Message text written by "BP - His DNA is this long."
>I think the sense of denigration does occur, particularly in the situation
of
craftspeople feeling inadequate to voice their knowledge. I also believe
that
there is a bias on the part of many people in the preservation movement to
denigrate the person working with their hands and head --<

Ken has something here--- I have seen it all my professional life. I have
seen engineers 
and designers who never got up from behind their desks to go into the hot
sweaty smelly parts of a factory 
to figure out what was really going on in a process, or to talk to the guy
who is on the line 8 hours a day, who may not have
the scientific training, but who has spent more time observing and
experiencing a set of realities than any professional ever can.

That guy on the line --  whether in a factory or on a scaffold - - holds a
vital piece of the puzzle. If your scientific explanations do not account
for
all of his observations, you have probably missed something -- go back and
be hot and sweaty and smelly a little more and you may figure out
what you've missed.

My job as a chemical process engineer got real easy real early on, as soon
as I realized that the guy whose hands and head were into that job all day
every day held the answer to the problem I was assigned to solve, and that
beyond securing his good will and assistance, all I had to do was sort
through
all of his observations and ideas, substantiate or disprove them. What was
left was the solution.

Mike E.