Comment by henryrobbins00

10 hours ago

I read The World-Ending Fire (Wendell Berry), Hackers (Steven Levy), and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig) around the same time. I was struck by how similar Berry, Pirsig, and the early MIT hackers thought about Quality work. I gave a talk about it at an images & algorithms class I took in undergrad. It's reassuring to see Wendell Berry was an influential figure to many others in this space. RIP.

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henryrobbins00

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wisemang  3 hours ago

I haven’t read Berry, but he just went up on my priority list based on this.

Another link to Quality in the Pirsig sense I haven’t seen discussed much is Christopher Alexander’s work. Specifically A Timeless Way of Building which gives similar frustratingly inexact descriptions. I guess Jane Jacobs fits in with this as well but with a bit more concreteness.

  • henryrobbins00  2 hours ago

    Thanks for the recommendations. Horse-Drawn Tools and the Doctrine of Labor Saving is a very short Berry essay and particularly relevant to this conversation.

kulahan  5 hours ago

I’m not sure I’m quite ready to take on 3 books to figure this out - can you explain a little bit what you mean about quality work? Consider my interest piqued!

  • henryrobbins00  2 hours ago

    I'm afraid I won't do this justice, as it's been a while since I've thought deeply about these ideas, but here is an attempt!

    For me, Pirsig put it best: "Quality is the goal of Art." I too struggled to understand Pirsig's full metaphysical hierarchy of Quality, but this quote gets at the core of the similarities I saw in these books.

    Pirsig was concerned with teaching his students writing and maintaining his motorcycle. Berry was concerned with doing fulfilling and meaningful work on the farm. The MIT hackers were concerned with finding The Right Thing: "the unique, correct, elegant [program]." All of these individuals were concerned with some notion of Quality.

    Interestingly, they all viewed what they were doing as a form of art. A colleague remarked, "Sounds like art," to Pirsig upon hearing his ideas on Quality, to which he responded, "Well, it is art." Levy identifies "You can create art and beauty on the computer." as one of the tenets of The Hacker Ethic. "[A]ll serious computer programs are expressions of an individual." This was the first clue to me that they were all talking about the same thing.

    Like art, Quality is more a description of a process than product. And the Quality way of working that all three books discuss is very much the same. For me, it is exactly the defining characteristics of the artistic process. Through their work, an artist expresses themselves. They make contact with their medium, be that motorcycle, field, code, or painting. They make choices. Their medium responds. Both evolve with each other. The process is inherently experimental. Importantly, their medium imposes limitations and constraints.

    I gave this talk back in 2024, two years after I took the course. At the time, I was frustrated with my lack of artistic output post-graduation. These readings made me realize my creative/artistic outlet had just changed for the time being. I took a lot of solace in that. Recently, I've been trying to understand how AI fits into my picture of Quality programming.

    If you've come this far, you might be interested to see some of my image & algorithm work [1]. The decluttering, exaptation exhibition was the culmination of the class and an independent study.

    I should also mention Shop Class as Soulcraft (Matthew B. Crawford) as another book that influenced my thinking.

    [1] https://henryrobbins.com/artwork/