Once upon a time, we developed skills throughout a lifetime. A potter, like the Korean man above, practiced his craft and got better over the years. The boat builder on the small island of Lanyu, just off the southeast coast of Taiwan, refined his techniques over a lifetime. And both developed an intimate relationship with their materials so that the clay and the wood became as responsive and predictable as their own thumbs. And then they passed on the craft and the pride in work well-done to the next generation.
Today, so many job skills are so quickly superseded by irrelevance and technology. That's not inherently a bad thing; repetitive work can be tedious and many were forced by tradition into work they were unsuited for or that gave them little pleasure. And it it isn't as if a lifelong accumulation of expertise and a personal hand-off of skill no longer happen, but they are suddenly rare. In the last few hundred years, the growth of information and the pace of change have accelerated so that in many areas, instead of our becoming masters, we see our honed skills fall into irrelevance or disappear into obsolescence.
But hey, we can make a artificially intelligent facsimile instead.
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As an applied physicist and engineer, I am glad to have also learned technical and mechanical arts. In designing a successful machine or electronic device, one must consider how it will be built and maintained, and the workers involved in the process. Too many modern devices, both industrial and consumer, are almost impossible to fix due to a lack or such skill or consideration by the designers.
Besides, there is a deep satisfaction in building a physical artifact and seeing it work.
What wonderful pictures. Valuable , too. somewhere floating around on the internet is a detailed documentary of two pretty elderly men demonstrating ropemaking. I hope younger people are learning from them.