Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

hn-books.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 80 posts

Re: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

#31

Post by prospero »

tibbon wrote: post #13
prospero wrote: post #3

Out of curiosity, how did people who had already studied philosophy find this book? Nothing in it struck me as particularly revelatory, and I'm wondering if maybe I just wasn't the intended audience.

There have been a few books like this, that are supposed to be massive and life changing, but when I read they just fell flat. Everything by Ayn Rand I read was like this too. I could get past the pacing, the circular storytelling, and largely the premise of it just didn't work in my mind. It was not something I could get into and getting past more than a chapter at a time was painful. Oddly, I like philosophy and I…

I think Ayn Rand is writing to an audience who already fundamentally agrees with her ideas. A lot of her writing strikes me as clarification of her philosophy, rather than a justification of it.

I didn't get that same sense from Pirsig, but while the ideas he presented were interesting, I didn't feel I was getting a novel perspective on them.

Re: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

#32

Post by unoti »

pirsig_fan wrote: post #21

It never ceases to amaze me how often technical people in general and computer programmers in particular read this book and can't see the point, which is that your values can't be deduced by logic.

Here are some thought provoking ideas for computer hackers that he discusses at some length: * Is it a good idea or bad idea to listen to music while working? Why? * Do machines have souls, and can they? * Why do machines frustrate me so much? What happens when I get frustrated? What role does frame-of-mind play in productivity, and how do you control it?

A lot of the negative comments I see here are perhaps expecting too much from the book. It's not like God wrote it and provided all the answers to life. (And even if that did happen, probably a lot of people would hate it.) It's just a very interesting and thought provoking book.

And with regard to the comparisons to Ayn Rand, it's nowhere near that level. The book is very short compared to what Ayn Rand writes. It's not preachy at all like her stuff. It's also far more practical. Ayn Rand writes about how civilization as a whole should live. This book is far more personal and contemplative, and not preachy at all. Ayn Rand might talk for 45 pages about how socialized medicine is a parasite on the productive people. Persig might talk for 3 pages about how if you keep working on the machine when you feel frustrated, you're just building your frustration into the machine and making it part of it. Totally different in scale and practicality.

Re: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

#33

Post by barce »

prospero wrote: post #3

Out of curiosity, how did people who had already studied philosophy find this book? Nothing in it struck me as particularly revelatory, and I'm wondering if maybe I just wasn't the intended audience.

There's a difference between a work being a result of philosophical genius and a work producing in the reader a philosophical experience.

As someone who studied philosophy, I felt that his proof for the existence of quality lacking. He appealed to a small sample, his class, in order to ground the existence of quality which is simply a hasty generalization.

However, I did feel something of a philosophical experience when he raised the issue of classic vs. romantic. He took pains to give examples and I feel that we all have to figure out this problem.

Re: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

#34

Post by wisty »

pirsig_fan wrote: post #21

It never ceases to amaze me how often technical people in general and computer programmers in particular read this book and can't see the point, which is that your values can't be deduced by logic.

I saw the point was something like this: you can deduce all of some values by logic, and you can some of all vaules by logic, but you can't deduce all of all values by logic.

It also had a nice, short, well written take on a lot of philosophy by a fairly smart guy who geeks tend to identify with.

Re: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

#37

Post by BrandonM »

neutronicus wrote: post #16
tibbon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been a few books like this, that are supposed to be massive and life changing, but when I read they just fell flat. Everything by Ayn Rand I read was like this too. I could get past the pacing, the circular storytelling, and largely the premise of it just didn't work in my mind. It was not something I could get into and getting past more than a chapter at a time was painful. Oddly, I like philosophy and I…

> My only theory is that since these books have been published, the core ideas have worked their way through our culture so throughly that reading it now just seems like 'duh'. This is the way I felt reading Ayn Rand and not a single interesting thing there popped out at me as new or novel. Either that, or the ideas are presented within the pages as interesting and novel, but they're actually simple takes on simple q…

I'm curious why you chose to put Twain and Vonnegut in there. My take on their writings is that they were amazing storytellers. Twain used simple language and local color to produce wonderful imagery with an expertise that few achieved before him. He whisks us away and drops us into a place in history that we otherwise never could have experienced.

Vonnegut lets us in on the insane parts of his mind. He tells interesting stories and frames them in a way that I, personally, never would. Even if I had some of his crazy ideas, I wouldn't think about them at all like he does. I've never seen another author break down the fourth wall the way Vonnegut did; after reading a few of his books, I felt like I understood a lot about the way he thought. (Another author who did this was Douglas Adams, whose output was markedly less than Vonnegut's, and Adams wasn't quite as "out there" as Vonnegut.)

In other words, I've never really heard of reading Twain and Vonnegut for their ideas or philosophies. While I would argue that their beliefs were rather anomalous for their times, I wouldn't consider their philosophies to be the main virtues of their writings.

Re: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

#38

Post by cema »

alnayyir wrote: post #23
alexophile wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like that comparison, he is kind of the troll of philosophical history. The interesting thing about Nietzsche, though (esepecially in Geneaology ) is that he takes on so many different voices to address different existing philosophies such that you can't really say (although many have) that he's anti-semitic (In fact, IIRC he seemed to dig the old testament Jews' style) or anti-christianity . The difference between…

>adolescent Pointing out the hypocrisy and self-consuming nature of the greater moral system underlying western religion is scarcely adolescent and even in his day that took a good deal of courage to speak out like that. He was provocative, but not for its own sake.

Adolescents are often courageous, but also sophomoric. I think the latter is what the poster referred to.

Re: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

#39

Post by pavelludiq »

I loved this book when i read it. I liked it mostly because it was able to explain to me what i already "knew" but couldn't explain. I now had the vocabulary and a road map to figure myself out. Its not so much that the ideas in the book were life changing, they were interesting to think about, but what i got out of it is that the book sparked a process in my mind to turn myself from a depressed cynical high-schooler, into a pragmatic adult, who enjoys his work, his studies, and his art, yet is not blinded by idealism or plagued by cynicism.

I guess its a lot about timing, had i read it at any other point in my life, i might have not liked it.

Re: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

#40

Post by crcarlson »

I recommend this book to young engineers all of the time for the side messages on debugging, motivation and quality.

When I run into burnout problems I often use his simple advice to get out of slumps: usually) actively recharge with rest/sleep, when under the gun) coffee.

Post reply on HN