Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig

A (semi-autobiographical?) story of a man and his son going on a trip across America, but also ‘a motorcycle trip across themselves’.

Notes

Something is always lost when you look at something through the rational lens. Mark Twain spent his whole life learning how to navigate the Hudson river and discovered that it had lost its beauty.
Young mechanics have the radio on while they work, while much older mechanics don’t. It shows a difference in attitudes. The older mechanics are fully involved in their work, and focussing on it as much as possible, but the young people are much less involved.

Two types of logic:
- Induction: Reasoning particular experiences to general truths (if the motorbike misfires 5 times after going over 5 bumps, you can say that the bumps cause the misfirings).
- Deduction: Reasoning from general truths to particular experiences (if the horn on a motorbike works using electricity and the horn doesn’t work, the battery is probably dead).
The scientific method:
1. Statement of the problem.
2. Hypotheses as to the cause of the problem.
3. Experiments designed to test each hypothesis.
4. Predicted results of the experiments.
5. Observed results of the experiment.
6. Conclusions from the results of the experiments.
The scientific method is like a huge bulldozer – slow, tedious, lumbering, laborious, but invincible. It takes 2x, 3x, even 10x as long, but is guaranteed to get the job done.
Zen and the Art of Software Engineering? Applying the scientific method to diagnosing and fixing bugs in programs seems apt:
- You state the problem
- Theorise what the issue could be/where it could lie
- Try different things that will change depending on what the underlying issue is
- Compare what actually happens to your predictions.

Looking laterally:
- Knowledge that doesn’t go forward “like an arrow in flight”.
- Instead “expands outwards”, “like the archer, discovering that although he’s hit a bullseye and has won the prize, his head is a pillow and the sun is coming through the window”.
Classic and romantic modes of thinking, theoretical and ethestical.

People’s behaviour:
- “In his face I sometimes see a look of worry, or at least anxiety, and wonder why, and then discover that I’m angry”

Not having any grades for school:
- It creates people who aren’t grade-motivated but instead knowledge-motivated.
- “He would need no external pushing to learn. His push would come from the inside.”, links to the ideas about intrinsic motivation from [[Replacing Guilt, Soares]]^N.
- But for many people, their goal for each subject is getting the best grades possible and so taking away grades creates a “goalless vacuum”. You have to have some sort of internal goal to work towards that helps you keep yourself motivated, but it’s very difficult to have some sort of authoritarian figure tell you what your goal should be since it’s so individual. That’s why it doesn’t work in the classroom.
- You shouldn’t try learning stuff for the sake of thinking that it’ll make you smart. You should learn stuff because you know that it’ll come in useful for yourself.

A dilemma:
- Greek for “two premises”… it’s like the two horns at the front of a charging bull.
- It’s a logical construct where you have to take one of two premises, where each premise is equally as underiserable.
- The example from the book was “does quality exist in the mind of the observer or is it intrinsic to the thing being observed?”
- So how can you face a dilemma logically?
  - Refute the implications of accepting the left horn
  - Refute the implications of accepting the right horn
- How can you face a dilemma rhetorically?
  - One may throw sand in the bull’s eyes – i.e. say that the person giving the dilemma is stupid (I think?)
  - One may attempt to sing the bull to sleep – in the book he uses admitting that he doesn’t have the solution as the answer.
  - One may refuse to enter the arena – refuse to answer the question.
“Reductio ad absurdum” – showing that at least one given premise must be false since you can show that using the premises would lead to a ridiculous, absurd or impractical conclusion.

This is the second book where the example of Euclid’s 5th postulate has come up (the other was [[Gödel, Escher, Bach]]^N). The idea is that there were originally 5 axioms for geometry, and 4 of them seemed completely obvious and self-evident, but the last one did not. People tried to prove it using the other 4 axioms but had lots of difficutly until eventually they realised that you could have geometries (non-Euclidiean geometries) without it, and it was just a different way of interpreting the world.

When you’re stuck on a problem or issue, Quality is what you’re working towards. There has to be some conception of what you’re pursuing?
Self-taught mechanics are often better than “institutional” mechanics because they have a better understanding of quality and how to overcome stuckness.
“we keep passing unseen through little moments of other people’s lives”

Inner peace of mind is important in work. He offers a bunch of suggestions of how to find or get back inner peace of mind if you need it; a cup of coffee, a walk around the block, 5 minutes of silence.
The goal of good work should be reducing the distinction between subject and object. When you stop seeing yourself as separate from the thing you’re working on, you can be said to “care” about what you’re doing.

The idea of this chapter was to introduce the idea of “gumption”, a sort of resourcefulness, intelligence, passion, excitement and initiave to be working on what they’re working on.
Gumption traps – things that deplete your gumption:
- Ego: Thinking too highly of yourself makes you less flexible and less likely to admit when you’re wrong. The fix: modesty, and if modesty doesn’t come naturally, fake it.
- Anxiety: Being so afraid of doing anything wrong and being inferior that you never get started. Leads to procrastination and nervousness… work made under anxiety is not good work. The fix: working out anxieties on paper, clarifying your thoughts, reading lots about anxiety in books and magazines can help – it’s peace of mind you’re after, not necessarily a fixed machine.
- Boredom: you’re failing to see things freshly… your gumption supply is low! The fix: do anything but work on your motorcycle, stop work entirely. Go to a show, read a book, turn on the TV, get some sleep, drink coffee. Turn boring repetitive tasks into rituals, like tuning or cleaning a machine.
- Impatience: this is where you underestimate how long things are going to take. Leave longer to do things!

“The real cycle you’re wokring on 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 seperat things.”

This guy has a smart idea while camping… go for a run straight away in the morning, in the cold. You warm up really quickly and feel a lot more awake.

We should return to the idea of individual worth; the book tries to show the difference in attitudes between “primary America” and “secondary America” where there’s a lot more focus on the individual in the second.