4 ms·

I especially like one of the comments on the page. “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a bui

by raddad 10y ago

I especially like one of the comments on the page. “A 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

amelius 10y ago
A human being should be able to fly a Boeing 747, run a marathon, design a nuclear reactor, prove Fermat's last theorem, climb the K2, dance the Swan Lake, discover new drugs, speak 7 languages. Specialization is for insects. Just to put things into perspective. I'm glad we have insects :)
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > A human being should be able to fly a Boeing 747 That's what we have flight simulators for (the good kind, not the arcade ones). > run a marathon Lots of people do that :). Hell, I might even do it myself one day. > design a nuclear reactor Well, why not? Of course your design isn't going to cut it because of tons of engineering trade-offs involved, but I think one should be able to make a "complex enough" design that makes sense. > prove Fermat's last theorem, climb the K2, dance the Swan Lake, discover new drugs, speak 7 languages Oh come on. :). I get your point about perspective, but I still think we're specializing a bit too much. Given that the boundaries of our occupations are pretty arbitrary, and the reality doesn't care about them, we're losing out on knowledge at the boundaries. T-shaped skills, or whatever is the buzzword du jour for it these days, seems like a good idea. That, and I think Heinlein is arguing for people to have a little thicker horizontal bar in their "T". :).
- ivanhoe 10y ago
  A human being should be able to do some running, and running a marathon is a specialization for a few dedicated ones... and then you have Bruce Dickinson who does fly a Boing 747 :)
- RangerScience 10y ago
  It's more about: Humans should specialize in solving problems, or making art, or performing... Which to a large extent just means "specialize in learning". That's what each person in the article did. They found a problem, learned what they needed to solve it, and solved it. It's probably way less about specialization versus willing to depart from your existing specializations. If you think, "Oh, I'm a software engineer, I can't do electrical", then you can't solve some problems. Or you can say, "I'm a software engineer, but I need to solve an electrical problem. Guess I'll go learn some electrical engineering." Over the last week, I've given myself a crash-course in Arch Linux, driver code, and how feature points (as in computer vision) work, because there's a problem I need to solve that needs me to know these things. Until I changed my attitude from "I'm a web dev! I can't do that!" to "It's a problem I'm going to solve", doing those things was hard. When I changed my outlook, doing those things was easy. Do the work, get the output - work's still work, but it's not... "hard". Just involved and time-consuming.
antman 10y ago
Plato's Republic 3ii And now let us see how our city will be able to supply this great demand: We may suppose that one man is a husbandman, another a builder, some one else a weaver --shall we add to them a shoemaker, or perhaps some other purveyor to our bodily wants?. The barest notion of a State must include four or five men.Clearly. edit: formatting http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.3.ii.html http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.3.ii.html

by raddad 10y ago

amelius 10y ago

A human being should be able to fly a Boeing 747, run a marathon, design a nuclear reactor, prove Fermat's last theorem, climb the K2, dance the Swan Lake, discover new drugs, speak 7 languages. Specialization is for insects. Just to put things into perspective. I'm glad we have insects :)

TeMPOraL 10y ago
> A human being should be able to fly a Boeing 747 That's what we have flight simulators for (the good kind, not the arcade ones). > run a marathon Lots of people do that :). Hell, I might even do it myself one day. > design a nuclear reactor Well, why not? Of course your design isn't going to cut it because of tons of engineering trade-offs involved, but I think one should be able to make a "complex enough" design that makes sense. > prove Fermat's last theorem, climb the K2, dance the Swan Lake, discover new drugs, speak 7 languages Oh come on. :). I get your point about perspective, but I still think we're specializing a bit too much. Given that the boundaries of our occupations are pretty arbitrary, and the reality doesn't care about them, we're losing out on knowledge at the boundaries. T-shaped skills, or whatever is the buzzword du jour for it these days, seems like a good idea. That, and I think Heinlein is arguing for people to have a little thicker horizontal bar in their "T". :).
ivanhoe 10y ago
A human being should be able to do some running, and running a marathon is a specialization for a few dedicated ones... and then you have Bruce Dickinson who does fly a Boing 747 :)
RangerScience 10y ago
It's more about: Humans should specialize in solving problems, or making art, or performing... Which to a large extent just means "specialize in learning". That's what each person in the article did. They found a problem, learned what they needed to solve it, and solved it. It's probably way less about specialization versus willing to depart from your existing specializations. If you think, "Oh, I'm a software engineer, I can't do electrical", then you can't solve some problems. Or you can say, "I'm a software engineer, but I need to solve an electrical problem. Guess I'll go learn some electrical engineering." Over the last week, I've given myself a crash-course in Arch Linux, driver code, and how feature points (as in computer vision) work, because there's a problem I need to solve that needs me to know these things. Until I changed my attitude from "I'm a web dev! I can't do that!" to "It's a problem I'm going to solve", doing those things was hard. When I changed my outlook, doing those things was easy. Do the work, get the output - work's still work, but it's not... "hard". Just involved and time-consuming.

antman 10y ago

Plato's Republic 3ii And now let us see how our city will be able to supply this great demand: We may suppose that one man is a husbandman, another a builder, some one else a weaver --shall we add to them a shoemaker, or perhaps some other purveyor to our bodily wants?. The barest notion of a State must include four or five men.Clearly. edit: formatting http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.3.ii.html http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.3.ii.html