RK's Musings

Shop Class as Soulcraft : Summary

It has been more than one and half months since I have read any book. Was involving in developing some stuff @work, so was completely immersed in it. Decided to read this book on a beautiful Saturday.

Came across this book in an NY times article and was looking forward to read the book, as it was relating to an aspect which is close to my heart, hacking.Hacking in geek's jargon is ripping apart software, packages, libraries, things and understanding stuff at level 0. In some sense,I guess there are two types of people, first kind who do not want to get their hands dirty a lot and would rather assemble, manage a set of people to accomplish some task, second kind are those who want to hack things and build things from scratch. By the kind of education I have undergone, I should be doing the former but I have found joy in the latter activity. In that sense, I could relate to the author was a Chicago Phd , academic, whom one would expect to write papers, do research and be a professor. Instead he chooses to become a mechanic. Why ? This book answers that question and much more. Author has organized the book in such a way that it traces author's experiences from being a young apprentice in a repair shop , to being a PhD from Chicago, to working in a cubicle, to finally coming round the circle to repair shop again.

Separation of Thinking from Doing

The author traces the dichotomy that has been built in to the society, courtesy the industrial clock-work mentality. In the so called knowledge worker world, it seems to many of us that knowledge , thinking etc is crucial and implementation can be done easily..outsource the code, break down the task in to process and decouple the process in to a simple components which require less skilled labor. Interesting the word, "compensation", comes from the fact that work which required high skilled engagement of both physical and mental faculties is reduced to a few mundane repeatable steps and the worker has to be compensated for robbing of this kind of work and replacing it with some less engaging work.
This essay is a call towards picking up a trade and working on that trade for a long time to understand, engage and produce something of value. According to the author, nowadays everybody is called an Einstein, be it a best buy worker, or a management consultant. However it is easy to forget the fact that Einstein or Rembrandt are , what they are because of their commitment and submission to something in the initial stages and subsequently mastering it over a long period of time.

To be a master of one's own stuff

The ideology of freedom is at the heart of consumerist culture; a promise to disburden us of mental and bodily involvement with our own stuff so we can pursue ends we have freely chosen; For some of us, we don't even know what end we are pursuing, whether the end is a figment of imagination based on current circumstances, whether it is changing etc. Anyway coming back to this so called freedom from DOING and INVOLVEMENT, robs of the experience of having a direct responsibility of things.

A true gem of a statement in the book :

To be master of your own stuff entails also being mastered by it

There are umpteen number of examples quoted which go on to make this point that by subjecting oneself to being mastered by something else, one can experience joy. Be it music, where the rigid rules of keys and notes need to be submitted to, before novelty can be displayed. Learning a new language is also akin to submission. Let's say you are learning French and like any language it goes by a set of rules. Only by submitting to the rules, one can enjoy the experience of the language. If you have ever written a software library, developed a UI, developed a software, built a system, the initial days are usually where the language/syntax etc is your master. You have to obey it or get kicked( debug errors). But once you know the rules, then it's like heaven. You can play with the code, components, rules and create something innovative. The more low level language, the more joy it brings to your work. Imagine the difference between building a library using C/C++ vis-a-vis building something using point and click interfaces. There is a ton of difference in doing things at a lower level than merely working using the surface level pre-built things.

In today's world, autonomy , individualism, freedom are the buzz words where every individual strives to be an individual, in the literal sense of the word. He/she picks and chooses from an array of choices available and tries to establish an identity for oneself. Marketing, is hell bent on showing how customization is the new cool thing.. If one ponders a bit, one realizes that the marketing jargon is doing something else to us. It kind of equates picking and choosing relevant things to freedom. Nope, we are merely selecting. We are not tinkering with the details, which means we are still operating at the surface and are disconnecting ourselves with the true nature of the system that we are interacting.

The best thing mentioned in the essay is about Yamaha warrior 2007 ad:

Life is what you make it . Start making it your own

The picture shows a guy in his home focused intently on the warrior. He's not smiling for the camera. He's lost in his work. Underneath the caption is written in small font, You only get one shot at life- may as well make it mean something!.
This sort of joy obtained by hacking things is never obtained by mere selection of pre built things, like wearing a good helmet, having a good rear mud guard etc. Joy , as suggested by the ad is only obtained by close tinkering of the machine to suit one's likes and dislikes. and such a close tinkering provides JOY and not superficial selection is what the entire essay is about.

Education of a Gearhead

The author narrates his experience as an apprentice in a repair shop in California. His interactions with Lance , Chas makes him work on things and allows him to ponder about the different worlds, one at home where his dad is a mathematical physicist who deals with beautiful abstractions, the other world is the mundane repair shop where utilitarian aspects triumph abstract things. Being in close proximity to repair personnel, he realizes the importance of attentiveness while repairing vehicles. The same set of data can be give different signals to different people based on their involvement levels. Spectator skills won't do. I get the same feeling when people merely sit around the fences and trying to guess the next hottest startup, next hottest trend....Why sit as a spectator? Shouldn't one not get involved in the game ? Well, as they say , different people get attracted to different types of dispositions.

Pure Mathematicians and Builders fall in one category. If you think about it, the builder and mathematician builds something out with a specific mental image of something. If the theory or building falls, it is entirely the responsibility of the creator. However motor repairing skills / doctor's skills are very different. They are inherently dealing with things they have not built. They are looking at fixing things which means the realizations of the problems are stochastic( This word was used by Aristotle to describe specific kind of arts which require attention and openness to things as they are). A specific write up in Robert Pirig's Zen and art of motorcycle maintenance is also mentioned to bring home the point that " At work, being good-natured , friendly , easy going and UNINVOLVED is useless" . In our lives we come across so many people such as described above who are good in nature but don't involve themselves completely in any specific activity and hence appear as spectators. It isn't fun to watch spectators as much as to watch players hitting the runs. Well, I believe it is better to play the sport and than watch either spectators or players :)

The point of this essay is that practical world needs a person to be involved, attentive , make the work personal. At the same time, develop a paradoxical feeling of being unimposing of their views / assumptions etc on the things they come across. A true statistician would say , form a null hypothesis and test it out. However that needs to be appended with another aspect, " develop a personal connection to the thing you are testing, only then there is fun, joy and in the end utilitarian.

Further Education of a Gearhead : Amateur to Professional

This essay recounts the tension between engaging in work completely Vis-a-vis client's budget constraints. There are instances when the author spend more than required time , reason being a obsessive drive towards perfection. Not always was the client intent on spending money for all the hours spent. There are cases when the client needs the motorcycle to just run and give him just enough service in his budget constraints. Working in abstractions is good in ivory towers but not in real world where different people have different agendas in your work.

The Contradictions of the Cubicle

This note contains author's experiences as a knowledge worker and sheer paradox between the quality of work and intellectual status the work offers. Author goes on to talk about the degree inflation, the so called corporate culture where most of us seek an identity, a place where in the name of team work, management creates more vague notions of work satisfaction. There is also a comparison between Site crew and a team at a office which shows the vast differences between the two. A clear objective measurement and sense of achievement is usually seen in a trades job, whereas in a big company, the contribution one makes is often difficult to measure and it could be result of a ton of random forces beyond your control.

Thinking as Doing

Author makes a strong case that tacit knowledge that is obtained from years of understanding, tinkering can never be replaced with algorithms, computer systems. I don't necessarily concur fully with the view of the author as I believe systems and raw computing power can be used as an effective aid for understanding. Lets say before the advent of statistical software, simulating and understanding various aspects probability distributions, stochastic processes would have been very difficult. High frequency trading which permeates the world of finance would have never flourished had there been no money produced by those systems.

However I do agree to the point that our society gives more importance to thinking rather than doing. However increasingly the lines are blurring. A feedback loop is the key and a person who is involved in both the steps is the person who is going to do something productive. Confining to only one part of the loop is not going to be effective, point in case are technical writers in IT companies. They write documentation with out ever writing a line of code, with out ever building a user interface. Result : Reams of useless English documents which serve as no purpose. Yes , indeed tacit knowledge which is gained by doing is somehow thought to be replaced by computers/ processes in a few fields,is a shaky ground which will collapse soon if not now.

Work , Leisure and Full Engagement

I felt that the last essay is the best essay of the book, because it probably echoes a similar feeling that I have about work and life. Examples quoted in this essay are numerous. Why does a mortgage banker work like mad and looks forward to Climbing Everest holiday? Why does corporate jetsetting consultant thirsts for a vacation in australia, Amazon's rain forests etc ? There are a class of people who live dual lives. In one part of their lives, they work and accumulate money. In the second part of their lives, for some it is weekends, for some it is end of year vacation, they release their pent up need for an experience where feelings and action are linked together. However there are a set of trades where one can live in one unified world where work and life intermingle and have a meaningful relationship between them. There are so many wonderful points made in this essay that my summary would do no justice to it. Overall takeaway from this essay is that finding work as a way of life is crucial to live a joyous life, else an individual is forever living in 2 worlds, one in which he/she makes money, and the other in which he connects with core need !

This become reminds me of Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham. Excellent in prose and to the point , where the central message of the book is to work on things which offer you to mix thinking and doing.

For those who are time strapped and are looking for a 2 minute video recap of the book, here is a youtube link :

Outliers : Summary

 

Bought this book in India for $2 , less than the shipping cost of an item from Amazon!. Price difference of books sometimes amazes me. If one really wants to read a set a books, one can manage the stuff with a very lean budget in India.

This is a book about outliers. In some sense, everybody wants to be an outlier. Ask any person and he/she might say " I want to be different" . He/She wants to be different. However there are only few people in this world who manage to be very very different from the rest of us, as far as the eventual world-measured-success is concerned. This book emphasizes one single point through out. Outstanding achievement/Success is made by certain individuals because of the culture they belong to. There could be many variables that effect the success of an individual. Malcolm Gladwell takes one such variable, culture, of the individual and tries to weave experimental and anecdotal evidence to argue that , culture, probably could be one of the most significant variables that determines success of an individual.

The book starts off with an interesting finding at a place , some 100 miles away from Bancor, Pennsylvania. A surprisingly healthy community who all come from a place in Italy and are unusually healthy. This example brings out the "Outlier" effect. Is health related to the usual known causes or Does culture have a big role to play in it ?

Gladwell talks about the Canadian Hockey league and shows that date of birth , and specifically date and month of birth have a tremendous effect on the success of the person. The eligibility date of the Canadian Hockey league somehow seem to have a great effect on the type of successful players which the system churns out. Someone born near the cut off date has a far more likelihood to be grouped with a set of younger students and eventually displays far more superior skills in the group and thus gets to the top , thanks to the asymmetric age distribution in the group.

10,000 hours is the effort required to master anything , as per gladwell's research. Be it Bill Joy, Bill Gates, Beatles, Paul Allen, every one of the rock stars/ chess players/ entrepreneurs seems to have put 10,000 hours of passionate efforts to become excellent in their respective work. If you put in 12 hrs of effort, 7 days a week , which is 84 hours a week. In a year it translates to approx 4200 hours. If you can spend at least 3 years this schedule of 12hr days, then there is no doubt that you can become proficient, as per Gladwell.

Author runs a story about Joe Flom , a successful lawyer and glosses over the usual reasons that are given for the success of an individual. Instead he focuses on specific events that arise in Joe Flom's life , Being Jewish, Demographic luck, 3 elements of flow (autonomy+complexity+effort & reward ) coming together in the type of law practiced. These factors , gladwell, cogently argues are the main reasons behind Joe Flom's success.

Personally, I found the story on Rice paddies to be the most important part of the book. Gladwell explains the connection between the effort spent on rice fields and the way the same traits are carried in to the math abilities of Asians. Truly the most interesting narrative that I have read in the recent times

There is also an account of KIPP school in Bronx which illustrates the importance of "more schooling" rather "less schooling" being the reason behind the turn around of the school. Author presents the data which says that the only reason which the elite school kids perform better other kids is the way they spend their spare time. Well, the spare time is what decides the expertise of a person.

The book ends with the story about author's mother where a set of fortuitous events lead his mom from Jamaica to US .

The book is a great one-time read of a few stories which go on to hammer the point that , culture, where you come from has a significant bearing on your success. If you are a gladwell fan , you might not want to miss this book.

The Power of Less : Summary

 

This books falls under a specific category of books which includes titles like " In Praise of Slow", Zen books which focus on simplicity, Productivity books etc. As the title hints, there is one simple theme running through out the book - "Declutter your life, in all aspects of your life." Cutting down variables and living with fewer and lesser variables in life is a far richer experience than dealing with a lot of variables and trying to do justice to all the variables.

This book is a classic productivity book but is completely in odds with the "Getting things done" - David Allen talk. The author Leo Babautta says that simplifying things relating to various aspects like, information intake, email reading habits, internet browsing time, goals in life, people whom you deal with, working on the daily tasks, etc. makes a lot of sense. The book gives some practical tips to simplify things in life.

The book can be read in less than hour's time and at the end of it will make you feel that Life is a objective function where the lesser number variables makes it easier to find the maximum value of the function. In fact, it makes me feel that the local maxima could also be the global maxima!, if you choose the right kind of variables!

For those who feel overwhelmed by stuff in life, this book is going to be a welcome breather. However one can get the best out of this book only if one implements and experiments with at least a few of the stuff mentioned in the book.

Variables

Sometimes there are so many random variables that one needs to deal with all at once. It kind of gets on to your nerves.

Most of the variables are stochastic in nature. The distribution for each of these variables X(t) changes for each day. It looks as though X(t) follows a known distribution for a given t. However as t increases, one starts seeing the distributions are no longer stable. There are jumps / non random behavior beyond comprehension.And worst of all, completely independent variables(at least which I assume) start showing extremely positive correlation / extremely negative correlation.

Ideally one can summarize an objective function as a function dependent on certain variables. These variables can be characterized as known knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns.

In real life, known knowns are very very few and one can easily deal with them. Everyone knows what they are.

Coming to known unknowns, these variable cause the maximum pain. Known unknowns are those variables one tries to predict and adjust one's behaviors accordingly. But alas! , sometimes known unknowns are too many and the problems starts showing up. Uncertain distributions, uncertain correlations, variables morphing from deterministic to stochastic and back. These known unknows that I deal with are may be 10 variables and I for one am finding extremely difficult to deal with these 10 variables.

Well. then there are unknown unknowns , which , for reasons that can't be verbalized, I think I am well equipped to handle. May be because the known unknowns have sucked up so much of my energy that I am confident to handle any unknown unknowns. Atleast that's the frame of mind I am in.

One convenient way is to shove all the known unknowns in to unknown unknowns category and live a peaceful life. Well then the world is Black and White world. It is either known knowns OR unknown unknowns .But soon I start realizing that it is difficult to live in that state of world. Mind always tries to trick me in to hypothesizing about known unknowns. Vain effort OR Intellectual Orgasm OR simply succumbing to human behavior ..whatever it might be, I do not know.

Variables, Variables everywhere...Well , the only thing that is constant as of now seems to be ONE of the known knowns, thankfully..

Quote for the day

Standardize and you simplify lives;everyone learns the system only once. But don't standardize too soon; you may be locked in to a primitive technology, or you may have introduced rules that turn out to be grossly inefficient, even error-inducing

    -- DONALD A. NORMAN

Quote for the day

Standardize and you simplify lives;everyone learns the system only once. But don't standardize too soon; you may be locked in to a primitive technology, or you may have introduced rules that turn out to be grossly inefficient, even error-inducing

    -- DONALD A. NORMAN