I feel that the Zen used in the West and the Zen in East Asia are quite different. I think the Western Zen is probably the one from the 1970s book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It usually carries a sense of equanimity and beginner's mind. But in East Asia, Zen actually emphasizes aimlessness or non‑purposefulness.
The point where I really feel the difference is that Western Zen seems to be about how to train the self to become stronger, whereas actual Seon (Zen) in East Asia is about going with nature, letting go of the self, and allowing things to flow. In the actual practice of Seon, it's about doubting the self, letting go of attachments, and realizing that achievement, comparison, and the desire for control are all just fleeting. There's a famous phrase: 'Banghasak (放下著)' — let it all go.
If anything, I think ancient Roman Stoicism feels more like Zen than Western Zen does
So that's fascinating. When I saw this article, I was expecting it to be about whether we should give up the desire for success, but instead it took a completely different direction, which was surprising
Similarly, the Western idea of Stoicism seems to focus mostly on controlling or even suppressing your emotions (at least on surface level), while the Stoicism you rightly call "Roman" (thanks for that, btw) is much more holistic and more of an ethical framework.
Stoicism in Ancient Rome was COMPLETELY about controlling your emotions, though. And in Greece it was never that big of a deal. The stoics we remember today are all Roman. Marcus Aurelius, Epicurious, Seneca.
Meditations is largely Marcus Aurelius soothing himself with logical arguments.
Im not doing it full justice but the passages read like “A whole is not less than its parts, Humans are intelligent, therefore the universe is intelligent, there for my situation is a logical plan from the universe, so I should be content.” Marcus was explaining why he needed to be the perfect elite Roman citizen, using nature to logically show why he needed to embody societally cherished traits like being logical, just, fair, but also being stern, powerful and strong. Over and over again.
Now at the time, they did consider it a hard science. They were trying to figure out secrets of the universe, the absolute correct ethics, and therapy (controlling your emotions) at the same
time. Each tenet relied on eachother, you couldn’t have one with the other. Today we know the science was wrong and ethics are more complicated than they could’ve imagined, but the controlling emotions side remains. So I completely disagree that modern stoic bros are bastardizing it, it just is an flawed ideology that matches well with some of our modern western traits of a “masculine” man.
> Stoicism in Ancient Rome was COMPLETELY about controlling your emotions,
This is so false it deserves comment. For example, the SEP for Stoicism [1]. You'll notice that the first entire two sections are Physical Theory and Logic. Ethics comes later and it isn't until 4.3 (after Telos and Virtue) that you get to indifference. From the intro:
"Stoic philosophy was, from Zeno onwards, conceived of as comprising three parts: physics (phusikê), logic (logikê), and ethics (êthikê)."
I think you are over-indexing on one work by one Stoic. There is much, much more to actual Stoicism than "controlling your emotions".
"To be done with doing", from Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea novels, always struck me as such a powerful phrase. An entire state of mind boiled down to 5 words. But then again I remember her saying eastern philosophy greatly influenced her writing, if I'm not mistaken
The 'Le Guin' series actually had similar kinds of stories in Asia before. There's a strong Taoist influence, you see—more specifically, Chinese-style Taoism rather than a Buddhist perspective.
From the viewpoint of '不立文字 (Bù lì wén zì): truth is not confined to language; language is merely the finger pointing at the truth' — this is closer to Taoism than to Zen. In fact, the Chinese worldview runs deep throughout her worldbuilding. Le Guin's take on 'magic' reflects a profound understanding of Eastern philosophy. The reason Ged doesn't use magic lightly is precisely a matter of balance, and (without giving away spoilers) the final confrontation between Ged and the Shadow is essentially about embracing one's own dark side — which shows a deep grasp of Taoist thought.
Personally, I also love the Earthsea series. The philosophy underlying that world is exactly the kind that resonates especially well with East Asian readers
Ha, wow, thanks for the refinement. Indeed use of language (especially at the end with the dragons) is a very important theme.
And I agree, it's more than excellent. The judicious magic, the way she manages to naturally - without it becoming a sermon - describe acts of kindness as the biggest miracles, is great.
No need for an income at all if you are going to be a monk.
This is the problem with modern spirituality, we take teachings meant for ascetics and try to apply it without a teacher to our, very far from acetic life.
Mediation s goal isn't to help you be more productive. Prayer isn't for getting a better car or in lieu of life insurance.
I don't think the intent of Robert Pirsig's work was to outline a git gud strategy cloaked in chillness. The book is heavily inspired by Eugen Herrigel's Zen in the Art of Archery which is explicitly not about trying to get good at something.
Both books highlight the value of dissolving conscious aim in favor of experience something. Pirsig's point isn't, you gotta act like a noob and then you can be good at maintaining motorcycles. His point was that there is a joy in losing yourself in these things that have to be done. If you are rushing to get it done or focusing too much on the end state, you will lose the joy and this thing will become a chore.
He does make the connection that years of doing things this way will lend you a kind of skill. And he connects the ideas to the Western concept of gumption which is a kind of motivation or persistence but again the book's core is not, lose yourself and you will get good. It's more like that a Western obsession with accomplishment can rob you of the joy that can come from engaging with activities for their own sake and not pushing through them just to get them done.
They’re both wrong though in reality. Zen comes from the chinese word chan, which comes from the pali word jhana, meaning meditative absorption (and it doesn’t just mean “meditation” in a general sense, it’s really referring to the rupajhanas). Real Buddhadharma has nothing to do with going along with nature or nonduality. What you’re describing sounds like taoism.
To summarize your argument a bit, you are essentially saying, 'Christianity was originally a Jewish sect, so the current Trinity doctrine is wrong.' Generally speaking, Zen (Seon) moved from India to China, and after Bodhidharma, it began to emphasize self‑nature while incorporating Taoist concepts. Perhaps your argument might come from a perspective that is not East Asian but rather based on the original texts, possibly from the Indian tradition. In Mahayana Buddhism, Sunyata (emptiness) is the core of non‑duality, and it is actually somewhat different from your Theravada interpretation.
The problem is that the way Zen is used resembles the Seon traditions of East Asia, specifically Korea, China, and Japan, and those traditions are built on Mahayana emptiness with Taoist elements mixed in. Therefore, from the perspective of primitive Buddhism, what you say is correct, and from the Pali perspective, it can be called Jhana, but strictly speaking, that is difficult to call Zen[1][2]
Actually, this is a matter of Buddhist sects. It's not that you're wrong—the etymology is correct—but I think you're taking the historical changes too lightly. Because generally speaking, there is Mahayana Buddhism and Theravada Buddhism, and they usually follow the Pali tradition. In fact, the concept of 'emptiness' (Sunyata) in Mahayana Buddhism is itself based on non-duality. So what you're asserting is not wrong as a source or an original form of Buddhism, but regarding the description of Zen in the article, the actual Seon tradition is generally closer to what I'm claiming. In fact, you can't really talk about Seon Buddhism without bringing up Taoism, because during the process of its transmission through China, it merged with Chinese folk beliefs and then spread throughout East Asia. (For reference, I'm Korean, and the Buddhist traditions in Korea were also heavily influenced by China.)
There's no such thing as "wrong" in this sense. Eastern religious traditions are manifold across space and time, they influence each other, change, and split quite significantly.
> The point where I really feel the difference is that Western Zen seems to be about how to train the self to become stronger, whereas actual Seon (Zen) in East Asia is about going with nature, letting go of the self, and allowing things to flow.
I think the Western sentiment, and why it is attached to strength, comes from a combination of the West's allure to Eastern martial arts and the reality of plateauing during training. Once you've been doing something for 2 years, you are no longer seeing the massive learning gains you saw as a true novice. However in that journey toward "mastery" (a term I hate) you have to keep a positive outlook that the practice takes time.
I now use this phrase from my instructor: "Practice makes permanent". There's no such thing as "perfect practice", but whatever you practice is what will stick.
> comes from a combination of the West's allure to Eastern martial arts and the reality of plateauing during training. Once you've been doing something for 2 years, you are no longer seeing the massive learning gains you saw as a true novice.
Which is ironic given the context - Wing Chun is basically useless the first two years and’s you plateau until it finally clicks - only then do you start to see massive gains each lesson!
(why? For a long time you just go through the motions with drills, but until you >really< understand how your structure is connected to your stance (which can be over a year), your punches and movement are way off from optimal from a Wing Chun perspective).
> Zen actually emphasizes aimlessness or non‑purposefulness
The visual metaphor from Taoists is being like 'uncarved wood'. Western Zen has been bastardised and commercialised, whereas one can look into Taoism to find many of the same concepts that, by virtue of their own simplicity, have remained timeless. The "problem", so to speak, with Zen is being associated with Buddhism, which has a long and intricate history and body of works attached to it, yet moves towards the same line of simplicity and spontaneity of Taoism.
In the words of Alan Watts, it all starts with the eternal Tao; all other religions are for people that need the same ideas overcomplicated with too many words.
You seem to know quite a lot about the East. Buddhism and Taoism are a bit different, of course, but your understanding is largely in line with how Eastern popular thought actually sees things. It seems like you've done a fair amount of business with Easterners.
After watching how much the east misunderstands western religion (i.e. Neon Genesis Evangelion), there's no benefit to "actually understanding" the religions of the east. They make little effort to understand western religion in their popular media, so why should we do it for them? As far as I'm concerned, Lisa Simpson is the quintessential Buddhist and will remain that way until Japan proves they understand what the trinity actually is.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a series of lectures about philosophy told through the lens of a real motorcycle trip across the country interleaved with recollections of his personal history developing the philosophy, going through a breakdown as a result of schizophrenia, and recovering the personality lost through electroshock therapy. He was a bit of a megalomaniac and failed out of traditional academia as a result of his mental illness which his son likely shared to some degree.
Do non-westerners do this? Go through lengthy "it's not this it's that" explanations trying to display superior knowledge of what the real genuine thing from somebody else's culture is?
Any time some topic of some asian culture that has been shared into america comes up this sort of thing dominates the discussion.
There is plenty of it in ancient literature, both Western and Eastern. Humans' fundamental attachments remain more or less remain recognizable over time and place.
There is, though, something especially cheap about how it is mostly done today. At least we got treasures like the Cantongqi/Sandōkai out of it in the past. (Or maybe I just committed exactly the same error by invoking the Sandōkai.) I'm sure it was done similarly back then, but likely mostly in actual conversation.
Maybe enough of today's commented noise will filter down to a small number of some particularly astute internet comments which will be studied in the year 3226, but I doubt it. Today's best thinking is still found in books and articles. Which has always probably been true, but it used to require some additional amount of work to hear foolishness.
I think everyone, to some extent, does that when they encounter something they already know. The truth is, we don't all share a unified way of thinking, and HN, being one of the most prominent Western platforms where information spreads quickly, is viewed by people from many countries. In fact, Japan, China, and Korea all have sites that curate content from here. And when you spend time here, you see a lot of differing perspectives. It's like the difference between an outsider's view and an insider's view.
Western Zen has also adapted to fit certain needs, and I don't think that's a bad thing. It's just that, as an East Asian, when I clicked on a post about Zen, what I expected and what I actually saw were different.
In fact, from what I've seen on Korean YouTube and elsewhere, when something tied to one's cultural identity gets modified, it's a fairly universal human reaction for someone who knows the original to say, 'This seems different, doesn't it?' What you're talking about often tends to become a kind of power struggle over 'who gets to define this culture.' When the insider's definition differs from the outsider's, that dynamic frequently plays out. It's a common trait of online communities.
However, this is usually influenced by the dominant demographic of the community, so generally speaking, the community's majority tends to shape the norms. In that sense, it's usually the outsiders who need to adapt. I'm trying my best to do that too. HN is fundamentally Western-oriented, and I try to adjust to native speakers like you, even if it means slightly altering my approach. The problem is that our ways of thinking differ in so many ways that for me, what feels like a low-cost critique can read to this community as a high-cost one. That gap is something I find quite difficult.
In any case, it's just a fresh perspective for me. I don't think Western Zen is bad (and that's an important point).
It's like this: if an actual Chinese person goes to the US and eats Panda Express orange chicken, they'll say, 'This isn't Chinese food.' But is that really the Chinese person's fault? Localization is only natural. When you think about it, it's simple. Most people don't stay on this site for long (I stay about two hours a day, so I guess I'm a longer-term user). Many people don't even leave comments. But when they click on a title that interests them and find it different from what they expected, they might leave a comment.
And isn't that part of what makes life interesting? The fact that you and I think differently, that our predictions don't always match. Rather than framing it as a 'non-Western way of thinking,' I'd ask you to understand it as a gap that arises because you're a native of a site watched by people all over the world.
In any case, I don't think the Western adaptation of Zen is wrong. Cultures naturally get localized. Just like how I feel a sense of unfamiliarity when I see K-pop Demon Hunters, but that's a natural reaction. I just hope you'll see it as a third-party observation that certain things feel different. Isn't it better to have a diversity of perspectives?
Around 2015, I found myself managing back end and machine learning engineers (not researchers) at the same time. Many of the back end engineers wanted to do more ML. Some of them did well when given a chance, but others wanted to revert to back end within a few months. At the same time, one of the ML leaders wanted to step away from ML and only do back end work to support ML.
As I studied these dynamics, something occurred to me... Different people need to see signs of success at different frequencies. Because of the nature of our product, measuring the performance of a new/updated model required the model to be live for at least a full calendar month. So, between initial work and final analysis, it was often a 2 month wait or more. For many back end tasks, you can build a quick prototype, run it to see if it works, and be on your way - the signals come all day long. The varying frequency needs of different people went a long way to determining which of them liked working on ML.
This is sort of a manager's version of feature engineering. ;-) The people on that team taught me a lot!
I saw the same thing and always wondered how you can manage it effectively.
I had a team of data engineers that wanted to do more data science, and 2 data scientists that both wanted to be data engineers(one of them argued that everyone wants to be DS and so it was too crowded, saying that they could make more money as a DE).
I also remember a specific instance where, one day, my friend ranted about how he needs to step away from pure front end and that it's a dead end career (he was quite good at it too!) and then the next day at lunch a colleague started complaining about how front end developers get all the credit and he's considering moving.
Sometimes it's a "grass is greener on the other side of the fence" thing or a FOMO thing. But sometimes different roles fit different people better.
I started my career doing mostly full stack work. I couldn't get away from the front end part quickly enough. I had intuition for simplifying UI flows, but none at all for aesthetics. As requests for aesthetic changes came in from our excellent designers, they felt completely arbitrary to me, even though they probably weren't. Most of my career was as a data engineer, data engineering manager, or leading an ML-heavy org. That space fit me so much better.
I loved having a few self-starting front-end devs in my orgs - they could take various tools we were creating for ourselves and make them quite a bit more useful. But it was also always a stepping stone as they typically wanted to work on the public facing part of the product.
like the author said, so much of 'success' or 'progress' (in research but of course also across disciplines) depends upon temperament. just straight up having a good attitude about things. the skills that make a good researcher could not be more transferable: patience, innate curiosity, and a resilience against failure.
that said, these skills are increasingly rare/at a premium given our culture of minimizing discomfort tolerance via hyperconvenience. people have a harder and harder time waiting or failing.
I think this also stems from ML being more like biology or alchemy and less like math or programming (where you can get down to the first principles, abstractions are rock solid, and non-determinism is limited in scope).
This reminds me of Ed Witten (greatest living physicist?) in an interview by Brian Green. Green asked Witten what his day-to-day was like at the Institute for Advanced Study ...
Stepping away from the work to find inspiration, to allow the subconscious time to process everything, to present your conscious mind ideas is necessary. I try to pick a wild or almost outlandish idea from time to time, because if I only try what I think will work, then I'm not doing my job.
Perhaps I've been deep in my own issues for too long, but it seems to me that the author is trying to say "don't trust the current evaluation suites too much"; scores only reflect a small part of the problem. What's interesting is discovering a new, stable evaluation metric, doing something new based on it, and having that new thing yield some unexpected intelligent results
> If you want to solve a problem, the tried-and-true path to success is to attempt a solution, try it, reach a bottleneck, try to solve it, and only reach for literature when you’ve run out of ideas yourself.
I've found this to be the right balance between using your creativity and getting stuck too long
It revolves around the sentiment of "go deeper" - but I think it is a double-edged sword.
Sure, entropy, tensors and gradients are important - and yes, they are pretty much requirements.
But from what I see, it is the opposite - a lot (if not virtually all) progress in the last decade of deep learning was not because of a fundamental idea, but incremental, experimentally-verified practice.
Even though I think there is good intuition for why ReLU is better than sigmoid (tl;dr: last layer is log(sigmoid) ~ ReLU, putting anything different inside kills the gradient), the original paper by Hinton himself was more or less "because it trains 3x faster".
Re-thinking fundamentals might help, but most "let's change the fundamentals" is rarely how it works. Even the most seminal papers, i.e. AlexNet and "Attention Is All You Need", are refinements of existing ideas, and show how they help.
Machine learning is an experimental science. Many mathematically cool ideas do not work. Many engineering ones do.
> I've tweeted before that one of the most important traits in a researcher is healthy paranoia. Be paranoid!
I have seen so many PhDs burned out to cinders; I don't think it is any more a good piece of advice than "depression is good for philosophers". Sure, be a relentless explorer.
> In short, holding on to ideas for too long can actually be counterproductive. Stay open-minded and refuse to let ego cloud your judgement.
I have some coworkers that are similar in everything--education, work ethic, and intelligence--but some of the tick out ML ideas that work like clockwork, while others get hits rarely if ever. I cannot tell what makes it work for some and not others. Their ideas both sound equally good.
Sometimes a coworker will be an ML star for a year or two, but then suddenly run out of steam. It's brutal to watch.
I used to think most smart people had similar distributions of good ideas, and it was just that the hardest working tried out all 50 of their ideas to pick out the 2 good ones. But I've seen smart and hardworking people have a hit rate of 0.
That's the nature of research. You try every idea that may be a good avenue and only a handful work out, if at all. That's why quantifying research credibility via publication and citation counts inherently lead to toxic work cultures. The best ideas must be given time to be discovered, not forced out and contorted to fit the requirements of a journal.
this is part of why I think most researchers get less productive over time... Someone gets some big result during grad school or early career, get some big job from it, and then struggle to get new results of similar quality :shrug:
With ML in particular, there's also the sheer volume of people basically all looking at (essentially) the same problems... so it's kind of like monkeys with type writers spamming ideas until some work.
It's not just ML research; that's just human nature.
We like to see hard-working, God-fearing people minting raw knowledge from Mount Olympus itself, whereby each shard of crystalline insight is carved meticulously by the Apprentice over the course of a productive and morally pure career.
The reality is it's some skill plus the occasional drive-by of an unknown force of nature, hitting you on the head with a shattered fragment of insight whose provenance you'll remain completely ignorant of. I'd say we just revert back to invoking the muses. It was a fine explanation.
In spirituality it is believed that ideas and inspirations aren't our own. That our mind is like an LLM that gets prompted by higher beings. In research everyone has high param count minds, trained for many years by studying. But just like LLMs by themselves are useless at creating new original work, no matter the compute you have available, so the mind can not create anything new without "inspiration"
I feel that the Zen used in the West and the Zen in East Asia are quite different. I think the Western Zen is probably the one from the 1970s book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It usually carries a sense of equanimity and beginner's mind. But in East Asia, Zen actually emphasizes aimlessness or non‑purposefulness.
The point where I really feel the difference is that Western Zen seems to be about how to train the self to become stronger, whereas actual Seon (Zen) in East Asia is about going with nature, letting go of the self, and allowing things to flow. In the actual practice of Seon, it's about doubting the self, letting go of attachments, and realizing that achievement, comparison, and the desire for control are all just fleeting. There's a famous phrase: 'Banghasak (放下著)' — let it all go.
If anything, I think ancient Roman Stoicism feels more like Zen than Western Zen does
So that's fascinating. When I saw this article, I was expecting it to be about whether we should give up the desire for success, but instead it took a completely different direction, which was surprising
> But in East Asia, Zen actually emphasizes aimlessness or non‑purposefulness.
I cannot recommend the Idler magazine strongly enough. It's outstanding material towards a healthy way of aimless being.
https://www.idler.co.uk/article/leisure-principles/
https://archive.is/nKJM2
Similarly, the Western idea of Stoicism seems to focus mostly on controlling or even suppressing your emotions (at least on surface level), while the Stoicism you rightly call "Roman" (thanks for that, btw) is much more holistic and more of an ethical framework.
Thank you for letting me know correctly.
Stoicism in Ancient Rome was COMPLETELY about controlling your emotions, though. And in Greece it was never that big of a deal. The stoics we remember today are all Roman. Marcus Aurelius, Epicurious, Seneca.
Meditations is largely Marcus Aurelius soothing himself with logical arguments.
Im not doing it full justice but the passages read like “A whole is not less than its parts, Humans are intelligent, therefore the universe is intelligent, there for my situation is a logical plan from the universe, so I should be content.” Marcus was explaining why he needed to be the perfect elite Roman citizen, using nature to logically show why he needed to embody societally cherished traits like being logical, just, fair, but also being stern, powerful and strong. Over and over again.
Now at the time, they did consider it a hard science. They were trying to figure out secrets of the universe, the absolute correct ethics, and therapy (controlling your emotions) at the same time. Each tenet relied on eachother, you couldn’t have one with the other. Today we know the science was wrong and ethics are more complicated than they could’ve imagined, but the controlling emotions side remains. So I completely disagree that modern stoic bros are bastardizing it, it just is an flawed ideology that matches well with some of our modern western traits of a “masculine” man.
> Stoicism in Ancient Rome was COMPLETELY about controlling your emotions,
This is so false it deserves comment. For example, the SEP for Stoicism [1]. You'll notice that the first entire two sections are Physical Theory and Logic. Ethics comes later and it isn't until 4.3 (after Telos and Virtue) that you get to indifference. From the intro:
"Stoic philosophy was, from Zeno onwards, conceived of as comprising three parts: physics (phusikê), logic (logikê), and ethics (êthikê)."
I think you are over-indexing on one work by one Stoic. There is much, much more to actual Stoicism than "controlling your emotions".
1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/stoicism/
Who doesn't call stoicism Roman?
The idea that "being stoic" means to be emotionless isn't a roman idea. Its a modern one.
> Who doesn't call stoicism Roman?
The Greeks?
Most pop stoics focus on the Greeks :P
"To be done with doing", from Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea novels, always struck me as such a powerful phrase. An entire state of mind boiled down to 5 words. But then again I remember her saying eastern philosophy greatly influenced her writing, if I'm not mistaken
The 'Le Guin' series actually had similar kinds of stories in Asia before. There's a strong Taoist influence, you see—more specifically, Chinese-style Taoism rather than a Buddhist perspective.
From the viewpoint of '不立文字 (Bù lì wén zì): truth is not confined to language; language is merely the finger pointing at the truth' — this is closer to Taoism than to Zen. In fact, the Chinese worldview runs deep throughout her worldbuilding. Le Guin's take on 'magic' reflects a profound understanding of Eastern philosophy. The reason Ged doesn't use magic lightly is precisely a matter of balance, and (without giving away spoilers) the final confrontation between Ged and the Shadow is essentially about embracing one's own dark side — which shows a deep grasp of Taoist thought.
Personally, I also love the Earthsea series. The philosophy underlying that world is exactly the kind that resonates especially well with East Asian readers
Ha, wow, thanks for the refinement. Indeed use of language (especially at the end with the dragons) is a very important theme.
And I agree, it's more than excellent. The judicious magic, the way she manages to naturally - without it becoming a sermon - describe acts of kindness as the biggest miracles, is great.
Highly recommended.
To be done with doing, would appear to require passive income?
No need for an income at all if you are going to be a monk.
This is the problem with modern spirituality, we take teachings meant for ascetics and try to apply it without a teacher to our, very far from acetic life.
Mediation s goal isn't to help you be more productive. Prayer isn't for getting a better car or in lieu of life insurance.
There are some useful lessons to be drawn, though. One of them being that even the monks will kick you out if you just slack off all day.
> To be done with doing, would appear to require passive income?
who is asking this question ?
Man it sucks that she gets the unique distinction of being the only IP that Miyazaki's son totally RUINED.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_Earthsea_(film)
Easily the worst film ever made to have Miyazaki's name on it. Even Ursula LeGuin couldn't hide her disappointment with it.
I don't think the intent of Robert Pirsig's work was to outline a git gud strategy cloaked in chillness. The book is heavily inspired by Eugen Herrigel's Zen in the Art of Archery which is explicitly not about trying to get good at something.
Both books highlight the value of dissolving conscious aim in favor of experience something. Pirsig's point isn't, you gotta act like a noob and then you can be good at maintaining motorcycles. His point was that there is a joy in losing yourself in these things that have to be done. If you are rushing to get it done or focusing too much on the end state, you will lose the joy and this thing will become a chore.
He does make the connection that years of doing things this way will lend you a kind of skill. And he connects the ideas to the Western concept of gumption which is a kind of motivation or persistence but again the book's core is not, lose yourself and you will get good. It's more like that a Western obsession with accomplishment can rob you of the joy that can come from engaging with activities for their own sake and not pushing through them just to get them done.
When I read the title I thought it was about running machine learning algorithms on AMD/Zen processors
They’re both wrong though in reality. Zen comes from the chinese word chan, which comes from the pali word jhana, meaning meditative absorption (and it doesn’t just mean “meditation” in a general sense, it’s really referring to the rupajhanas). Real Buddhadharma has nothing to do with going along with nature or nonduality. What you’re describing sounds like taoism.
To summarize your argument a bit, you are essentially saying, 'Christianity was originally a Jewish sect, so the current Trinity doctrine is wrong.' Generally speaking, Zen (Seon) moved from India to China, and after Bodhidharma, it began to emphasize self‑nature while incorporating Taoist concepts. Perhaps your argument might come from a perspective that is not East Asian but rather based on the original texts, possibly from the Indian tradition. In Mahayana Buddhism, Sunyata (emptiness) is the core of non‑duality, and it is actually somewhat different from your Theravada interpretation.
The problem is that the way Zen is used resembles the Seon traditions of East Asia, specifically Korea, China, and Japan, and those traditions are built on Mahayana emptiness with Taoist elements mixed in. Therefore, from the perspective of primitive Buddhism, what you say is correct, and from the Pali perspective, it can be called Jhana, but strictly speaking, that is difficult to call Zen[1][2]
[1]https://kabc.dongguk.edu/content/view?dataId=ABC_BJ_H0184_T_...
[2] https://www.ibulgyo.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=28814&ut...
Actually, this is a matter of Buddhist sects. It's not that you're wrong—the etymology is correct—but I think you're taking the historical changes too lightly. Because generally speaking, there is Mahayana Buddhism and Theravada Buddhism, and they usually follow the Pali tradition. In fact, the concept of 'emptiness' (Sunyata) in Mahayana Buddhism is itself based on non-duality. So what you're asserting is not wrong as a source or an original form of Buddhism, but regarding the description of Zen in the article, the actual Seon tradition is generally closer to what I'm claiming. In fact, you can't really talk about Seon Buddhism without bringing up Taoism, because during the process of its transmission through China, it merged with Chinese folk beliefs and then spread throughout East Asia. (For reference, I'm Korean, and the Buddhist traditions in Korea were also heavily influenced by China.)
There's no such thing as "wrong" in this sense. Eastern religious traditions are manifold across space and time, they influence each other, change, and split quite significantly.
> The point where I really feel the difference is that Western Zen seems to be about how to train the self to become stronger, whereas actual Seon (Zen) in East Asia is about going with nature, letting go of the self, and allowing things to flow.
I think the Western sentiment, and why it is attached to strength, comes from a combination of the West's allure to Eastern martial arts and the reality of plateauing during training. Once you've been doing something for 2 years, you are no longer seeing the massive learning gains you saw as a true novice. However in that journey toward "mastery" (a term I hate) you have to keep a positive outlook that the practice takes time.
I now use this phrase from my instructor: "Practice makes permanent". There's no such thing as "perfect practice", but whatever you practice is what will stick.
> comes from a combination of the West's allure to Eastern martial arts and the reality of plateauing during training. Once you've been doing something for 2 years, you are no longer seeing the massive learning gains you saw as a true novice.
Which is ironic given the context - Wing Chun is basically useless the first two years and’s you plateau until it finally clicks - only then do you start to see massive gains each lesson!
(why? For a long time you just go through the motions with drills, but until you >really< understand how your structure is connected to your stance (which can be over a year), your punches and movement are way off from optimal from a Wing Chun perspective).
> Zen actually emphasizes aimlessness or non‑purposefulness
The visual metaphor from Taoists is being like 'uncarved wood'. Western Zen has been bastardised and commercialised, whereas one can look into Taoism to find many of the same concepts that, by virtue of their own simplicity, have remained timeless. The "problem", so to speak, with Zen is being associated with Buddhism, which has a long and intricate history and body of works attached to it, yet moves towards the same line of simplicity and spontaneity of Taoism.
In the words of Alan Watts, it all starts with the eternal Tao; all other religions are for people that need the same ideas overcomplicated with too many words.
You seem to know quite a lot about the East. Buddhism and Taoism are a bit different, of course, but your understanding is largely in line with how Eastern popular thought actually sees things. It seems like you've done a fair amount of business with Easterners.
Would either of you have a recommendation on where to start learning about either?
My journey into this world started with Watts' "The Way of Zen", and later, with his posthumous book "Tao: The Watercourse Way"
And I am a big fan of Ron Hogan's "Getting Right with Tao" translation/modern interpretation of the Tao Te Ching.
Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching (Translated Ursula K. Le Guin) The Way of Lao Tzu (Wing-tsit Chan)
After watching how much the east misunderstands western religion (i.e. Neon Genesis Evangelion), there's no benefit to "actually understanding" the religions of the east. They make little effort to understand western religion in their popular media, so why should we do it for them? As far as I'm concerned, Lisa Simpson is the quintessential Buddhist and will remain that way until Japan proves they understand what the trinity actually is.
Saint Serafim Rose has books on Taoism being mostly compatible with Orthodox Christianity fwiw.
I am just another western poser that has sought peace of mind reading Eastern philosophy. I am no expert.
And if anyone actually read the book, Zen was about processing childhood trauma.
what?
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a series of lectures about philosophy told through the lens of a real motorcycle trip across the country interleaved with recollections of his personal history developing the philosophy, going through a breakdown as a result of schizophrenia, and recovering the personality lost through electroshock therapy. He was a bit of a megalomaniac and failed out of traditional academia as a result of his mental illness which his son likely shared to some degree.
one of those words that lost meaning, like samaritan or literally
That good 'ole Protestant work ethic. Idle hands are the Devil's play things!
Do non-westerners do this? Go through lengthy "it's not this it's that" explanations trying to display superior knowledge of what the real genuine thing from somebody else's culture is?
Any time some topic of some asian culture that has been shared into america comes up this sort of thing dominates the discussion.
There is plenty of it in ancient literature, both Western and Eastern. Humans' fundamental attachments remain more or less remain recognizable over time and place.
There is, though, something especially cheap about how it is mostly done today. At least we got treasures like the Cantongqi/Sandōkai out of it in the past. (Or maybe I just committed exactly the same error by invoking the Sandōkai.) I'm sure it was done similarly back then, but likely mostly in actual conversation.
Maybe enough of today's commented noise will filter down to a small number of some particularly astute internet comments which will be studied in the year 3226, but I doubt it. Today's best thinking is still found in books and articles. Which has always probably been true, but it used to require some additional amount of work to hear foolishness.
I think everyone, to some extent, does that when they encounter something they already know. The truth is, we don't all share a unified way of thinking, and HN, being one of the most prominent Western platforms where information spreads quickly, is viewed by people from many countries. In fact, Japan, China, and Korea all have sites that curate content from here. And when you spend time here, you see a lot of differing perspectives. It's like the difference between an outsider's view and an insider's view.
Western Zen has also adapted to fit certain needs, and I don't think that's a bad thing. It's just that, as an East Asian, when I clicked on a post about Zen, what I expected and what I actually saw were different.
In fact, from what I've seen on Korean YouTube and elsewhere, when something tied to one's cultural identity gets modified, it's a fairly universal human reaction for someone who knows the original to say, 'This seems different, doesn't it?' What you're talking about often tends to become a kind of power struggle over 'who gets to define this culture.' When the insider's definition differs from the outsider's, that dynamic frequently plays out. It's a common trait of online communities.
However, this is usually influenced by the dominant demographic of the community, so generally speaking, the community's majority tends to shape the norms. In that sense, it's usually the outsiders who need to adapt. I'm trying my best to do that too. HN is fundamentally Western-oriented, and I try to adjust to native speakers like you, even if it means slightly altering my approach. The problem is that our ways of thinking differ in so many ways that for me, what feels like a low-cost critique can read to this community as a high-cost one. That gap is something I find quite difficult.
In any case, it's just a fresh perspective for me. I don't think Western Zen is bad (and that's an important point).
It's like this: if an actual Chinese person goes to the US and eats Panda Express orange chicken, they'll say, 'This isn't Chinese food.' But is that really the Chinese person's fault? Localization is only natural. When you think about it, it's simple. Most people don't stay on this site for long (I stay about two hours a day, so I guess I'm a longer-term user). Many people don't even leave comments. But when they click on a title that interests them and find it different from what they expected, they might leave a comment.
And isn't that part of what makes life interesting? The fact that you and I think differently, that our predictions don't always match. Rather than framing it as a 'non-Western way of thinking,' I'd ask you to understand it as a gap that arises because you're a native of a site watched by people all over the world.
In any case, I don't think the Western adaptation of Zen is wrong. Cultures naturally get localized. Just like how I feel a sense of unfamiliarity when I see K-pop Demon Hunters, but that's a natural reaction. I just hope you'll see it as a third-party observation that certain things feel different. Isn't it better to have a diversity of perspectives?
Kind of like when I had dark bread in Asia, it was white bread with food color.
Some things don't transfer well.
I stopped caring about the (ab)use of the word Zen in "tech" when that scummy startup Zenefits got in trouble.
Given AI’s impact on society, I read this more as Zen And The Practice of Kamikaze.
Around 2015, I found myself managing back end and machine learning engineers (not researchers) at the same time. Many of the back end engineers wanted to do more ML. Some of them did well when given a chance, but others wanted to revert to back end within a few months. At the same time, one of the ML leaders wanted to step away from ML and only do back end work to support ML.
As I studied these dynamics, something occurred to me... Different people need to see signs of success at different frequencies. Because of the nature of our product, measuring the performance of a new/updated model required the model to be live for at least a full calendar month. So, between initial work and final analysis, it was often a 2 month wait or more. For many back end tasks, you can build a quick prototype, run it to see if it works, and be on your way - the signals come all day long. The varying frequency needs of different people went a long way to determining which of them liked working on ML.
This is sort of a manager's version of feature engineering. ;-) The people on that team taught me a lot!
I saw the same thing and always wondered how you can manage it effectively.
I had a team of data engineers that wanted to do more data science, and 2 data scientists that both wanted to be data engineers(one of them argued that everyone wants to be DS and so it was too crowded, saying that they could make more money as a DE).
I also remember a specific instance where, one day, my friend ranted about how he needs to step away from pure front end and that it's a dead end career (he was quite good at it too!) and then the next day at lunch a colleague started complaining about how front end developers get all the credit and he's considering moving.
Sometimes it's a "grass is greener on the other side of the fence" thing or a FOMO thing. But sometimes different roles fit different people better.
I started my career doing mostly full stack work. I couldn't get away from the front end part quickly enough. I had intuition for simplifying UI flows, but none at all for aesthetics. As requests for aesthetic changes came in from our excellent designers, they felt completely arbitrary to me, even though they probably weren't. Most of my career was as a data engineer, data engineering manager, or leading an ML-heavy org. That space fit me so much better.
I loved having a few self-starting front-end devs in my orgs - they could take various tools we were creating for ourselves and make them quite a bit more useful. But it was also always a stepping stone as they typically wanted to work on the public facing part of the product.
excellent essay. what a great read.
like the author said, so much of 'success' or 'progress' (in research but of course also across disciplines) depends upon temperament. just straight up having a good attitude about things. the skills that make a good researcher could not be more transferable: patience, innate curiosity, and a resilience against failure.
that said, these skills are increasingly rare/at a premium given our culture of minimizing discomfort tolerance via hyperconvenience. people have a harder and harder time waiting or failing.
I think this also stems from ML being more like biology or alchemy and less like math or programming (where you can get down to the first principles, abstractions are rock solid, and non-determinism is limited in scope).
> on days we find insight, we sit.
> on days we do not find insight, we sit.
This reminds me of Ed Witten (greatest living physicist?) in an interview by Brian Green. Green asked Witten what his day-to-day was like at the Institute for Advanced Study ...
Wittens' reply: "I sit at my desk".
Stepping away from the work to find inspiration, to allow the subconscious time to process everything, to present your conscious mind ideas is necessary. I try to pick a wild or almost outlandish idea from time to time, because if I only try what I think will work, then I'm not doing my job.
You can in fact take courses taught by the greatest in the field. The one does not exclude the other.
Perhaps I've been deep in my own issues for too long, but it seems to me that the author is trying to say "don't trust the current evaluation suites too much"; scores only reflect a small part of the problem. What's interesting is discovering a new, stable evaluation metric, doing something new based on it, and having that new thing yield some unexpected intelligent results
> If you want to solve a problem, the tried-and-true path to success is to attempt a solution, try it, reach a bottleneck, try to solve it, and only reach for literature when you’ve run out of ideas yourself.
I've found this to be the right balance between using your creativity and getting stuck too long
Good learning
It revolves around the sentiment of "go deeper" - but I think it is a double-edged sword. Sure, entropy, tensors and gradients are important - and yes, they are pretty much requirements.
But from what I see, it is the opposite - a lot (if not virtually all) progress in the last decade of deep learning was not because of a fundamental idea, but incremental, experimentally-verified practice. Even though I think there is good intuition for why ReLU is better than sigmoid (tl;dr: last layer is log(sigmoid) ~ ReLU, putting anything different inside kills the gradient), the original paper by Hinton himself was more or less "because it trains 3x faster".
Re-thinking fundamentals might help, but most "let's change the fundamentals" is rarely how it works. Even the most seminal papers, i.e. AlexNet and "Attention Is All You Need", are refinements of existing ideas, and show how they help.
Machine learning is an experimental science. Many mathematically cool ideas do not work. Many engineering ones do.
> I've tweeted before that one of the most important traits in a researcher is healthy paranoia. Be paranoid!
I have seen so many PhDs burned out to cinders; I don't think it is any more a good piece of advice than "depression is good for philosophers". Sure, be a relentless explorer.
> In short, holding on to ideas for too long can actually be counterproductive. Stay open-minded and refuse to let ego cloud your judgement.
Which I think is true.
Would either of you have a recommendation on where to start learning about either?
I have some coworkers that are similar in everything--education, work ethic, and intelligence--but some of the tick out ML ideas that work like clockwork, while others get hits rarely if ever. I cannot tell what makes it work for some and not others. Their ideas both sound equally good.
Sometimes a coworker will be an ML star for a year or two, but then suddenly run out of steam. It's brutal to watch.
I used to think most smart people had similar distributions of good ideas, and it was just that the hardest working tried out all 50 of their ideas to pick out the 2 good ones. But I've seen smart and hardworking people have a hit rate of 0.
That's the nature of research. You try every idea that may be a good avenue and only a handful work out, if at all. That's why quantifying research credibility via publication and citation counts inherently lead to toxic work cultures. The best ideas must be given time to be discovered, not forced out and contorted to fit the requirements of a journal.
this is part of why I think most researchers get less productive over time... Someone gets some big result during grad school or early career, get some big job from it, and then struggle to get new results of similar quality :shrug:
With ML in particular, there's also the sheer volume of people basically all looking at (essentially) the same problems... so it's kind of like monkeys with type writers spamming ideas until some work.
It's not just ML research; that's just human nature.
We like to see hard-working, God-fearing people minting raw knowledge from Mount Olympus itself, whereby each shard of crystalline insight is carved meticulously by the Apprentice over the course of a productive and morally pure career.
The reality is it's some skill plus the occasional drive-by of an unknown force of nature, hitting you on the head with a shattered fragment of insight whose provenance you'll remain completely ignorant of. I'd say we just revert back to invoking the muses. It was a fine explanation.
In spirituality it is believed that ideas and inspirations aren't our own. That our mind is like an LLM that gets prompted by higher beings. In research everyone has high param count minds, trained for many years by studying. But just like LLMs by themselves are useless at creating new original work, no matter the compute you have available, so the mind can not create anything new without "inspiration"
Wow, this makes ML sound even more like voodoo than I thought. Can you give examples of what the nature of these ideas is?
why is SVD so important? i know it's important in general ML but seems minor for LLMs (LoRA?)
This is gold!!!!