I started a project in 2010 to rebuild my BMW R75/6 motorcycle with 103,000 original owner miles.  I wanted to get back to tacit knowledge derived from doing it myself as most of my working day is spent in what has euphemistically come to be called “Knowledge” work.

Prior to that, I was reading articles on the hand/mind connection, the plastic brain, learning and the value of tinkering .  Tinkering for kids comes in two varieties. you can tinker with stuff (inanimate objects) and you can engage in unsupervised play (animate objects), and both seem to be missing for today’s children.  I’ve come to separate learning into two kinds: abstract, or “Knowledge” learning where the animate and inanimate objects (people, things, materials, etc.) are purposely left out, and “Experience” learning where the objects are kept in and you are confronted with the cussedness of inanimate objects and the irrationality of motives.

I ended up subscribing to a magazine, Make which has a number of do it yourself (DIY) projects.  I stumbled across articles in The Denver Post about a tool lending library that operates like a public library, and an inventor’s workshop where you can pay a flat fee for access to a large variety of tools and shop space to work on projects.  And just today, I came across a video from TED about Marcin Jakabowski, an ex PhD in physics who decided his formal education as a Knowledge worker was “useless” and became a farmer.  From the hands on experience, he identified the 50 basic machines that support our civilization.   Then he decided to build them in a DIY fashion publishing the blue prints, material list and cost estimates so others can do the same.  An additional goal is to store all the information on a single DVD. Very interesting.

I see the beginning of a movement back toward experience-based tacit knowledge that comes from DIY thinking.  In many cases, the people who are DIY evangelists were fully invested in the mythos of the knowledge worker as the highest and best use of humanity but in practice found it to be hollow.

This raises a question about living a good life and if abstract knowledge alone really provides it.  I’ve had a growing sense that the lack of wisdom evident in many sectors of society may be correlated to the growing number of people who never tinkered with real things as part of their education.  I use “education” in the broad sense so it is not unnaturally constrained by what happens to you in school.  I see resumes in the tech sector from people who spend 1-2 years doing something and then move on.  How can you really have experience, let alone wisdom, from that short a time doing anything that is meaningful?  You hardly had time to fail spectacularly and figure out how to assimilate that experience, and its those kinds of experiences from which wisdom comes.

I have another perspective on knowledge workers vs. experience workers. I think there are two important contributors to the global problem of sustainability and throw-away culture (aka, things).  I’m  interested in how to change the throw-away “things” pattern underpinning the first world economy.

As a kid growing up in the 50’s, products were built to last a long time and ease of repair was an important part of industrial design.  For those of a “certain age”, remember Sears and the spare parts available for just about everything they sold?  They did that because DIY was alive and well in the 50’s due to the shared experience of the Great Depression by the majority of their customers.

I suspect that if we looked in detail at the difference in “carbon footprint” between a “Design For Throwaway” (DFT) and “Design For Repair”  (DFR) economy, the DFR model would demonstrate a dramatic reduction.  (I’d be interested in references to any research along these lines.)  I wouldn’t be surprised to find that a DFT culture reinforces an education model that teaches a rubric where an abstract knowledge worker is superior to a pragmatic experience worker.   In fact, I think nothing could be farther from the truth.

This could be a long post due to the depth of this topic.  However, I’m going to keep this one short. 

I suggest that our mind abstracts what our senses perceive to create context.  The context is dynamic as our senses measure change both in our bodies and in the surrounding “non-body”, aka the “world”, and both are in flux.  

When the mind abstracts, it chooses an abstraction model. We have a large number of them based on our experiences, and we can make more when needed which is often what is meant by the word “creativity”.  I use the term abstraction in the sense that it is a filter obscuring some sense input and some thought processes while focusing on and amplifying others.  This is common in our experience and easy to demonstrate.  Look out the window.  Make note of what you see.  Now, look at the wall of one building or a single tree or flower and focus on the colors, lines, cracks, texture and shadows.  This adjusts your abstraction model and allows information of this kind to be particularly noticed, but now you are not focused on the larger scale context.  In your first look out the window you did not see these details as the abstraction filter at that time was tuned to the scale of the entire landscape in front of you.  Scale, context, sensing, emotions and abstraction models are important parts of what the mind is doing.  I think these processes are what we mean when we describe what conciousness means.  I’ll not dwell on them in this post, but they are important, in constant flux, not static, and go unnoticed unless we take some effort to direct the mind’s attention to them.

There are a variety of optical illusions that demonstrate that once an abstraction filter is selected, we tend to keep using it unless we are confronted with a problem for which the filter is not useful.  The one I always use to illustrate this is the picture that can be seen as a beautiful woman with elaborate hat, or an old women with large nose and white bonnet.  If you see one image you can not see the other.  In fact, the first time you see this image your mind will select one context and associate image.  You will not see the other image until you are told there is another image and you should try and find it.

Optical illusions are a demonstration not only of  how the mind processes sensory data, but at a deep level, of the way thinking is performed.  We think with abstractions (filters) and without concicious effort, we do not immediately search for an alternative abstraction so long as the current one is “suitable”.  Here, suitable means self-consistent and satisfying.  We sense when the information we are thinking about, filtered by the abstractions we are currently using, don’t make “sense” of ourselves and the world in the current context.  We emotionally feel what “don’t make sense” is as an uncomfortable feeling of inconsistency, or lack of wholeness, or completeness.  I suggest that sensing inconsistency is part of what Pirsig draws attention to when he focuses on Quality and its role in his Metaphysics of Quality.  High Quality contains consistency, while lack of consistency lowers Quality.

Okay, now for a practical application of abstraction filters.  You may have been keeping up with the current political debate about the budget.  President Obama published and reviewed his proposal for the 2012 budget (note, we currently don’t have a budget for 2011 and continue to operate on “funding resolutions”, but that’s another story).  There is wide agreement on the necessity to reduce the deficit. This agreement is at the scale you saw when you first looked out the window.  The arguments are over the details and methods of achieving deficit reduction.  That shifts the scale of your thinking, so you should be open to shifting you abstraction filter.

To help you decide what is an appropriate abstraction filter for this scale of thinking, take a look at this diagram and direct your thinking to how you would create a consistent (higher Quality) path toward reducing the deficit.

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/newsgraphics/2011/0119-budget/index.html

In closing, its important to understand how systemic and instinctual the use of abstraction filters is for our mind as it makes sense of us and the surrounding world.  Once filters are selected we tend to continue using them, even when the context (scale) has shifted.  If you are more aware of the mind’s tendancy to keep using a filter, you can more freely look for other abstraction filters (or even create new ones if we want to) that are better suited to the context so the consistency of your thinking (Quality) is improved.

PS:  I just bumped into this article from O’reilly Radar and the accompanying video about the magazine business.  I think this illustrates the role of abstraction filters (in this context, the abstraction of a profit model in the magazine business) and the need to change them when there is dramatic shift in “scale”.

Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QRtWGnNPTc4

Article:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/02/sam-jones-online-content.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+oreilly%2Fradar%2Fatom+%28O%27Reilly+Radar%29

I noted last night on the News Hour on PBS, a report on the IBM Watson computer playing Jeopardy.  And this morning, I happened across this note on “Trends to Watch, Formal Relationships Between Governments and Hackers“.  I could summarize that article as, “How the next world war will be fought and what the battlefield will be”.

If we combine these two articles, we get an interesting notion of a potential future.  One where computing can analyze human conversation, and act, and where the power of networks to connect, are used to disrupt a nation in war time. 

An unseen risk is the fact common components and software (think Intel chips and Linux for example) are becoming ubiquitous.  Exploits to hack these components can have wide ranging application.  Said differently, and in a biological way, if we develop a computing based species (as the Watson story hints at), it would be a good idea to have enough gentic diversity to prevent an infection in one species from overwhelming the entire “biosphere”.  We have seen this in the PC market where infections of Intel+Microsoft Windows “species” don’t carry over to the Apple, or RIM species.

For some time, science fiction has provided stories of many futures where computing becomes sentient.  Isaac Asimov in the I Robot series in 1950 explored this notion.  Perhaps its time for a modern version of his three laws of robotics to be applied to computing in its broadest sense as we seem to be heading down a road where world-wide agreement on the “rules of war” in a cyberage, before we wage that war, might be a good idea.