The idea in ZAMM that has stuck with me the longest, and affects my daily thinking most, is gumption traps. Those little things, little frustrations, that make you lose enthusiasm for a project or task. Hard things can be enjoyable. Even chores like cleaning, and maintenance, or documentation. But we all have those little things that eat away at our gumption. I've learned that an important way to improve my enjoyment of life is to remove those gumption traps.
For example, a lot of people give the advice to buy a cheap tool, and replace it with an expensive one if it breaks. That's OK advice, as far as it goes. But I find that working with bad tools, and breaking a tool, is a huge gumption trap for me. So I buy fewer quality tools instead. If that means I have to do some tasks the hard way, that's OK, because I still find that enjoyable.
> But I find that working with bad tools, and breaking a tool, is a huge gumption trap for me.
This is my current thesis for why software continues to improve at such a slow rate from the customer's perspective.
We as developers spend the least amount of time and energy on our tools. Having marinated in a large pile of mediocre tools, we then set about designing our software to be 'good'. We're standing in a cognitive hole with respect to what 'good' even is and then we get nominally the same results over and over.
Jetbrains frustrates me constantly, in particular because it frustrates me in the same ways it frustrated me fifteen years ago when I first started using it. It's held up as some pinnacle of developer tooling, instead of the table stakes/median yardstick we should be applying to their tools at this point, 15-20 years after they were designed.
Until we expect better of each other the customer is always going to be disappointed with what they get. It takes a massive amount of energy to produce gemstones from garbage.
In my opinion, Jetbrains IDEA was a better tool ten years ago, before they decided to make versions for every language imaginable. In some ways they’ve improved and occasionally still delight, but in others their Java support is remarkably weak or non existant. Support for working with JNI is one that comes immediately to mind
Having not worked there it's hard to tell if the team shifted to maintenance mode because the dreamers that started the whole thing left, or because the code is so work-hardened that only maintenance can be done on it. But it definitely feels like it's a product in maintenance mode.
I recall too, just before TeamCity launched, that there was a notable uptick in bugs and regressions. As if someone had been working on a new internal product that poached all of the R&D-compatible people and left things in the hand of more junior members.
As a work of popular philosophy, I think Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is unequalled. I think it got many people (including me) to an interest in philosophy where they had previously thought it to be boring hair-splitting.
I think the format - part travelogue, part novel, part philosophical exposition - is a big part of how he pulled that off.
I loved it, aged about 20. Leila, not so much. It's a bit Marmite
(people I think should love it hate it and vice versa). ZAMM came into
my world just as I was figuring out (and mortified by) the fraud
academia is, and the breakdown of his character Phaedrus was
life-saving parable. His themes and ideas remain strong for me. The
article author seems jaded with it (no doubt the recent notes are
tedious and disappointing). Yes, Persig's style seems a bit laboured
now. But it's a book of its time.
I feel like I missed something with the book. I read it about ten years ago and absolutely loved the travelogue part. His writing on travelling by motorcycle is excellent and I wanted more of it. The back half of the book where he really goes off on the metaphysics of quality didn't resonate at all with me.
I discarded the most detailed descriptions of the quality philosophy, and rather considered it as a great depiction of the character. The nervous breakdown would not have been as believable without the the depths of this wild goose chase.
In fact, this is what truly makes this book great.
I'm right there with you. When he starts writing about Phaedrus, everything goes south in the book. He's talking about quality while needlessly adjusting his tappets every five minutes, then throwing shade at John. Treating every little incidental thing as a deep metaphor comes across as a little too on the nose and self-important for me.
Two attempted reads and I consider ZAMM one of the most overrated books of all time.
Phaedrus went literally insane and had electro-shock-therapy to "cure" the problem.
My take on the insanity is that it was connected to the "needless adjusting", "throwing shade" and "treating every little incidental thing as deep metaphor" among other things.
This was the biggest takeaway for me from this book -- roughly that an obsessive pursuit of quality (or definition of quality even) might take someone over the edge of sanity.
This is the effect it had on me, reading it in college. It was the first time I'd seen such a mental journey, and it meshed almost perfectly with how my mind was working at the time: that kind of vocally articulated walk through a series of connected ideas. Mainly it told me it was okay to do so, to get deeply into my head and follow my reasoning and observations and just work through it all.
I got a degree in philosophy because of that book, in which I came to understand that Pirsig's project around "quality" was an idiosyncratic mashup of zen and western perspectives. I still loved the book and reread it several times. For a certain overly cerebral person, it's a balm and a respite.
Always nice to see it get a mention, it made quite an impact on me at a formative age in the late 80s. As a bonus it then got me on to Thoreau, as he talks about reading Walden to his son in the book.
Oddly, I distinctly remember what in turn got me on to that then 15 year book in the the first place, a brief flash of the intriguing lotus-wrench cover in an episode of Inspector Morse, of all things.
Odd to think how a such a minor passing reference set me off so far down a road I probably would never have traveled otherwise.
"Later on this Pirsig writes for ten pages about how to remove a broken screw from the block but not once does he tell you about the simple easy way which is the old Ezi-Out screw remover. In fact as far as I could figure out, man, I don’t think he ever did get that broken fucking screw out." Edward Abbey, as "Dave Harleyson", in _Down the River_
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is interesting in that it rejects most classical and modern Western philosophy. To find anything that speaks to it in the West, you have to read pre-Plato fragments (Heraclitus), or Nietzsche, or the fringes of Process Philosophy.
Even then, you probably won't be any closer to understanding quality but you'll at least be more confident in its existence and be able to vaguely conceptualize it.
For me, the starting point is a deep appreciation for the ancient Greek state of mind called Arete (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arete). I say 'state of mind' because it was only transformed into a 'concrete concept' later. The Wikipedia article doesn't do it justice as it has been Plato-ized but.. it is something.
Pre-Plato, it was a way of existing predicated on becoming or approaching excellence (as opposed to being a something). It isn't confined to a discipline or occupation and you never 'get there'. For Nietzsche, it enabled a key component of the Will to Power, self-overcoming.
There are some historians trying to prove that Stoicism and the European Enlightenment are both borrowed from contact with Eastern Philosophy.
Someone did their PhD thesis placing David Hume and a Jesuit who wrote about his experiences in eastern India in a little French town a little off the road from Paris to Nantes, pre-enlightenment:
I don't know anything about philosophy, however, the book permeates my thinking while writing software. Here are two examples. Every time ask myself where does this go or I have to decide on a folder structure, file, variable, class, or function name, I think of Pirsig's analytical knife. One day after forgetting a script running on a server out in the cloud which was scraping changing price data for a couple years, I logged into the server with an terminal to look at it's health. Everything was running perfect. I thought that must have been what Pirsig meant by Quality.
I don't think it's my imagination that there is something fundamentally different about the mentality of programmers who are also labeled as 'handy'.
I grew up on home improvement and woodworking shows, and spent a couple summers as a bicycle mechanic long before reading this book. Particularly in the Home Improvement shows where owners learned about the consequences of their sins and especially those of the previous owners. Neglect can be very expensive, and the surprise of it magnifies the experience. I invest a lot in avoiding big nasty surprises. I also have a weird brand of minimalism where I can be quite precious about a cherished tool or piece of furniture but fairly blasé about many of my other belongings.
For me the book was more of a nod-along, and there are certain conversations that are replaced with shorthand when talking to other people who hover when a desk chair is broken or a projector won't turn on. It is often useful to have other terminology and metaphors available to describe how you feel about something though. A particular problem I've had with the automatic equating of 'preaching to the choir' with 'waste of time'.
Like AI, bits of philosophy get carved off and called common sense or culture on a relatively constant basis. I think we had a conversation about that maybe a month ago. It seems to be a large part of why they both get people's shields up. Because whatever is left to be claimed by those names has not yet or may never achieve consensus. Sort of a Market for Lemons.
It was originally a radio show, way back, before podcasts. The podcast version is a revisit, revision and update but substantially the same as the original. It was recorded some years after the book was public, and he was working as a technical writer, IIRC.
There is a philosophical term that somewhat overlaps with Pirsig's "Quality", to my mind. The ancient Greek idealization of "moderation." When you read Xenophon's surviving text of Agricultural advice; he's pulling much the same move as Persig. When telling you how deep to plant an olive pit, he assumes you'll intuit how deep. He never tries to give a measure just saying something like "not too deep or too shallow." Thanks, Xenophon. He might as well be saying "put it at the point with the highest planting quality."
What I take from Pirsig is this:
Most of the brain doesn't speak or process speech; moderns do need to tune into more of their brains, where useful intuitions (from experience) lie. If you decide to roll with just rationality, you're leaving most of your brain behind, and the rest is very helpful (see Antonio Domasio and many other psychology profs.)
Of course, utterly uniformed intuition isn't of much value, but as we get older, it's time to tune into the parts of the brain (often accessed through subtle body feelings) that don't do logic, or language, per se.
Being able to appreciate something has several layers. There are cultural layers. There are previous experiences. There are your own personal aesthetics and mood.
And if you understand something's technical aspects, you might feel that you dislike it for technical reasons, or because it makes mistakes that you know are avoidable, or for many other reasons... or you might appreciate it even more for the rightness of the technical approach along with the work as a whole.
> Quality, Pirsig says, surrounds us. It is in a rug cleaned with care, a well-maintained garden, and the order of words in a sentence.
Reminds me a lot of Alexander’s “Thing which cannot be named” from A Pattern Language. You know it when you experience it, but it can’t be described fully in words.
A particularly tongue in cheek way to describe a statue is that it's a block of marble with all the bits that aren't the statue removed.
Both Michelangelo and Mark Twain have quotes that bear that sentiment.
There are ways to describe Quality by what it is not, and people often do, but defining things in the negative tends to be a less effective coping mechanism. Some people try to describe Quality by its consequences, rather than the consequences of not having it. But it's still slippery, in large part because we often only know it in hindsight. Long feedback loops are notoriously bad learning opportunities.
all the good stuff is ineffable. There’s a hard limit to extent to which “knowing that” covers the facts of the world; after which comes “knowing how”, and there’s no getting around it.
my absolute favorite benediction begins with “the peace of god, which passes all understanding…”
In addition to ways ZAMM affected the way I viewed the world. I take pleasure in asking folks who work with me at "Very Large Corp" with the word Quality in their title, if they have by any chance read ZAMM.
Obviously I still need to grow up :)
I read Zen in my twenties and thought it was OK, but couldn't really relate. Then I tried to read it again in my forties and stopped at the Boomer era mental and physical cruelty and neglect of his son in the novel. It negates anything else he may have said in the book.
I truly fear for the children of millions of men who use the novel as some sort of guide to life and being a parent. Putting an 11yo on the back of a motorcycle for 8 hours or more a day, ignoring him as he cries himself to sleep, acting as if he's an abnormal child when he doesn't want to sit around quietly while the adults smoke cigarettes and drink coffee, or get drunk or high. He actually suggests that Chris is mentally ill because he was, of course, acting like a child of an alcoholic, abusive schizophrenic father being forced to endure hours of physical discomfort and neglect.
Pirsig's notion of quality led me to an essay in a magazine that I haven't found again on particularly good pieces of engineering that have that Quality Without A Name: the ARM CPU, the Technics SL1200, the Leica M3, the HP-12C and some others.
For example, a lot of people give the advice to buy a cheap tool, and replace it with an expensive one if it breaks. That's OK advice, as far as it goes. But I find that working with bad tools, and breaking a tool, is a huge gumption trap for me. So I buy fewer quality tools instead. If that means I have to do some tasks the hard way, that's OK, because I still find that enjoyable.