@vgr: Peter Drucker's 1950s parable about Ethereum block builders

Don‘t get it. Care to explain?

it’s an adaptation of a classic parable about stonecutters:

“THE SPECIALIZED WORK OF MANAGERS: An old story tells of three stonecutters who were asked what they were doing. The first replied, ‘I am making a living’. The second kept on hammering while he said, ‘I am doing the best job of stonecutting in the entire country.’ The third one looked up with a visionary gleam in his eyes and said, ‘I am building a cathedral.’ The third man is, of course, the true manager. The first man knows what he wants to get out of the work and manages to do so. He is likely to give a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay. But he is not a manager and will never be one. It is the second man who is the problem. Workmanship is essential. An organization demoralizes if it does not demand of its members the highest workmanship they are capable of. But there is always a danger that the true workman, the true professional, will believe that he is accomplishing something when, in effect, he is just polishing stones or collecting footnotes. Workmanship must be encouraged in the business enterprise. But it must always be related to the needs of the whole.”

so the second one is just polishing stones and has lost sight of what they actually set out to build. making a parable w/ ethereum suggests that while technical excellence is necessary, it becomes dangerous when disconnected from the larger mission and values of the ecosystem. the second one risks becoming so focused on their technical optimization and corporate integration that they lose sight of the cypherpunk-cathedral, the decentralised, censorship-resistant financial system that ethereum is trying to build.

maybe fill in the dots yourself :)

Mhh very interesting, but I'd argue that this is somewhat philosophically oppressive(?).

E.g. an interpretation of the Genesis chapter in the bible is that the most godlike act is creation. Craft and art are commonly understood as the mastery of practice. There are Japanese sushi chefs who fold(?) sushi for 30 years and claim to still learn something new and important in year 29. To me the pursuit of mastery of a skill is actually a reason why life is beautiful, I don't consider it problematic at all.

On the other hand, I know that it was e.g. Marx who said that the division of labor alienates the worker from the purpose and the product, which I guess is true in e.g. classic factory work where the worker is a cog in the machine. So in that example I'd agree that in this case the optimization is problematic for that individual

i think bettering your craft and mastering skill, comprehensive learning is one of the best things you can do with your life and the path to happiness and fulfillment. the parable is not arguing against that, it is about how to fit that in an organisation. in this sense, in the light of the needs of the whole and the mission, being perfect might be the enemy of just being good.

now i’m interpreting the cast, i think in the parable of @vgr (but you never know w/ @vgr lol), he might hinting on the tension between technical efficiency and decentralised principles. maybe, but just guessing :) base for example is genuinely impressive at the craft level, speed, efficiency, scale. it is literally building ‘the fastest, cheapest, most efficiently knapsacked blocks’. but here the second builder problem emerges. base operates with a centralised sequencer that retains a significant part of fees for deploying the sequencer, while paying a minimal amount to ethereum. they're optimizing their own efficiency at the expense of the broader ecosystem. also you could argue base is too tied up with the coinbase culture and predominantly encourages the usage of usdc which can be frozen or censored. so while base achieves technical excellence, these centralisation concerns work against ethereum's core vision of decentralisation and permissionless access.

but maybe this is just my own opinion about base i read in the parable. you could also argue the second worker is people in the ethereum space only seeking maximum extraction not caring about the initial project. you can fill in quite some dots ;)