Why is the education of a sushi chef so insanely long?
quora.com
quora.com
Great watch, even if you never had sushi or don't like sushi. The extreme drive for perfection is admirable.
Apparently, Tampopo is in a similar vein (though fiction) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092048/?ref_=fn_al_tt_9
Sushi Sawada is a 3 Michelin star place in Tokyo run by a former truck driver who's studied for less than ten years.
So they tried experiments and learned. Then they did that some more. The constant refrain is intellectual humility and seeking to understand the people they are trying to help at a deep subconscious level.
Contrast this to the way I and many others think about various skills. We take a few classes, we play around and are able to achieve some simple level of competence. Somebody then gives us a certificate or other form of public "gold star". Then we feel like we know something.
Socrates was right: true wisdom comes from understanding how little you know and using all of your energy instead to concentrate on asking better questions.
If one sushi chef likes another chef's sushi, why doesn't the one just ask the other how to make it? Because of social reasons?
The theory made complete sense: you just need to be able to guess with hopefully high accuracy what they were going to do so that you could take advantage of it and it's fine because even if you are wrong sometimes you just still end up positive. Of course, the problem is you can't actually really assign probabilities to your guesses and you might have less than a second to decide what to do.
I imagine this is the same with making sushi. You might understand that if a fish is a certain way, you need to add more rice, or vice versa, but you can't just "measure" the fish and instead go off your intuition.
Honestly I don't know a thing about making sushi but the post described having to go off intuition, and it's just not something that can really be taught easily.
To compare with welding: Seasoned welders discuss heating and cooling a weld, pulling from top or bottom, dragging this molten liquid around the narrow crack between metal pieces, and how using different techniques can fine-tune a weld, making it easier to grind and make invisible.
From another angle, at 40 hours per week, it takes over 4.5 years to hit the mythical 10,000 hours. And so 5 years is usually a reasonable benchmark for mastery of any profession of tasks.
Probably at least some of this is marketing - an 8-year sushi chef is probably only marginally better than a 3rd year sushi chef, and most non-connoisseurs would have trouble telling the differences between their creations.
On the other hand, I also can see that when people reach a very high level of skill, it may be difficult for normal people to really see the differences in skill. But I don't know if you can really say there's only a marginal difference.
After all, if one person is 10000 miles away and another is 11000 miles away, they both are so far away you can barely see them. Indeed, I imagine they may be so far away you can't tell how far apart they are, or even which one is farther! But the reality is that one of them is 10% farther than the other: hardly a marginal difference.
Still I do agree that non connoisseurs probably would have difficulty truly appreciating the difference in skill.
Since fish can vary from practically tasteless to overpowering, it probably depends on the type of fish. But I've seen people can eat sushi and tell you the exact temperature based on the flavor. Or what part of the ocean the fish came from based on the flavor. Those are pretty objective metrics.
Then there's also the whole "people end up in the hospital if you screw up". If you're a poor and unclean sushi chef, you are going to make people sick eventually.
It reminds me of the Shakespeare quote about the vasty deep:
Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?
By the way, in japan there is a highly developed market for fish with many levels of quality, so the expensive restaurants get the best parts of the best fish and the leftovers end up in cheaper places.
Also, both chefs should get access to the same ingredients to test if the training is the important part.
This is a tremendous misreading of a study of dubious quality.
I have a few friends who have studied to be sommeliers. The training is intense and the exams arduous. There are several hundreds of different flavor profiles that have to be understood and picked out in real wines (and they map with objective chemical profiles). There is character in the wine that comes from specific characteristics of the regions and seasonality. And the tests to be a sommelier require months of study and are based on objective criteria.
So nothing has fundamentally changed, except that now there are more degrees of belts.
When I learned, we had 9 ranks. Today, most studios have more than 27, so every form and throw and move has its own test and belt. It's maddening, but it's not unlike unit testing. (Should we apply principles of software development to martial arts education?)
If you are, individuals who ultimately care for patients must complete college (4 years), medical school (>4 years), and a residency program (3+ years).
Thus, training to be a physician in the US would require at least 11 years, of which at least five (the last five) would involve extensive patient contact.
whether you'd actually get admitted without one is an exercise for the reader
There are accelerated bachelors+MD programs that high schoolers can apply to; these would shave off two years of overall training time. Notably, despite being accelerated programs, these grant a bachelors degree before program participants advance to medical school.
EDIT: I'm aware that this used to be the case but I don't believe that any schools still allow this.
I mean sushi is just cutting fish right? Just like programming is just typing instructions into a computer, or painting is just smearing pigments on a surface. Nothing to it. :)
It's so much more efficient this way. It might still take 5 years of training for someone to have masterful control over her or his body, but so long as they obey and work hard, success will come eventually.
These aren't the stone ages, where we'd grasp around in the dark for effective self-defense techniques. The road to success is long and hard, but it's well-paved and clearly marked today. We have maps, and also Search & Rescue standing by to catch people as they wander out of the Rye field of success.
I was also surprised to find out how difficult it was to make good sashimi: Does a sashimi chef really need that much skill? http://www.quora.com/Sushi/Does-a-sashimi-chef-really-need-t...
For example, he says, "I think my nigiri is still far from perfect: could use improvement to reach the perfect fish and rice balance with firmness and texture."
Why does this take years as opposed to taking standardized pieces of fish and testing by simply adding more or less rice to it. Why would this process take years?
I get what he's saying in general, that things can be infinitely improved, but why years and decades?
The process itself is the value. The years spent mastering the little things is the sacrifice that makes it valuable to the costumer. In return, the chef follows the path to satori by sticking to his chosen kata, the way. Japanese work ethic is deeply rooted in the zen tradition.
I'm frequently glad for Heinlein's invention of the word "grok" to finally give a name to it. I just wish it was a prettier word.
(That page ends up referencing, among other things, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satori , which may go well with sushi.)
'Grok' has always seemed to mean to me something kind of like this, where no further epiphanies are possible.
I've never heard of anyone using grok to mean something along the lines of "mastery".
I'd say 'grok' generally means that you truly understand something in a fundamental way, rather than just being 'competent' or 'masterful' at that thing. It's a crucial step on the path to mastery, but mastery might still require a lot of practice.
I find 'Your problem with Vim is that you don't grok vi [1]' to be a classic example of proper usage. It explains fundamental principles of vim's 'grammar'. Once you've read and understood it, you 'grok' vim. But even though this knowledge is crucial in being a 'master', it does not make you one. That would require a lot of practice (in this particular case, for me, a few weeks).
I've had similar experiences with functional programming. There was a point, after much reading, where I felt that I truly 'grokked' the approach, but I'm still far away from being a master at functional programming. Old imperative habits die hard.
[1]:http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-most...
We shouldn't glorify youth or age, just quality.
It contains plenty of examples of amazing craftsmanship.