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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

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Re: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

#61

Post by davidmathers »

neutronicus wrote: post #54
davidmathers wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Orwell is revered precisely because he was both simple and correct. Whoever told you that Orwell was supposed to be some sort of intellectual challenge or deep philosophy did you a great dis-service, because that's entirely missing the point. He cut through complex or pretentious intellectual bullshit like a chainsaw through butter. Imagine your job was to explain the Bolshevik revolution to humanity. Not to intellec…

I was referring more to 1984 that Animal Farm . The only thing 1984 does a chainsaw/butter number on is nuance.

It was back in 1990 that I set out on a project in memetic engineering. The Nazi-comparison meme, I'd decided, had gotten out of hand - in countless Usenet newsgroups, in many conferences on the Well, and on every BBS that I frequented, the labeling of posters or their ideas as "similar to the Nazis" or "Hitler-like" was a recurrent and often predictable event. It was the kind of thing that made you wonder how debates had ever occurred without having that handy rhetorical hammer.

So, I set out to conduct an experiment - to build a counter-meme designed to make discussion participants see how they are acting as vectors to a particularly silly and offensive meme...and perhaps to curtail the glib Nazi comparisons.

-- Mike Godwin: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/godwin.if.html

1984 may be the most successful memetic engineering project in history. He developed viral antibodies for totalitarianism and then injected them into our culture. It worked so well that people say "Orwellian" to mean "totalitarian-esque" in the same way they say "Kleenex" to mean "facial tissue".

Making ideas as simple as possible, but not simpler requires some amount of creative genius. Nuance is not viral.

EDIT, a thought experiment: Your job is to write a short book that if it could somehow be read by the population of North Korea would cause the Kim Jong-Il regime to collapse. Could such a book be written? I think 1984 would do it.

Re: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

#62

Post by tjic »

briandoll wrote: post #28

Lila: An Inquiry into Morals is Pirsig's second book which is described as the defining work of the Metaphysics of Quality (MOQ). I loved ZAMM, but Lila is a much better book and even more though-provoking. I've read it 4 times through, and I still don't think I could write a complete review of it. So if you liked ZAMM, definitely pick up Lila.

I loved ZAMM, and have read it a few times (in college at age 20, then a decade later at age 30, and then once more in my mid-30s).

I tried Lila once in college and found it muddled and self-congratulatory, and gave up on it after just a few chapters.

Re: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

#63

Post by tjic »

davidmathers wrote: post #36

There's a great portrait of hacker vs non-hacker mentalities which I think is on pages 15 and 16. I just went to Google Books to see if I could pull a quote from it but those 2 pages are missing.

Agreed; that's a choice bit. It was the first time I realized how sad and constrained the world-views of non-hacker types were.

...and the discussion of pistons and shims also got me interested in metalworking!

Re: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

#64

Post by neutronicus »

davidmathers wrote: post #61
neutronicus wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was referring more to 1984 that Animal Farm . The only thing 1984 does a chainsaw/butter number on is nuance.

It was back in 1990 that I set out on a project in memetic engineering. The Nazi-comparison meme, I'd decided, had gotten out of hand - in countless Usenet newsgroups, in many conferences on the Well, and on every BBS that I frequented, the labeling of posters or their ideas as "similar to the Nazis" or "Hitler-like" was a recurrent and often predictable event. It was the kind of thing that made you wonder how debate…

1984 may be the most successful memetic engineering project in history.

Dressing down your prose a little, you're saying "1984 successfully manipulated a lot of [gullible] people".

And that is, in a nutshell, why I don't like it much. Orwell does not treat his reader as a peer. There's no respect there, just manipulation, because the author doesn't trust the reader with nuance.

EDIT (in response to yours): Luckily for me, I am nobody's minister of propaganda. I would (were I a much better writer than I am) tell it like it is, nuances and all, and let them do with that what they will.

Re: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

#65

Post by davidmathers »

tjic wrote: post #63
davidmathers wrote: post #36

There's a great portrait of hacker vs non-hacker mentalities which I think is on pages 15 and 16. I just went to Google Books to see if I could pull a quote from it but those 2 pages are missing.

Agreed; that's a choice bit. It was the first time I realized how sad and constrained the world-views of non-hacker types were. ...and the discussion of pistons and shims also got me interested in metalworking!

That's it. The bit about the shim is what I was specifically thinking of.

Re: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

#66

Post by tibbon »

Eliezer wrote: post #55
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…

I would be curious as to what you thought of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, if you looked at that.

I'm loving parts of it so far. Its funny and clever at times. Other times, its just didactic in the worst way.

Re: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

#67

Post by joe_the_user »

steveklabnik wrote: post #12
alexophile wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you come from a solid grounding in (specifically Greek) philosophy, the concepts and questions Pirsig raises are familiar, but for me the way he addressed them seemed much less self-indulgent. Greek philosophers were public intellectuals and, for me at least, reading their texts was somewhat off-putting because of the level of... grandstanding for lack of a better word. ZAMM seems so much more honest. It's framed…

> grandstanding for lack of a better word. This is really interesting to me. I've recently started reading more political philosophy, and a few weeks ago, dug into "On the Genealogy of Morals" by Nietzsche, and when I got to that whole anti-Judiasim bit (the one about hawks and lambs), all I could think was "this sounds like /b/" or "I bet he was just trolling for pageviews, given that he's writing this in 1887 Germa…

Edit: your quote: "...and when I got to that whole anti-Judiasim bit..."

If you think Nietzsche is anti-Jewish, you're not understanding him.

He thought of the Jews as having a different position to his but also admired them far more than Christians.

He was also a hater of antisemites.

Re: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

#68

Post by joe_the_user »

alexophile wrote: post #51
davidmathers wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can't really say (although many have) that he's anti-christianity He wrote a book called The Anti-Christian . What else can you say?

He wrote criticisms of just about every major western belief system - if you take into account his larger body of work, saying he was anti-this or anti-that just seems disingenuous. Much of what he wrote was criticism for its own sake because that's what leads to progress. He wanted his critiques to hit hard; he wanted to be subversive. My reading, at least, is that he wanted to teach people to be critical of highly-…

He indeed had wide-ranging perspective but I think the one thing you can say is he was anti-Christian.

He even said a few good things about Christ but anything positive was along the lines that the Christians got him wrong.

Re: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

#69

Post by steveklabnik »

joe_the_user wrote: post #67
steveklabnik wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> grandstanding for lack of a better word. This is really interesting to me. I've recently started reading more political philosophy, and a few weeks ago, dug into "On the Genealogy of Morals" by Nietzsche, and when I got to that whole anti-Judiasim bit (the one about hawks and lambs), all I could think was "this sounds like /b/" or "I bet he was just trolling for pageviews, given that he's writing this in 1887 Germa…

Edit: your quote: "...and when I got to that whole anti-Judiasim bit..." If you think Nietzsche is anti-Jewish, you're not understanding him. He thought of the Jews as having a different position to his but also admired them far more than Christians . He was also a hater of antisemites.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2189990

Re: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

#70

Post by davidmathers »

neutronicus wrote: post #64
davidmathers wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was back in 1990 that I set out on a project in memetic engineering. The Nazi-comparison meme, I'd decided, had gotten out of hand - in countless Usenet newsgroups, in many conferences on the Well, and on every BBS that I frequented, the labeling of posters or their ideas as "similar to the Nazis" or "Hitler-like" was a recurrent and often predictable event. It was the kind of thing that made you wonder how debate…

1984 may be the most successful memetic engineering project in history. Dressing down your prose a little, you're saying " 1984 successfully manipulated a lot of [gullible] people". And that is, in a nutshell, why I don't like it much. Orwell does not treat his reader as a peer. There's no respect there, just manipulation, because the author doesn't trust the reader with nuance. EDIT (in response to yours): Luckily f…

"1984 successfully manipulated a lot of [gullible] people"

1984 successfully vaccinated a lot of people and helped stop certain diseases of the mind from spreading and causing more damage to civilization.

Like Jonas Salk and polio.

Although.. I saw Victoria Jackson on a Fox News clip once ranting about how Barack Obama is a socialist and she mentioned how she had read 1984 multiple times and therefore understood how the socialists work and how they are coming to get her. I wonder what will happen in her brain when someone explains to her that George Orwell was a socialist.

In other words it looks like some people are so dim that the vaccine can't work on their minds.

Tangent: I also wonder what would happen to Sarah Palin's brain if someone explained to her what a kibbutz is.

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