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A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance. If you were to show an engine or a mechanical drawing or electronic schematic to a romantic it is unlikely he would see much of interest in it. It has no appeal because the reality he sees is its surface. Dull, complex lists of names, lines and numbers. Nothing interesting. But if you were to show the same blueprint or schematic or give the same description to a classical person he might look at it and then become fascinated by it because he sees that within the lines and shapes and symbols is a tremendous richness of underlying form.

The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. "Art" when it is opposed to "Science" is often romantic. It does not proceed by reason or by laws. It proceeds by feeling, intuition and esthetic conscience. [...] The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws--which are themselves underlying forms of thought and behavior. [...]

To a romantic this classic mode often appears dull, awkward and ugly, like mechanical maintenance itself. Everything is in terms of pieces and parts and components and relationships. Nothing is figured out until it's run through the computer a dozen times. Everything's got to be measured and proved. Oppressive. Heavy. Endlessly grey. The death force. Within the classic mode, however, the romantic has some appearances of his own. Frivolous, irrational, erratic, untrustworthy, interested primarily in pleasure-seeking. Shallow. Of no substance. Often a parasite who cannot or will not carry his own weight. A real drag on society. By now these battle lines should sound a little familiar.

Pirsig is talking about one of the faces of one of great divides (maybe THE great divide, with his book pointing to the Taoism as the ineffable reconciliation of the two outlooks). Other faces/terms for it are "reductionism vs holism" and "surface vs essence".

The swing into LLM-based AI has unlocked new battlefronts in terms of this conflict. AI's "what sounds reasonable to say next based on an analysis of tons of human knowledge" has the ability to gloss over so many of the dotted "i"s and crossed "t"s that used to be the exclusive domain of folks in Pirsig's "classic mode".

A few months ago Andrej Karpathy introduced the term "vibe coding", where you can have medium-good success telling the computer what program to write, and it does it. The jury is still out as to the final potential of this (most LLMs seem to kind of tap out and lose the thread, as well as generating security loopholes, but it's not clear if this is a ceiling or a floor of where we will end up) but for folks who have made their living coding (or anyone who basically types or creates on a screen) it's sobering.

Incidentally vibe coding is the latest of a long line of attempts to enable "natural language programming" - trying to empower normal folks (well, business dudes at least) to get programs via "romantic" expression of high level intent without all those pesky "classic" level enginerds getting in the way.

But the divide is not just in programming, nor is it new with AI. Like Pirsig says, these are familiar battle lines. Politics is all vibe based thinking.

Similarly this cultural moment of people's views on stuff like vaccines... should you trust the vibe of industry and science (with its corrective mechanism of skepticism baked in) or the wariness of intuitions reminding us we should be extremely careful with what we put in our bodies, and the possibility that the forces guiding us down that path are somehow reckless or nefarious, pursuing profits or some kind of control rather than having humanity's best interests against viruses at heart.

It's such a weird moment. What will making a living look like in this world? What should we encourage upcoming generations to get good at? In what ways will we all benefit, and in what ways will the benefits just be funneled upward? (Like Scott Santens said 10 years ago, writing on Basic Income, "If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he eats for life. If you build a robot to fish, do all men starve, or do all men eat?"

Interesting times, in the curse sense of the word.