home>Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

words + meaning

If you love words, explore my collection of quotes, spam poetry in the style of ee cummings, π Day Pikus and my favourite excerpts from “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (excerpts)
禅与摩托车维修艺术（节选）

The purely intellectual pursuits were the least affected by the subtraction of Quality. If Quality were dropped, only rationality would remain unchanged. That was odd. Why would that be?
— Robert M. Pirsig

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (excerpts) / Martin Krzywinski @MKrzywinski mkweb.bcgsc.ca

Below are my favourite quotes and passages from the “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values” by Robert M. Pirsig.

The book speaks eloquently and incisively about a lot of what is important to me: finding combinations of thoughts and feelings about art and science and apply them to effectively visually communicate complicated concepts and data.
这本书雄辩而深刻地阐述了很多对我来说重要的事情：找到关于艺术和科学的思想和感受的结合，并运用它们来有效地以视觉方式传达复杂的概念和数据。

Image from The Velobanjogent.
图片来自 The Velobanjogent 。

“ The melancholy know that many of the things we most want are in tragic conflict: to feel secure and yet to be free; to have money and yet not to have to be beholden to others; to be in close-knit communities and yet not to be stifled by the expectations and demands of society; to explore the world and yet to put down deep roots; to fulfil the demands of our appetites for food, sex and sloth and yet stay thin, sober, faithful and fit.
“ 忧郁的人知道，我们最想要的很多东西都处于悲剧性的冲突之中：感到安全却又自由；拥有金钱却又不必受制于人；身处紧密联系的社区却又不受社会期望和要求的束缚；探索世界却又扎下深根；满足我们对食物、性和懒惰的欲望却又保持苗条、清醒、忠诚和健康。

“ The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” and so it goes away. Puzzling.
当真相敲门的时候，你说：“走开，我正在寻找真相。”然后它就走了。真让人费解。

“ “What's new?” is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow.
“ 什么是新的？”是一个有趣且不断拓展的永恒问题，但如果只局限于此，就只会导致无休止的琐事和时尚的游行，成为明天的淤泥。

“ “Dad?” “What?” A small bird rises from a tree in front of us. “What should I be when I grow up?” The bird disappears over a far ridge. I don't know what to say. “Honest,” I finally say.
“ 爸爸？”“什么？”一只小鸟从我们面前的树上飞起。“我长大后应该做什么？”鸟儿消失在远处的山脊上。我不知道该说什么。“说实话，”我终于说道。

“ But there are human forces stronger than logic.
“ 但是人类的力量比逻辑更强大。

“ But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing—and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, “I am a mechanic.” At 5 P.M. or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work. They were already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job. In their own way they were achieving the same thing John and Sylvia were, living with technology without really having anything to do with it. Or rather, they had something to do with it, but their own selves were outside of it, detached, removed. They were involved in it but not in such a way as to care.
“ 但最大的线索似乎是他们的表情。他们表情很难解释。和蔼、友好、随和——而且漠不关心。他们就像旁观者。你感觉他们只是自己走进来，然后有人递给他们一把扳手。他们对这份工作毫无认同感。不会说“我是个机械师”。到了下午 5 点，或者当他们的八小时工作时间结束时，你知道他们会停止工作，不再想着他们的工作。他们已经在努力不去想工作上的事情了。他们以自己的方式实现了约翰和西尔维亚所做的事情，与科技共存，却又不与之有任何关系。或者更确切地说，他们与科技有关，但他们自己却置身事外，抽离出来，置身事外。他们参与其中，但并不关心。

“ The mechanics in their attitude toward the machine were really taking no different attitude from the manual’s toward the machine, or from the attitude I had when I brought it in there. We were all spectators. And it occurred to me there is no manual that deals with the real business of motorcycle maintenance, the most important aspect of all. Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.
技师们对待摩托车的态度，其实和手册上的态度，或者说，和我把摩托车开到那里时的态度没什么不同。我们都是旁观者。我突然意识到，根本没有哪本手册真正涉及摩托车的保养，而这才是最重要的。关心自己正在做的事情，要么被认为不重要，要么被视为理所当然。

“ The new ones start out as good-looking strangers and, depending on how they are treated, degenerate rapidly into bad-acting grouches or even cripples, or else turn into healthy, good-natured, long-lasting friends.
“ 新来的人一开始都是相貌英俊的陌生人，但根据他们受到的对待，他们会迅速变成行为不端、脾气暴躁的人，甚至是残疾人，或者变成健康、善良、长久的朋友。

“ So we move down the empty road. I don’t want to own these prairies, or photograph them, or change them, or even stop or even keep going. We are just moving down the empty road.
于是我们沿着这条空旷的道路前行。我不想拥有这些草原，也不想拍摄它们，也不想改变它们，甚至不想停下来，甚至不想继续前行。我们只是沿着这条空旷的道路前行。

“ I was going at it in terms of underlying form. He was going at it in terms of immediate appearance. I was seeing what the shim meant. He was seeing what the shim was. That’s how I arrived at that distinction. And when you see what the shim is,in this case, it’s depressing. Who likes to think of a beautiful precision machine fixed with an old hunk of junk?
我是从底层形式入手的。他是从直观外观入手的。我理解的是垫片的含义，他理解的是垫片本身。我就是这样得出这个区别的。而当你看到垫片的含义时，在这种情况下，你会感到沮丧。谁会喜欢用一堆破烂不堪的东西来修理一台精密的机器呢？

“ Some things you miss because they’re so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don’t see because they’re so huge. We were both looking at the same thing, seeing the same thing, talking about the same thing, thinking about the same thing, except he was looking, seeing, talking and thinking from a completely different dimension.
有些东西你错过了，是因为它们太微小，你忽略了它们。但有些东西你却看不到，是因为它们太巨大了。我们当时都在注视着同一个事物，看到同一个东西，谈论着同一个话题，思考着同一个问题，只是他从一个完全不同的维度来观察、谈论和思考。

“ What you’ve got here, really, are two realities, one of immediate artistic appearance and one of underlying scientific explanation, and they don’t match and they don’t fit and they don’t really have much of anything to do with one another.
“ 实际上，你在这里看到的是两个现实，一个是直接的艺术外观，一个是潜在的科学解释，它们并不匹配，也不契合，而且它们之间实际上没有太大的关联。

“ I want to divide human understanding into two kinds—classical understanding and romantic understanding.
“ 我想把人类的理解分为两种—— 古典的理解和浪漫的理解。

“ A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance.
古典主义的理解主要将世界视为其潜在形式本身。浪漫主义的理解则主要从直接表象来看待世界。

“ 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. In the northern European cultures the romantic mode is usually associated with femininity, but this is certainly not a necessary association.
浪漫主义模式主要体现在灵感、想象力、创造力和直觉上。情感而非事实占据主导地位。“艺术”与“科学”相对立时，往往是浪漫的。它并非基于理性或法则，而是源于情感、直觉和审美良知。在北欧文化中，浪漫主义模式通常与女性气质联系在一起，但这并非必然的联系。

“ The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws—which are themselves underlying forms of thought and behavior. In the European cultures it is primarily a masculine mode and the fields of science, law and medicine are unattractive to women largely for this reason. Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic. The dirt, the grease, the mastery of underlying form required all give it such a negative romantic appeal that women never go near it.
相比之下，古典模式则以理性和法律为依据——而这些本身就是思想和行为的基本形式。在欧洲文化中，古典模式主要体现为男性化，科学、法律和医学领域对女性缺乏吸引力，很大程度上就是因为这个原因。骑摩托车虽然浪漫，但摩托车维修却纯粹是古典的。污垢、油污以及对基本形式的掌握，都赋予了它一种负面的浪漫吸引力，以至于女性不愿接触它。

“ Although surface ugliness is often found in the classic mode of understanding it is not inherent in it. There is a classic esthetic which romantics often miss because of its subtlety. The classic style is straightforward, unadorned, unemotional, economical and carefully proportioned. Its purpose is not to inspire emotionally, but to bring order out of chaos and make the unknown known. It is not an esthetically free and natural style. It is esthetically restrained. Everything is under control. Its value is measured in terms of the skill with which this control is maintained.
虽然古典理解模式中常常存在表面的丑陋，但这并非其固有特质。浪漫主义者常常因为其精妙而忽略了一种古典美学。古典风格直截了当、朴实无华、不带感情色彩、简洁明了且比例协调。其目的并非激发情感，而是从混乱中理出头绪，让未知成为已知。它并非一种审美上自由自然的风格。它在审美上有所克制。一切都在掌控之中。其价值在于衡量维持这种掌控的技巧。

“ 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.
对浪漫主义者来说，这种经典模式往往显得沉闷、笨拙、丑陋，就像机械维修本身一样。一切都是由零件、部件、组件和相互关系组成的。一切都需要经过电脑反复计算才能最终确定。一切都需要经过衡量和验证。压抑。沉重。无尽的灰色。死亡的力量。

“ 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.
然而，在古典模式中，浪漫主义者也有其独特的表象。轻浮、非理性、反复无常、不值得信任，一心只想寻欢作乐。肤浅，毫无内涵。他们往往像寄生虫，无法或不愿承担自己的重担。他们是社会真正的累赘。现在，这些论调听起来应该有点耳熟。

“ The first is that the motorcycle, so described, is almost impossible to understand unless you already know how one works. The immediate surface impressions that are essential for primary understanding are gone. Only the underlying form is left.
首先，除非你已经了解摩托车的工作原理，否则几乎不可能理解它。对初步理解至关重要的直接表面印象已经消失。只剩下底层的形式。

“ Classical understanding is concerned with the piles and the basis for sorting and interrelating them. Romantic understanding is directed toward the handful of sand before the sorting begins. Both are valid ways of looking at the world although irreconcilable with each other.
古典理解关注的是堆积如山的事物，以及对它们进行分类和关联的基础。浪漫理解则关注的是分类开始前的那把沙子。尽管两者互不相容，但都是看待世界的有效方式。

“ When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process. That is fairly well understood, at least in the arts. Mark Twain’s experience comes to mind, in which, after he had mastered the analytic knowledge needed to pilot the Mississippi River, he discovered the river had lost its beauty. Something is always killed. But what is less noticed in the arts—something is always created too. And instead of just dwelling on what is killed it’s important also to see what’s created and to see the process as a kind of death-birth continuity that is neither good nor bad, but just is.

“ Even in the presence of others he was completely alone.

“ No one really knew him. That is evidently the way he wanted it, and that’s the way it was. Perhaps his aloneness was the result of his intelligence. Perhaps it was the cause. But the two were always together. An uncanny solitary intelligence.

“ But apart from a personality what is there? Some bones and flesh. A collection of legal statistics, perhaps, but surely no person. The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.

“ There is no perfectly shaped part of the motorcycle and never will be, but when you come as close as these instruments take you, remarkable things happen, and you go flying across the countryside under a power that would be called magic if it were not so completely rational in every way.

“ I’ve noticed that people who have never worked with steel have trouble seeing this—that the motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon. They associate metal with given shapes—pipes, rods, girders, tools, parts—all of them fixed and inviolable, and think of it as primarily physical. But a person who does machining or foundry work or forge work or welding sees “steel” as having no shape at all. Steel can be any shape you want if you are skilled enough, and any shape but the one you want if you are not. Shapes, like this tappet, are what you arrive at, what you give to the steel. Steel has no more shape than this old pile of dirt on the engine here. These shapes are all out of someone’s mind. That’s important to see. The steel? Hell, even the steel is out of someone’s mind. There’s no steel in nature. Anyone from the Bronze Age could have told you that.

“ Scientific questions often have a surface appearance of dumbness for this reason. They are asked in order to prevent dumb mistakes later on.

“ In the temple of science are many mansions-and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them there.

“ What has brought them to the temple-no single answer will cover-escape from everyday life, with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one’s own shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from his noisy cramped surroundings into the silence of the high mountains where the eye ranges freely through the still pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity.

“ I feel happy to be here, and still a little sad to be here too. Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive.

“ He’s unable to comprehend things when they appear in the ugly, chopped-up, grotesque sentence style common to engineering and technical writing. Science works with chunks and bits and pieces of things with the continuity presumed, and DeWeese works only with the continuities of things with the chunks and bits and pieces presumed. What he really wants me to damn is the lack of artistic continuity, something an engineer couldn’t care less about. It hangs up, really, on the classic-romantic split, like everything else about technology.

“ “Well, it isn’t just art and technology. It’s a kind of a noncoalescence between reason and feeling. What’s wrong with technology is that it’s not connected in any real way with matters of the spirit and of the heart. And so it does blind, ugly things quite by accident and gets hated for that. People haven’t paid much attention to this before because the big concern has been with food, clothing and shelter for everyone and technology has provided these.” But now where these are assured, the ugliness is being noticed more and more and people are asking if we must always suffer spiritually and esthetically in order to satisfy material needs.

“ I think present-day reason is an analogue of the flat earth of the medieval period. If you go too far beyond it you’re presumed to fall off, into insanity. And people are very much afraid of that. I think this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world. Or the fear of heretics. There’s a very close analogue there.

“ It seemed as though every rule he honestly tried to discover with them and learn with them was so full of exceptions and contradictions and qualifications and confusions that he wished he’d never come across the rule in the first place.

“ And what he really thought was that the rule was pasted on to the writing after the writing was all done. It was post hoc, after the fact, instead of prior to the fact. And he became convinced that all the writers the students were supposed to mimic wrote without rules, putting down whatever sounded right, then going back to see if it still sounded right and changing it if it didn’t.

“ He just felt that no writer ever learned to write by this squarish, by-the-numbers, objective, methodical approach. Yet that was all rationality offered and there was nothing to do about it without being irrational

“ She couldn’t think of anything to write about Bozeman because she couldn’t recall anything she had heard worth repeating. She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to do some original and direct seeing.

“ As a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric teaching could begin. This imitation seemed to be an external compulsion. Little children didn’t have it. It seemed to come later on, possibly as a result of school itself.

“ When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do it’s a hollow victory. In order to sustain the victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again, driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out. That’s never the way.

“ The purely intellectual pursuits were the least affected by the subtraction of Quality. If Quality were dropped, only rationality would remain unchanged. That was odd. Why would that be?

“ Squareness. When you subtract Quality you get squareness. Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.

“ You take your analytic knife, put the point directly on the term Quality and just tap, not hard, gently, and the whole world splits, cleaves, right in two—hip and square, classic and romantic, technological and humanistic—and the split is clean. There’s no mess. No slop. No little items that could be one way or the other. Not just a skilled break but a very lucky break.

“ Romantic Quality always correlated with instantaneous impressions. Square Quality always involved multiple considerations that extended over a period of time. Romantic Quality was the present, the here and now of things. Classic Quality was always concerned with more than just the present. The relation of the present to the past and future was always considered. If you conceived the past and future to be all contained in the present, why, that was groovy, the present was what you lived for.

“ One thing about pioneers that you don't hear mentioned is that they are invariably, by their nature, mess-makers. They go forging ahead, seeing only their noble, distant goal, and never notice any of the crud and debris they leave behind them. Someone else gets to clean that up and it's not a very glamorous or interesting job.

“ The true work of the inventor consists in choosing among these combinations so as to eliminate the useless ones, or rather, to avoid the trouble of making them, and the rules that must guide the choice are extremely fine and delicate. It's almost impossible to state them precisely; they must be felt rather than formulated.

“ I think it's important now to tie care to Quality by pointing out that care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who's bound to have some characteristics of Quality.

“ This eternally dualistic subject-object way of approaching the motorcycle sounds right to us because we're used to it. But it's not right. It's always been an artificial interpretation superimposed on reality. It's never been reality itself. When this duality is completely accepted a certain nondivided relationship between the mechanic and motorcycle, a craftsmanlike feeling for the work, is destroyed. When traditional rationality divides the world into subjects and objects it shuts out Quality, and when you're really stuck it's Quality, not any subjects or objects, that tells you where you ought to go.

“ Romantic reality is the cutting edge of experience. It's the leading edge of the train of knowledge that keeps the whole train on the track. Traditional knowledge is only the collective memory of where that leading edge has been.

“ The leading edge is where absolutely all the action is. The leading edge contains all the infinite possibilities of the future. It contains all the history of the past. Where else could they be contained?

“ If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then you may be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas.

“ The fear of stuckness is needless because the longer you stay stuck the more you see the Quality—reality that gets you unstuck every time. What's really been getting you stuck is the running from the stuckness through the cars of your train of knowledge looking for a solution that is out in front of the train.

“ Nature has a non-Euclidian geometry of her own that seems to soften the deliberate objectivity of these buildings with a kind of random spontaneity that architects would do well to study.

“ The real ugliness is not the result of any objects of technology. Nor is it, if one follows Phćdrus' metaphysics, the result of any subjects of technology, the people who produce it or the people who use it. Quality, or its absence, doesn't reside in either the subject or the object. The real ugliness lies in the relationship between the people who produce the technology and the things they produce, which results in a similar relationship between the people who use the technology and the things they use.

“ This is the tat tvam asi truth of the Upanishads, but it's also reflected in modern street argot. “Getting with it,” “digging it,” “grooving on it” are all slang reflections of this identity. It is this identity that is the basis of craftsmanship in all the technical arts. And it is this identity that modern, dualistically conceived technology lacks. The creator of it feels no particular sense of identity with it. The owner of it feels no particular sense of identity with it. The user of it feels no particular sense of identity with it. Hence, by Phćdrus' definition, it has no Quality.

“ The way to solve the conflict between human values and technological needs is not to run away from technology. That's impossible. The way to resolve the conflict is to break down the barriers of dualistic thought that prevent a real understanding of what technology is— not an exploitation of nature, but a fusion of nature and the human spirit into a new kind of creation that transcends both.

“ The nature of our culture is such that if you were to look for instruction in how to do any of these jobs, the instruction would always give only one understanding of Quality, the classic. It would tell you how to hold the blade when sharpening the knife, or how to use a sewing machine, or how to mix and apply glue with the presumption that once these underlying methods were applied, “good” would naturally follow. The ability to see directly what “looks good” would be ignored.

“ The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of “style” to make it acceptable. And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes it all the worse. Now it's not just depressingly dull, it's also phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized houses. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents.

“ It's the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don't know where to start because no one has ever told them there's such a thing as Quality in this world and it's real, not style. Quality isn't something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start.

“ The answer is Phćdrus' contention that classic understanding should not be overlaid with romantic prettiness; classic and romantic understanding should be united at a basic level.

“ It's been necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions, the emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of nature's order which was as yet unknown. Now it's time to further an understanding of nature's order by reassimilating those passions which were originally fled from. The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man's consciousness, are a part of nature's order too. The central part.

“ We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly. The time for real reunification of art and technology is really long overdue.

“ The way to see what looks good and understand the reasons it looks good, and to be at one with this goodness as the work proceeds, is to cultivate an inner quietness, a peace of mind so that goodness can shine through.

“ I say inner peace of mind. It has no direct relationship to external circumstances. It can occur to a monk in meditation, to a soldier in heavy combat or to a machinist taking off that last ten-thousandth of an inch. It involves unselfconsciousness, which produces a complete identification with one's circumstances, and there are levels and levels of this identification and levels and levels of quietness quite as profound and difficult of attainment as the more familiar levels of activity. The mountains of achievement are Quality discovered in one direction only, and are relatively meaningless and often unobtainable unless taken together with the ocean trenches of self-awareness—so different from selfconsciousness—which result from inner peace of mind.

“ This inner peace of mind occurs on three levels of understanding. Physical quietness seems the easiest to achieve, although there are levels and levels of this too, as attested by the ability of Hindu mystics to live buried alive for many days. Mental quietness, in which one has no wandering thoughts at all, seems more difficult, but can be achieved. But value quietness, in which one has no wandering desires at all but simply performs the acts of his life without desire, that seems the hardest.

“ When one isn't dominated by feelings of separateness from what he's working on, then one can be said to “care” about what he's doing. That is what caring really is, a feeling of identification with what one's doing. When one has this feeling then he also sees the inverse side of caring, Quality itself.

“ Sometimes, when thinking about this, I thought that the idea that one person's mind is accessible to another's is just a conversational illusion, just a figure of speech, an assumption that makes some kind of exchange between basically alien creatures seem plausible, and that really the relationship of one person to another is ultimately unknowable. The effort of fathoming what is in another's mind creates a distortion of what is seen.

“ The gumption-filling process occurs when one is quiet long enough to see and hear and feel the real universe, not just one's own stale opinions about it. But it's nothing exotic. That's why I like the word.

“ Because we're unaccustomed to it, we don't usually see that there's a third possible logical term equal to yes and no which is capable of expanding our understanding in an unrecognized direction. We don't even have a term for it, so I'll have to use the Japanese mu.

“ Technology is blamed for a lot of this loneliness, since the loneliness is certainly associated with the newer technological devices—TV, jets, freeways and so on—but I hope it's been made plain that the real evil isn't the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity.

“ Phćdrus saw Aristotle as tremendously satisfied with this neat little stunt of naming and classifying everything. His world began and ended with this stunt. The reason why, if he were not more than two thousand years dead, he would have gladly rubbed him out is that he saw him as a prototype for the many millions of self-satisfied and truly ignorant teachers throughout history who have smugly and callously killed the creative spirit of their students with this dumb ritual of analysis, this blind, rote, eternal naming of things.

“ They saw the future as something that came upon them from behind their backs with the past receding away before their eyes.

VIEW ALL

news + thoughts

Propensity score weighting

Mon 17-03-2025

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. —Mr. Spock (Star Trek II)

This month, we explore a related and powerful technique to address bias: propensity score weighting (PSW), which applies weights to each subject instead of matching (or discarding) them.

Martin Krzywinski @MKrzywinski mkweb.bcgsc.ca

▲ Nature Methods Points of Significance column: Propensity score weighting. (read)
▲ Nature 方法重要性点栏：倾向得分加权。（阅读）

Kurz, C.F., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2025) Points of significance: Propensity score weighting. Nat. Methods 22:1–3.
Kurz, CF, Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2025) 重要点：倾向评分加权。 《自然-方法》 22 ：1-3。

Happy 2025 π Day—
TTCAGT: a sequence of digits
2025 年 π 日快乐——TTCAGT：一串数字

Thu 13-03-2025 2025年3月13日星期四

Celebrate π Day (March 14th) and sequence digits like its 1999. Let's call some peaks.
庆祝 π 日（3 月 14 日）并序列数字，例如 1999 年。我们称之为一些峰值。

▲ 2025 π DAY | TTCAGT: a sequence of digits. The digits of π are encoded into DNA sequence and visualized with Sanger sequencing. (details)
▲ 2025 π DAY | TTCAGT：一串数字。π 的数字被编码成 DNA 序列，并通过桑格测序进行可视化。（详情）

Crafting 10 Years of Statistics Explanations: Points of Significance
精心打造十年统计数据解释：重要点

Sun 09-03-2025 2025年9月3日星期日

I don’t have good luck in the match points. —Rafael Nadal, Spanish tennis player
我在赛点上运气不太好。——拉斐尔·纳达尔，西班牙网球运动员

Points of Significance is an ongoing series of short articles about statistics in Nature Methods that started in 2013. Its aim is to provide clear explanations of essential concepts in statistics for a nonspecialist audience. The articles favor heuristic explanations and make extensive use of simulated examples and graphical explanations, while maintaining mathematical rigor.
“重要性要点”是《自然方法》杂志自2013年起持续更新的统计学短文系列。其目标是为非专业读者清晰地解释统计学的基本概念。文章倾向于启发式解释，并大量使用模拟示例和图形解释，同时保持数学严谨性。

Topics range from basic, but often misunderstood, such as uncertainty and P-values, to relatively advanced, but often neglected, such as the error-in-variables problem and the curse of dimensionality. More recent articles have focused on timely topics such as modeling of epidemics, machine learning, and neural networks.
主题涵盖范围广泛，从基础但常被误解的不确定性和 P 值，到相对高级但常被忽视的变量误差问题和维数灾难。近期文章则聚焦于流行病建模、机器学习和神经网络等热门话题。

In this article, we discuss the evolution of topics and details behind some of the story arcs, our approach to crafting statistical explanations and narratives, and our use of figures and numerical simulations as props for building understanding.
在本文中，我们讨论了一些故事情节背后的主题和细节的演变、我们制作统计解释和叙述的方法，以及我们使用数字和数值模拟作为建立理解的道具。

▲ Crafting 10 Years of Statistics Explanations: Points of Significance. (read)
▲ 十年统计讲解的精髓：意义所在。（阅读）

Altman, N. & Krzywinski, M. (2025) Crafting 10 Years of Statistics Explanations: Points of Significance. Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application 12:69–87.
Altman, N. & Krzywinski, M. (2025) 精心打造十年统计解释：重要要点。 《统计及其应用年鉴》 12 ：69-87。

Propensity score matching
倾向得分匹配

Mon 16-09-2024 2024年9月16日星期一

I don’t have good luck in the match points. —Rafael Nadal, Spanish tennis player
我在赛点上运气不太好。——拉斐尔·纳达尔，西班牙网球运动员

In many experimental designs, we need to keep in mind the possibility of confounding variables, which may give rise to bias in the estimate of the treatment effect.
在许多实验设计中，我们需要记住混杂变量的可能性，这可能会导致对治疗效果的估计产生偏差。

▲ Nature Methods Points of Significance column: Propensity score matching. (read)
▲ Nature 方法论中重要性栏：倾向得分匹配。（阅读）

If the control and experimental groups aren't matched (or, roughly, similar enough), this bias can arise.
如果对照组和实验组不匹配（或者大致不够相似），就会出现这种偏见。

Sometimes this can be dealt with by randomizing, which on average can balance this effect out. When randomization is not possible, propensity score matching is an excellent strategy to match control and experimental groups.
有时可以通过随机化来解决这个问题，平均而言，这可以平衡这种影响。当无法进行随机化时，倾向得分匹配是匹配对照组和实验组的绝佳策略。

Kurz, C.F., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2024) Points of significance: Propensity score matching. Nat. Methods 21:1770–1772.
Kurz, CF, Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2024) 重要点：倾向得分匹配。 《自然-方法》 21 ：1770–1772。

Understanding p-values and significance
理解 P 值和显著性

Tue 24-09-2024 2024年9月24日星期二

P-values combined with estimates of effect size are used to assess the importance of experimental results. However, their interpretation can be invalidated by selection bias when testing multiple hypotheses, fitting multiple models or even informally selecting results that seem interesting after observing the data.
P 值与效应量估计值相结合，用于评估实验结果的重要性。然而，在检验多个假设、拟合多个模型，甚至在观察数据后非正式地选择看似有趣的结果时，它们的解释可能会因选择偏差而失效。

We offer an introduction to principled uses of p-values (targeted at the non-specialist) and identify questionable practices to be avoided.

▲ Understanding p-values and significance. (read)

Altman, N. & Krzywinski, M. (2024) Understanding p-values and significance. Laboratory Animals 58:443–446.

Depicting variability and uncertainty using intervals and error bars

Thu 05-09-2024

Variability is inherent in most biological systems due to differences among members of the population. Two types of variation are commonly observed in studies: differences among samples and the “error” in estimating a population parameter (e.g. mean) from a sample. While these concepts are fundamentally very different, the associated variation is often expressed using similar notation—an interval that represents a range of values with a lower and upper bound.

In this article we discuss how common intervals are used (and misused).

▲ Depicting variability and uncertainty using intervals and error bars. (read)

Altman, N. & Krzywinski, M. (2024) Depicting variability and uncertainty using intervals and error bars. Laboratory Animals 58:453–456.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (excerpts)禅与摩托车维修艺术（节选）

Propensity score weighting

Happy 2025 π Day—TTCAGT: a sequence of digits2025 年 π 日快乐——TTCAGT：一串数字

Crafting 10 Years of Statistics Explanations: Points of Significance精心打造十年统计数据解释：重要点