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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance got much better and I'm glad I stuck with it. In fact, a lot of the issues that I had as I was going along contribute to him going insane so I got a measure of satisfaction from that. When you look back, everything he says from the sciencey side of things is so overwhelmingly on the mark that I have to assume my qualms with his philosophical bits are outmatched.
It even spurred me to read Henri Poincare so I could get another set of eyes on his idea of Quality. And through the process, quality has become a well-defined word for me.
 Originally Posted by supa
Define please.
Quality is a function of iterations. The difference between a high quality paper and a low quality paper is that the high quality paper represents a history of more iterations - of more papers being written. The author has either learned, or gleaned, or developed on his own techniques which have been developing since papers have been written.
Think of the difference between cave painting and the mona lisa. The cave painter has weaker tools and weaker techniques. He has no idea about representing 3D in a 2D medium, perspective, lighting, etc etc. Over his lifetime, his tools may never improve - he'll always be using his fingers and those same crushed berries; but the more and more he paints, the more and more things he tries, the more and more things he sees work and fail, and over years his painting skill and style itself may evolve. The stuff he'll do at the end of his life will be of a higher Quality than the stuff he did earlier in life.
Now let's pretend that one caveman painter develops a new technique for painting which is a huge step forward. Let's say he discovers that you can paint four legs instead of two and it really gives some liveliness to the deer. This is a technique which can be recognized as quality, is the fruit of this artist's painting after painting, and can be taught to other painters. Now when some young painter begins painting but tackles the new four leg technique immediately, he'll be painting at a higher quality than another young painter who ignores the state of affairs of art and is just hammering away back at square one. Though the young painter hasn't himself put in all the iterations to develop his quality, his work carries with it the legacy of all the work which lead up to developing the techniques.
The same will be true for the tools. As you keep building and using tools for whichever task, rebuilding them everytime they break or fail, you'll become better at pulling together the tools, better at designing them to complete your task more effectively, etc etc. When you swing an axe today and compare it to a rock hand-ax from 50,000 years back, your axe today carries with it the legacy of all those steps in axe technology that we've enjoyed from years and years of ax-making. Your axe carries the legacy of the hand-ax 50,000 years back.
So something of higher quality is something which carries with it a greater legacy of improvements which implies that it carries a spirit of the most iterations since its form became.
It even appropriately tackles the issue that sometimes it's difficult to discern the better quality between say an iphone and a droid phone as both represent in many ways identical legacies of all the technologies which go into them.
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