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Everyone should be a surgeon and be able to perform surgical operations on their family and friends. Everyone should be an auto mechanic and be able to assembl
by biot 11y ago
Everyone should be a surgeon and be able to perform surgical operations on their family and friends.
Everyone should be an auto mechanic and be able to assemble new vehicles out of an engine and other parts.
Everyone should be an electronics engineer and be able to construct their own novel devices out of raw circuits.
Everyone should be a chemical engineer and be able to formulate their own novel chemicals.
Everyone should be a biologist and be able to construct their own novel DNA and RNA sequences, splice multiple organisms together to create new life.
Everyone should be a physicist and be able to explain the practical and theoretical principles underlying all the above principles.
Everyone should be an advanced mathematician and be able to derive from first principles the laws governing everything in the universe.
... or you can just do your own thing, grok how to use the things other people have dedicated their lives to understanding and building, and focus on mastering your own profession.
- pault 11y agoA human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. -Robert A. Heinlein ;) Edit: I sort of meant this tongue in cheek, but I do look forward to the day when cheap energy and life extension give bright people the opportunity to do all of the things in the parent post. Until then, yes, it's probably better to do one thing masterfully than many things poorly. I wish I had more time for learning for learning's sake, but I've only been playing this game for a few decades and I don't want to nerf my character.
- kazinator 11y ago> Specialization is for insects. As in, spending years to learn how to code instead of moving on to butchering that sonnet and comforting that hog.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago> Specialization is for insects. The single most successful clade in the history of this earth.
- scandox 11y agoDefine success
- AnimalMuppet 11y agoNumerically, yes. I aspire to be something more, however.
- protomyth 11y agoSpecialization allows doctors to save more patients. Specialization means I don't have to do a bunch of stuff just to survive when I could be doing something I love. We can expand the frontiers of humanity when all of us wander in new directions as opposed to having to learn to do everything.
- TheGRS 11y agoI am pretty sure I have heard each of these phrases verbatim from whichever specialist would have said them at one point or another, especially the auto mechanic one, I've heard that one many times.