From Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance

When someone recommended the book "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance", I wasn't very impressed by the title. Zen is a Buddhism branch that originated in China during the 6th century as Chan. From China, Zen spread south to Vietnam, to Korea and east to Japan. Zen is the name used in Japan. Even though the name started in China but all Buddhism were essentially from India. I didn't believe the book is about Chan or Zen as if that is the case, it may better to look somewhere else. According to the introducer, the book is about philosophy of engineering. That sounds cautiously interesting. Philosophy is an art that never ends, where correctness always evolves. Still, I borrowed the audio book, with doubts.

The book starts normal but makes a hit when it came to express a seemingly truth about human research intensity versus knowledge. The point is that if we research some topics with increasingly intensity, from experience, current knowledge in that topics would become outdated sooner than before when we're lack of supporting knowledge. The reason it made a hit is that, it sounds correct. We are transformed by technologies and science everyday, with even faster speed than before. When we know more, we can learn even more and faster, isn't it? This is the plus. But it also sounds skeptical because, can we image that soon we would understand our body or the globe? It has remained an X for a long time. The idea just sounds too rosy. This is the negative. But the plus is still inspiring.

Keeping listening to the book until it hits another point that may be able to explain the negative. There is a section about teaching schools whose main function is teaching rather than researching. As days passing on teaching the same materials year after year, people gets dull and loses student's respect. That is a bing: We know more but we become duller along the path. it is true that we have known more, but we've also seen more such that we're used to them. Unless we are willing to change them we will have incentives to break them. This is not easy in all field. For instance, When Greenspan summaries the reason why capitalism works, one of his reasons is that capitalism encourages "constructive destruction". When things become outdated and not fit to the market, it is gone, even we memorize them. Examples like Eastman Kodak or maybe Research in Motion. The driving force is corporation survival. This is in economy and financial field. Even in society science, it is not easy either. We still try to find out precedent bounds to understand our past.

Even though with these thoughts, the book sounds worth chewing. At least, it makes people to think two sides.