I will admit I hate doing handyman shit now. Used to be proud to be able to do basic stuff as a teenager but jeez it’s high effort, low (psychological) reward. I’d get bored to tears if I had to do full time handyman work like minor maintenance and repairs in a building all day.
Conversation
What makes blue collar work different from white collar work is not manual labor vs information work. Both are 70-90% information processing. It’s just the low inductive generalizability of the information work. Blue collar work is human big data work.
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The last lightbulb I changed was on a Toyota Corolla. This one was a Volvo S40. Very different. Iirc on the Corolla I had to change both left and right and the procedures were slightly different on the 2 sides because of asymmetries under the hood. Meatspace is all corner cases.
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Now I know why I’m also increasingly tired of building and running my own websites even with low/no code Wordpress. It’s digital blue collar work. You spend hundreds of hours on this shit and learn nothing interesting besides how to do the shit.
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Any romantic sentimentality I had about hands-on tinkering on such things is long gone. Gimme the turnkey SaaS thing and the Uber/lyft apps. Tinkering is only fun when there’s a good chance of unreasonably leveraged inductive generalization ahas.
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The more mature a tech stack, the lower the chances of breakthrough upsides from tinkering. I’m not going to invent a new spark plug by replacing lightbulbs and wiper blades. I’m not going to invent blogging 2.0 fiddling with theme CSS. Need advanced conceptual knowledge for that
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Never trust anyone who waxes eloquent about the poetic spiritual joys of working with your hands. They’re crazy. The goal is not to achieve enlightenment fixing your shit. The goal is to pay the other guy to achieve enlightenment fixing your shit.
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Not saying you should be contemptuous of or entirely avoid such work, but you shouldn’t fetishize or romanticize it, or develop a reactionary suspicion of leveraged conceptual-symbolic information work. You should try to minimize and automate it and level up as much as you can.
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Replying to
Two, related Qs:
(1) To the extent Wells’ Eloi are alienated from tacit understanding/metis, do you see the difference between their posture and the Morlocks’ as one of degree or kind?
(2) Would you revise Wells’ take to increase or decrease the moralizing in his comparison?
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I think the eloi/morlock thing is about class and status really,not epistemology. Going abstract is not the same as going self-indulgent/hedonistic.
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Oh interesting! I read the self-indulgence as more of an asymptotic consequence of consuming abstraction without engaging its production. As needs and desires are abstracted away, we consume more of them. Social construction of our relationship to abstractions is independent.
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