Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

by Matthew B. Crawford

The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on.

In the trades, a master offers his apprentice good reasons for acting in one way rather than another, the better to realize ends the goodness of which is readily apparent.

Maybe some masters, but there are plenty of trade teachers who don't...

Algorithms can be made to simulate the kind of tacit knowledge that experts possess, as when IBM’s Deep Blue succeeded in playing chess at the highest level in 1997. Through brute computation of every possible move that adheres to the rules of chess (200 million board positions per second), the program was able to pick winning moves. To constrain the problem, the programmers made it their goal to beat one man in particular, Gary Kasparov, the reigning champion. Knowing his preferred opening moves and strategies made the problem tractable. But in beating Kasparov at his own game, Deep Blue was doing something very different than what a human chess player does.

This is a completely incorrect understanding of the way that chess engines work, and is not a good argument against white collar work. Modern chess champions all use engines to train with lmao

A similar effect may account for the familiar fact that when someone turns his hobby into a business, he often loses pleasure in it.

Then what the fuck are we even talking about here? Why quit your job at the think tank and start a motorcycle repair business?

This book grows out of an attempt to get a critical handle on my own work history; to understand the human possibilities latent in what I was doing when the work seemed good, and when it was bad to identify the features of the work that systematically preempted or damaged those same possibilities.

I think that this is the real base of the issue. He's built this philosophy backwards to explain and justify his own life choices