I'd like to understand better what you mean by this. I agree that, in general, many improvements so-called to everyday life have been technologies that do things for you and therefore remove agency and the resulting pleasure; remove agency except the very basic, almost pre-human agencies of adding inputs without having to think about results; and by technologies I mean administrative systems as well as machines. Almost 3 decades ago a friend on a modestly successful upward career path as a commercial loan officer at a regional bank left after the bank was bought by a much bigger bank that had rationalized everything and put into place their program of using statistical analysis to reduce loan decisions to a checklist instead of what he found fulfilling: getting to know people and sizing up their circumstances and character, and forecasting outcomes based on this judgment.
And 20 years ago, when I was married to a pediatrician, the big hospitals (here in flyover ABQ, NM) had been more and more making diagnosis and treatment a matter of following rationalized, statistically tested, general checklists, with other checklists to measure "productivity." She is now in 1-woman private practice, and good for her. Is this what you mean? It's funny and sad that more and more -- not only hard, dirty, dangerous physical labor, but human thought and creativity has been replaced by rationalized systems evaluated statistically, so that even some previously professional work has been reduced to hewing wood and drawing water, metaphorically speaking: plugging in inputs. This started of course with manufacturing. I agree that the same trend seems to be taking over cycling, with the difference that the ultimate agency in cycling is still the person that pedals. Still, I too like friction, when I don't use the primitive indexing on Sturmey Archer hubs, or give it all up altogether for fixed drivetrains -- because of agency. I do not by any means consider Matthew Crawford a sage, but he's an intelligent and well educated man who has actually thought through this sort of thing and expressed his conclusions with surprising clarity for someone trained as an academic, this in *Shop Class as Soul Craft* and *The World Beyond Your Head.* Both books assert generally that real-life confrontation and engagement with real things, notably in the manual trades*, are much more conducive to virtue** than coding software or even -- the clientele I write for -- managing the strategies and general direction and design of business systems, be these entire corporations or business units or product portfolios or global IT systems using statistical methods and working to meet the quarterly numbers. Yes, doing otherwise does indeed put a limit on practical size. Crawford worked as a journeyman electrician, and owns a business restoring classic motorcycles. * Hands-on trades: plumbing, auto mechanics, framing, and I daresay, though he doesn't extend his descriptions to them, cooking, interior design, event planning, stock raising, farming on a family scale. ** "Arete," the perfection or fulfillment and thus flourishing of a specific (= species) kind. The virtue of a hammer is to be well balanced, properly weighted, and because of this to drive nails efficiently. Crawford means both the specific excellences of character and the specific excellences of the practical intelligence; the speculative intelligence is beyond him. Suntour's classic bar cons by this criterion are highly virtuous shifting devices. Forget the idea of "virtue" in the modern sense as something that makes you give up stuff. On Sun, May 1, 2022 at 4:45 AM ascpgh <asc....@gmail.com> wrote: > ... So much in our lives has been optimized and refined to make things > less of an effort in general that a part of my brain is left unsatisfied by > the resulting lack of problem solving, coping or effort, mental or > physical, that is necessary in a day. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rbw-owners-bunch/CALuTfgsfuVn6m8OkPVF6SQpeR8OmT0FkFqAspvpcB001bKqjyQ%40mail.gmail.com.
