How many apprentices did this guy managed to put through the pipeline before his career was over? It always shocks me how low this number tends to be for highly skilled craftsmen. They spend their century maintaining/creating some of the best work on the planet but when they disappear, unenumerable amount of knowledge, tips and experience silently disappears as quickly as it was gained, and it's sad to observe every single time.
It's sad but at the same time there is a sort of optimization that tends to occur each time the magic trick is rediscovered.
Often it is not possible to separate the technique from the man. Things like riding a bike or flying a helicopter come to mind. A lot of what makes a master good cannot be written down anywhere. There isn't anything tangible to actually lose.
How would you write a document that describes to someone how to ride a bike or dig holes efficiently? You could explain the principles and general ideas, but the apprentice is going to need to get scraped up a bit before they actually learn anything that matters. The apprentice willing to suffer repeated failure is where most of the heavy lifting occurs. The master is mostly a backstop to keep the apprentice alive.
> How would you write a document that describes to someone how to ride a bike or dig holes efficiently?
You don't. You put these people together for some years to work on stuff together, and a small percentage of this "intangible" feelings, knowledge and experiences you cannot write down somehow magically passes over to the other person.
Of course, the apprentice will still require their own repeated failures and uphill battle even getting close, but having someone who mastered the craft near you as you go through this, makes the whole process a hell of a lot faster.
I think they're touching on multiple things that typically happens between an apprentice and master, not just tacit knowledge. Also implicit learning, procedural / nondeclarative memory, expert intuition and metacognitive feelings, all very hard to quantify into a written document, but put two people together where one learns from the other, and all these somehow gets transferred over time.
> It always shocks me how low this number tends to be for highly skilled craftsmen.
Generally speaking (only a Sith deals in absolutes), engineers want to engineer.
There is no incentive for management to nudge the best performing engineers to teach their expertise in their craft[s]. A high-performing engineer "reflects good" on a manger. The way incentives are generally structured, this becomes a problem that perpetuates itself: Everyone in the management pipeline gets more money for the high performing engineer to keep engineering, rather than to teach.
This is one of the saddest aspects of our societies being optimized for maximum short-term gains. In the past, master craftsman would own their own shop and pass it down to their apprentices, leaving a tradition and legacy that could last hundreds of years. This dynamic is becoming increasingly rare.
This is relative. In two generations, the concept of "master craftsman" and longevity will have been forgotten and short term thinking will the be "norm".
It is only because we know and can compare that we judge.
Remember, when we were hunter & gatherers, before becoming bound to the land and tilling that land, we had different gifts and talents that have all been lost. For better or worse.
Or closer to home: barely anyone remembers black and white television or the feeling it must have been to view the moon landing on one.[1] Cathode ray TVs have gone the way of the Dodos - good or bad? Who knows.
Whether a long term or short term outlook is better or worse, no one can tell because there aren't any goals nor targets to meet in evolution.
> barely anyone remembers black and white television
I feel like some "old" people have the weird idea that "young" people are just clueless about anything older than themselves. Just because some technology is no longer in use, does not mean that you don't get in touch with it. You don't grow up in isolation. There are always museums and of course the appliances of your parents and grandparents, in this case their photos.
All the films beyond some point are black and white and it's not like there were no significant events during that time. (Although I have seen some color-pictures from the 1900s, but the majority of course wasn't.)
Sure, you only use the technology from the past 15-20 years in daily life, but I feel like the technology you get in touch with is more closer to 80-100 years.
>and longevity will have been forgotten and short term thinking will the be "norm".
Nobody plans for decades because nobody can afford the risk.
On a personal or organizational level there is no point in making investments that will turn profit over the course of decades if over the ~5yr horizon there's there's always the looming risk that the government will kick your craft out of the country at the behest of the people.
What happened to all the men who specialized in casting steels? What happened to those facilities? What happened to those companies?
The math is simple and they teach it in every business school in the country.
That raises the question, what came first: maths or evolution?
Of course we can apply the laws of physics and the theories of maths onto everything we see and experience around us but does that make them so - those experiences.
> What happened to all the men who specialized in casting steels? What happened to those facilities? What happened to those companies? Nobody plans for decades because nobody can afford the risk.
Take a more holistic view, what happened to all the stars and galaxies?[1]
The spiritual acceptance of the inevitable end of everything isn't taught in any business school and we are left to face/cope with that ourselves. If maths/business is your poison for coping, then so be it. I dislike reducing every experience to numbers and graphs, profit margins, win/loss and them/us.
I guess I'm trying to say is that even the biggest profit will have no longevity when compared to, even just human history, let alone the history of the universe.
The thing is that profit is not the only reason people do something. Some people just like their profession, I would argue that this is kinda a requirement to actually become really good. So in order to actually matter for a good skill you must lack the very argument you argue with.
The leading of companies with people not actually skilled at the craft is still a historic anomaly.
Money is not the "only" reason people do things. But it sure helps.
Would we have nearly as many slime-balls scheming up ways to plaster ads upon everyone's eyeballs and record our every movement and click if not for the money in it? At a societal level almost nothing ever gets done at scale if there isn't money in it. You remove the financial incentive and things atrophy, new investment stops replacing old, etc.
None of those industries create the material or social plenty that make us all richer.
You cannot eat real estate or stock options, the medical industry is a drag on us all though obviously you can cherry pick examples where things don't look perverse.
Incorrect. I don't think I've met one person that were actually good at their job but didn't wanted to share the skill.
It's because management didn't value it. They put the veteran on on more jobs rather on moving them to training, because short term it's more profitable, and mid term it's easier to poach veterans off competition rather than train them in house
Possibly the website has been hugged to death, but the principle resonates with me from the headline. In the large and old enterprises I've worked with, there is such a stark shift from I suppose, lifetime service to the consultant economy as the workforce transition follows the boomer generation out, and forecasting where that might leave us.
Short term drivers like a bad quarter or to be seen "disrupting" as a measure of progress, rather then genuine demonstrations of skills, turf out tenured employees often mid-career.
Or perhaps being in the engine room of many companies, doesn't often give you the lifestyle you want anymore, so the race to the top is the optimal spot to go for. Even if it means going up and falling down a few times on the heirarchy, its worth it.
The value of the nature of not having custodians of certain crafts, like aviation or really at the guts of any industry, seems to me its really going to set us back towards really transactional style of operating businesses that are only financially engineered and not really innovating the product in a way they should.
just random thoughts around how to have a fulfilling career, when most of the effort is in sales & marketing, and not much in operations when the funding pot gets allocated across a business.
Often it is not possible to separate the technique from the man. Things like riding a bike or flying a helicopter come to mind. A lot of what makes a master good cannot be written down anywhere. There isn't anything tangible to actually lose.
How would you write a document that describes to someone how to ride a bike or dig holes efficiently? You could explain the principles and general ideas, but the apprentice is going to need to get scraped up a bit before they actually learn anything that matters. The apprentice willing to suffer repeated failure is where most of the heavy lifting occurs. The master is mostly a backstop to keep the apprentice alive.
You don't. You put these people together for some years to work on stuff together, and a small percentage of this "intangible" feelings, knowledge and experiences you cannot write down somehow magically passes over to the other person.
Of course, the apprentice will still require their own repeated failures and uphill battle even getting close, but having someone who mastered the craft near you as you go through this, makes the whole process a hell of a lot faster.
Worse is that they who have the knowledge don't realise that others don't know what they know, it's completely automatic and ingrained to the owner.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge
Generally speaking (only a Sith deals in absolutes), engineers want to engineer.
There is no incentive for management to nudge the best performing engineers to teach their expertise in their craft[s]. A high-performing engineer "reflects good" on a manger. The way incentives are generally structured, this becomes a problem that perpetuates itself: Everyone in the management pipeline gets more money for the high performing engineer to keep engineering, rather than to teach.
It is only because we know and can compare that we judge.
Remember, when we were hunter & gatherers, before becoming bound to the land and tilling that land, we had different gifts and talents that have all been lost. For better or worse.
Or closer to home: barely anyone remembers black and white television or the feeling it must have been to view the moon landing on one.[1] Cathode ray TVs have gone the way of the Dodos - good or bad? Who knows.
Whether a long term or short term outlook is better or worse, no one can tell because there aren't any goals nor targets to meet in evolution.
[1] https://archive.org/details/apollo-8-bbc-coverage
I feel like some "old" people have the weird idea that "young" people are just clueless about anything older than themselves. Just because some technology is no longer in use, does not mean that you don't get in touch with it. You don't grow up in isolation. There are always museums and of course the appliances of your parents and grandparents, in this case their photos.
All the films beyond some point are black and white and it's not like there were no significant events during that time. (Although I have seen some color-pictures from the 1900s, but the majority of course wasn't.)
Sure, you only use the technology from the past 15-20 years in daily life, but I feel like the technology you get in touch with is more closer to 80-100 years.
Nobody plans for decades because nobody can afford the risk.
On a personal or organizational level there is no point in making investments that will turn profit over the course of decades if over the ~5yr horizon there's there's always the looming risk that the government will kick your craft out of the country at the behest of the people.
What happened to all the men who specialized in casting steels? What happened to those facilities? What happened to those companies?
The math is simple and they teach it in every business school in the country.
Of course we can apply the laws of physics and the theories of maths onto everything we see and experience around us but does that make them so - those experiences.
> What happened to all the men who specialized in casting steels? What happened to those facilities? What happened to those companies? Nobody plans for decades because nobody can afford the risk.
Take a more holistic view, what happened to all the stars and galaxies?[1]
The spiritual acceptance of the inevitable end of everything isn't taught in any business school and we are left to face/cope with that ourselves. If maths/business is your poison for coping, then so be it. I dislike reducing every experience to numbers and graphs, profit margins, win/loss and them/us.
I guess I'm trying to say is that even the biggest profit will have no longevity when compared to, even just human history, let alone the history of the universe.
[1] https://www.legacysurvey.org/viewer?ra=229.6352&dec=2.0739&l...
The leading of companies with people not actually skilled at the craft is still a historic anomaly.
Would we have nearly as many slime-balls scheming up ways to plaster ads upon everyone's eyeballs and record our every movement and click if not for the money in it? At a societal level almost nothing ever gets done at scale if there isn't money in it. You remove the financial incentive and things atrophy, new investment stops replacing old, etc.
People also lend money and invest in equities like index funds to plan for decades.
You cannot eat real estate or stock options, the medical industry is a drag on us all though obviously you can cherry pick examples where things don't look perverse.
It's because management didn't value it. They put the veteran on on more jobs rather on moving them to training, because short term it's more profitable, and mid term it's easier to poach veterans off competition rather than train them in house
Short term drivers like a bad quarter or to be seen "disrupting" as a measure of progress, rather then genuine demonstrations of skills, turf out tenured employees often mid-career.
Or perhaps being in the engine room of many companies, doesn't often give you the lifestyle you want anymore, so the race to the top is the optimal spot to go for. Even if it means going up and falling down a few times on the heirarchy, its worth it.
The value of the nature of not having custodians of certain crafts, like aviation or really at the guts of any industry, seems to me its really going to set us back towards really transactional style of operating businesses that are only financially engineered and not really innovating the product in a way they should.
just random thoughts around how to have a fulfilling career, when most of the effort is in sales & marketing, and not much in operations when the funding pot gets allocated across a business.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/29/us/azriel-al-blackman-dea... | https://archive.today/dmcaA
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/105781-lo...
https://www.local591.com/docs/Al%20Blackman%20Passing.pdf