Please...........................

 

The world doesn’t need another hard-nosed profession. It needs one that acquires clout through competence and caring.

-Michael Wade, from here

Be careful out there - Part 2.....

 

The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society. 

-The Palladium Letter

safetyism..........................

 

If one cares about safety (and who doesn't), one does well to take a skeptical look at the safety-industrial complex, and its reliance on moral intimidation to pursue ends other than safety.

. . . if left unchallenged, the pursuit of risk reduction tends to create a society based on an unrealistically low view of human capacities.  Infantilization slips in, under cover of democratic ideals.  I will insist, on the contrary, that democracy remains viable only if we are willing to extend to one another a presumption of individual competence.  This is what social trust is built on.  Together, they are the minimal endowments for a free, responsible, fully awake people.

-Matthew Crawford,  Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control

an edge..........................

 

You have to figure out what your own aptitudes are. If you play games where other people have the aptitudes and you don’t, you’re going to lose. And that’s as close to certain as any prediction that you can make. You have to figure out where you’ve got an edge. And you’ve got to play within your own circle of competence.

-Charlie Munger, from here

thanks Chris

by-product......................

      The truth, of course, is that creativity is a by-product of mastery of the sort that is cultivated by long practice.  It seems to be built up through submission (think of a musician practicing scales, or Einstein learning tensor algebra).  Identifying creativity with freedom harmonizes quite well with the culture of the new capitalism, in which the imperative of flexibility precludes dwelling in any task long enough to develop real competence.  Such competence is the condition not only for genuine creativity but for economic independence such as the tradesman enjoys.

--Matthew B. Crawford,  Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

Be careful what you wish for.............

      Driverless cars will finally solve the problem of moving people around with maximum efficiency, by ceding human control to impersonal algorithms.  They promise to bring a messy, dangerous domain of life under control at last.  Traffic jams will likely become a thing of the past, and accidents will be greatly reduced.  So we are told at any rate.

     In this case we can detect a familiar pattern.  Driverless cars are one instance of a wider shift in our relationship to the physical world, in which the demands of competence give way to a promise of safety and convenience.  The skilled practitioner becomes a passive beneficiary of something more systematic, rendering his skill obsolete.  

-Matthew B. Crawford, Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road

thanks Michael