Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [64]
Ohm’s law doesn’t refer to any particular place, nor does it refer to the particular sources of corruption. Such as rain. During one of those rainy weeks when he keeps having to wipe the mud off his boots and peel a clammy shirt off his shoulders, an experienced mechanic facing an ignition problem in an older car is likely to reach for some WD-40 and spray it in the distributor, to displace moisture from the contact points. On the other hand, if his hair is full of sand that has been raining down in little micro-avalanches from the recesses of a truck up on the lift, he is likely to intuit that the driver has been off-roading in the local dunes, say, and reach instead for his compressed air to blow debris out of the distributor. I say “intuit” rather than “conclude” because he may not draw any explicit connections in his mind between muddy boots and remedy A, on the one hand, and sandy hair and remedy B, on the other. Rather, he is familiar with typical situations, and their typicality is something of which he has a tacit knowledge. This tacit knowledge seems to consist of recognizing patterns, and the causal patterns of the ignition problem are mirrored by patterns in his own bodily motions: periodically scratching the sand out of his scalp, or peeling a clammy shirt off his shoulders.
Ohm’s law is something explicit and rulelike, and is true in the way that propositions are true. Its utter simplicity makes it beautiful; a mind in possession of this equation is charmed with a sense of its own competence. We feel we have access to something universal, and this affords a pleasure that is quasi-religious, perhaps. But this charm of competence can get in the way of noticing things; it can displace, or perhaps hamper the development of, a different kind of knowledge that may be difficult to bring to explicit awareness, but is superior as a practical matter. Its superiority lies in the fact that it begins with the typical rather than the universal, so it goes more rapidly and directly to particular causes, the kind that actually tend to cause ignition problems.
Appreciating the situated character of the kind of thinking we do at work is important, because the degradation of work is often based on efforts to replace the intuitive judgments of practitioners with rule following, and codify knowledge into abstract systems of symbols that then stand in for situated knowledge. Daniel Bell, the author of The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, calls this codification an “intellectual technology.” Its significance lies in the fact that it opens up the possibility of a “social technology,” that is, a division of labor, that may be brought to bear on, for example, the organization of a hospital, an international trade system, or a work group whose members are engaged in specialized tasks for a common objective. The crux of the idea of an intellectual technology is “the substitution of algorithms (problem-solving rules) for intuitive judgments. These algorithms may be embodied in an automatic machine or a computer program or a set of instructions based on some statistical or mathematical formula.”5
Bell seems to regard the mechanization and centralization of thinking as progress, or at any rate as inevitable; it is the only proper response to the growing complexity of society. His readiness to do away with the intuitive judgments of expert practitioners rests on the idea that such judgments are inadequate to complex systems that may involve
the interaction of too many variables for the mind to hold in correct order simultaneously. . . . [I]ntuitive judgments respond to immediate cause-and-effect relationships which are characteristic of simpler systems, whereas in complex systems the actual causes may be deeply hidden or remote in time or, more often, may lie in the very structure (i.e. pattern) of the system itself, which is not immediately recognizable. For this reason, one has to use algorithms,