as he prepares for engineering classes. I plan on getting him as addicted to RPN as the rest of us.
gonzo 9y ago
HP 41SX? That's new! HP 41C!

DonaldFisk 9y ago

Quality without a definition, surely. Quality Without a Name was Christopher Alexander's idea, described in A Timeless Way of Building. Though the two are related. I've read both ZatAoMM and Lila, and can recommend both.

camperman 9y ago
Whoops - you're quite right. QWAN is Christopher Alexander.
skilesare 9y ago
Both Alexander and Pirsig are great and I think they have a lot of crossover. I actually just released my book this week that mashes their two ideas together. It is with sadness that I learned of his passing today and a bit ironic that the title of my book is 'Immortality'. Death can jump off a cliff. Http://skilesare.github.com/immortality
chubot 9y ago
I've read both books and I'd be very interested in reading how they are related. I do agree they are related, but though the use of the word "quality" in both contexts probably confuses issues rather than illuminates them. I agree with Paul Graham when he says that most philosophical discussions reduce to disagreements over the meaning of words: http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html It's also true that both Pirsig and Alexander are reluctant to define their respective "quality". I think there are profound core truths in both of their ideas, but I think they're also too ambitious. They're both trying to apply one concept to a multitude of things. It's almost religious -- there is one answer to all problems.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Good points. I was very heavily influenced by the book and still am in many respects, but ended up completely rejecting his conclusory argument. (Readers who don't want to spoil their experience of the book should move on now.) Where I think he goes wrong is his conflation of quality with desire, as summed up in the phrase 'quality is what you like.' Something about this gnawed at me because from an early age I noticed that that aesthetic quality and taste were poorly correlated for me; there are things I like that are objectively crap and conversely there are art objects of high quality that I don't like or were even hostile towards at first. My go-to example for this sort of thing is Francis Bacon, the English painter. I hate almost everything of his I've seen. It repulses me on a visceral level, such that I find his work almost physically painful to look at. But his painting is of very very high quality. Bacon was a true master of composition and other measurable factors of aesthetic quality. It is his mastery of those painterly techniques that make the unpleasantness of his work so impactful. I have my doubts about Pirsig's relationship to art. You'll recall the tale of when he was on the faculty at Boise, and his friend (an art professor) came around one evening for a social purpose, to find Pirsig wrapping a table in string for the eminently practical purpose of holding it under tension so that the glue he had just applied could set properly. The art professor is surprised and Pirsig decides to have a little fun with him by saying it's an art project, which naturally intrigues the art professor who begins evaluating it without any awareness of its more quotidian nature. this bothered me; Pirsig aimed to point out the arbitrary and unfalsifiable nature of art so as to disqualify it as a vehicle for truth, and indeed he is not alone; many people have such a reaction to modern art because abstraction or the fetishization of expression (in the MArxist rather than the Freudian sense) devalues the representational aspect, even though the latter is the easiest for people to evaluate by simply observing the degree of convergence between the quality of representation in the art work and their experience of the physical world. But Pirsig was writing from the perspective of a technician or engineer, in which qualia can be ranked objectively in terms of their contribution to some truth-seeking function, qua his masterful exegesis of the scientific method for solving ordinary problems like undesirable behavior of a motorcycle. Valuable though this is, it falls apart in three ways when Pirsig sails too close to the rocks of aesthetics: function, scope and intentionality. First, Pirsig has a poor understanding of artistic function; he doesn't seem to understand art in contexts other than pictorial. Art consists of implicit assertions about proportion and harmony which are more or less successful depending on the degree to which those assumptions reflect our understanding of nature. To an artist, the pictorial content of a work is often the least interesting aspect - it's not uncommon to evaluate a picture upside down or through squinted eyes so as to be able to see less of the distracting subject matter. We are often much more interested in the claims that are being made about proportionality or symmetry - spatial, chromatic, luminous, or other types. These things are what abstract art is about, and the clarity with which such assertions are made are what cause some people to rave about the quality of what may seem like random splotches or clumsy daubings to the unseeing eye. Education helps but I'm not sure you can teach taste; I knew what I admired from a very young age, decades before accumulating enough knowledge to be able to objectively explain why I liked it. By scope I mean the degree of universality in the cumulative assertions of the work, the specificity or generality of the truth it is asserting. This is very hard to put into words - and arguably the better the art, the less the degree to which the underlying concept can be expressed by other means, or it wouldn't have been necessary to go to all the bother of rendering it in paint in the first place. It is perhaps the degree to which the different elements of the work support and reinforce its central thesis, which extends to the semantic and symbolic levels. The last question, of intent, is an especially thorny one. For Pirsig, the professor's enthusiasm over the string table was foolish because Pirsig's intention was aesthetic rather than practical, and he assumes that aesthetic value stems from authority, that is the economic decision to create something at a cost in time and effort. But is it? This is a very tricky question and one that modernism has failed to answer. The most famous art example of this is Foundtain, which consists of a urinal which has been laid upon its back and declared an art object and duly signed 'R. Mutt', a pseudonym of the Dadaist artist Marcel duchamp. Or was it? There's evidence to suggest that both the submission and the signature were actually the product of his friend, the enigmatic Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and that Duchamp simply took the credit when the rest of the art world came around to his view that found objects could be art. Anyway, let us imagine a situation in which Pirsig, overwhelmed by amusement, suffered a heart attack and died immediately after conning the art professor into evaluating his String Table as art rather than furniture repair. Let us assume that the professor saw some or other formal quality about the work that made it attractive to his experienced eye, regardless of whether this aesthetic quality was the product of accident or some subconscious aesthetic impulse on Pirsig's part. Let us further imagine that Pirsig's tragic death by laughter following on the completion of his first and only artwork was sufficiently interesting to hook the attention of the art world, which then fell in love with the piece on its own merits, and that it now occupies pride of place in a great museum, viewed and loved by millions who know nothing of its provenance. Are they all idiots? I argue that art inheres in the work, regardless of the intention with which it was created. It is sufficient that it was wrought (natural objects are merely pretty), but Pirsig's artistic intention or lack thereof is irrelevant to the question of whether it embodies aesthetic truth. To see why, let us consider a parallel paradox of monkeys with typewriters. We are all familiar with the idea that infinite typewriting monkeys might reproduce the work of Shakespeare, but also with the extreme remoteness of such a possibility. But once you've persuaded monkeys to take up typing, it's not so hard to imagine that one might crank out 'E=mc^2' in a reasonable timeframe, say by Wednesday of next week. Would that be a valid theorem? Obviously the monkeys know nothing of physics and can only be persuaded to bang on the typewriter because I keep supplying them with bananas. Indeed we could dispense with the monkeys altogether and instead draw Scrabble tiles out of a bag or something to underscore the random nature of the process. But now here comes that bum Einstein, with his inchoate intuitions about the nature of space and time, perplexedly pondering the relationships between energy, matter, and the speed of light. The monkeys flee the scene in terror, crying 'Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair!' and the commotion distracts Einstein enough to look at their output, which equation results in his illumination and subsequent adulation. Chance favors the prepared mind, of course, and it is only because Einstein was obsessed with such topics that the random keystrokes on the page were imbued with meaning for him, and him alone - but thanks to your familiarity with relativity, that same page would be imbued with meaning for you too if you were to see, regardless of whether you knew about the monkeys. It happens to be true (assuming you believe in relativity), notwithstanding the fact that it was produced by a system that produced a mixture of both false and true theorems through a random process. Following Godel, we can not prove the truth of the assertion within the system that produced it due to its lack of a truth-selection rule, but this is no barrier to be it being recognized as true from within the confines of a more rigorous system where its truth could be rigorously asserted. I argue that it is this recognition of truth, however inchoate or hard to articulate, on the part of viewer that invests a constructed object with art value independently of the intention with which it was created. I do not meant hat truth shines out from art like a lamp, only that it is independent of the intent with which it was created. In this sense a piece of 'accidental art' would be a discovery rather than invention, but science and to some extent mathematics is full of such accidental discoveries, and we don't hold those discoveries to be any less valuable even if we sometimes suspect the discoverers of having been lucky rather than clever. I do think that ultimately Pirsig's argument is indeed religious, in that he equates successful function with mastery of Plato's ideal forms and the subsequent realization of the imaginary hypothesis - a conclusion that might reasonably be extended to the material world as a whole. In his follow-up book, Lila, he attempted to derive a moral philosophy from first principles and I feel his narrow determinism limited the scope of his exploration, though perhaps I'm associating his philosophical argument too closely with the bounds of the rover on which his houseboat was situated for that story, not unlike the freewheeling motorcycle journey that was nevertheless constricted by the necessity of staying on the road.

randcraw 9y ago

It's funny, but this book probably played a greater role in my getting into motorcycling than all those years of poring over enthusiast mags like Motorcyclist or Cycle World combined. The thrill of raw speed is fleeting, but an epiphany... that lasts. A bike ride on back roads is a surprisingly natural place to think.

camperman 9y ago
Amen brother. This right here: “In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You're a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame. On a cycle the frame is gone. You're completely in contact with it all. You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.”