"They're not trying to *fix* the thing so much as bathing in its beauty."
I love this observation, universals like beauty are grounded by being in the world. "To entice them into such jobs with money is impoverished" While I mostly agree, I cannot help but notice that (by the numbers given in the video) the top plumbers can only hope to make as much as an entry-level web developer, and then there are the externalities... "We need to entice them/us into such muck in the same way we entice, say, a field biologist into their muck." The *muck* isn't simply mud or shit, but an ecosystem of hepatitis and parasites. Also, there is culture. While working as a laborer to a plumber wasn't the worst job I have ever had, the general milieu encouraged violent humor and poor diet, discouraged thinking, and a bordering-on-philosophical acceptance that we live, breathe, and eat shit. It doesn't take long to start to feel the hate creep in, folded into the soul as a consequence of being in the world. Then, there are the strange side-effects of our meritocratic capitalism. It seems to me that the cultural dynamics pressure individuals both toward specialism and away from meritocratic principles in a number of ways. Two, off the top of my head, counterintuitive and interrelated points include[†]: 1. Generalized spoils: Becoming a certified expert in a field occasionally confers expertise *over* individuals without certification in matters outside the scope of practice. A back of the envelope heuristic is employed along the lines of "Well, we know that *this* individual did some hard thinking in one area so *at least* we know they can do hard thinking *generally*. *That* individual we know nothing about, so place your bet accordingly". That this is a common feature of our society suggests that with access to deeper levels of certification comes greater access to agency. Too often, doing "low level" *essential work* bars an individual from being taken seriously. 2. Optimized employment: A career (whatever those were) is a process of canalization. Specialists are often more employable exactly because specific work is needed and throughput is directly measured. An effect, it seems to me, is that valuable generalists are left to roam nomadically between careers, under continuous exposure to forces that actively inhibit a sense of agency, value, or accumulated skill[≃]. As another option, I suppose, generalists survive the optimization through mimicry, the stultifying practice/training of one's self toward myopia. My concern here is that neither with academic work nor manual labor is there much room for the life of the mind. Especially not for a generalist mind. Instead, as youngsters, we are shown futures construed as accolade-valued functions along the real line. The rhetorical image, familiar to everyone here, is that "If you want options you head toward school"[∅]. [†] Please, pardon the touches of autobiographical bitterness. [≃] Specialist-Generalist inequity in the workplace is a place that I would love to see more attention given. [∅] Even at 40, people compulsively give me this advice weekly. -- Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
