6 ms·
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
by eimrine 4y ago
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, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
- paulcole 4y agoOn the flip side, that’s a 50-year old quote and maybe times have changed?
- andreareina 4y agoMaybe the specifics have changed but I'd argue the general sentiment remains valid. And at least half of those specifics still apply.
- PainfullyNormal 4y agoHave humans really changed in the last 2000 years? You can still find books today published back during Roman times complaining about kids these days and how they mispronounce latin.
- ben_w 4y agoWe have changed in some important ways in the last 20 years, and are yet the same in other ways as our nearest primates today and therefore probably our ancestors 2 million years ago. When we all have smartphones with access to WolframAlpha, do we need to know how to solve equations ourselves, or is it sufficient to just know how to phrase the problem so the software can answer it? Even excluding vegetarians and vegans, who even has access to hogs to butcher them — and given food delivery options, how many need to bother even if they can?
- drewcoo 4y agoWhy 2000? Mispronounced in Latin: "emm an' emm years" https://australian.museum/learn/science/human-evolution/homo-sapiens-modern-humans/ https://australian.museum/learn/science/human-evolution/homo...
- nbernard 4y agoWhat do you think of HN's cstross take in his novel _Saturn's Children_ ? > Please excuse my lack of depth; I'm a generalist, not a specialist. > Why bother learning all that biochemistry stuff --- or how to design a building, or conn a boat, or balance accounts, or solve equations, or comfort the dying --- when you can get other people to do all that for you in exchange for a blow job? (to me, it seems to be more a blow job specialist's view than that of an actual generalist, but ...)
- FlyingSnake 4y agoYou can replace some parts of it, but the core message is timeless.
- anigbrowl 4y agoIt's more relevant than ever.
- Rebelgecko 4y agoFair enough, nowadays you're probably better off writing a non-rhyming poem as opposed to a sonnet (at least if you're trying to be trendy). However I think a lot of the other skills are attainable and even worthwhile.
- tobyjsullivan 4y agoI don’t know know if anything has changed but sometimes it feels like most people today can’t do a single one of those things. Maybe it was always an unrealistic expectation, though.
- Kaibeezy 4y agoI’d add: - write an effective contract and be able to tell if one that someone hands you is reasonable - be able to explain to people you feel some responsibility towards how to install and operate a VPN - have a grip on basic statistics and economics - cook a tasty meal from grains, legumes, vegetables and/or fungi
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mfrw 4y agoThank you for making me laugh on my more than crappy day :) > plan an invasion Why would one need this ? [hahahaha]
- atemerev 4y ago> Why would one need this? You'll see! :) (seriously though, even if you are not planning any invasions in the foreseeable future, you need to think like an attacker to successfully defend against attackers).
- mfrw 4y agoFair enough :)
- jokethrowaway 4y agoIf you're not invading because you can't, you're not good: you're just useless. You need to be able to invade and not do it to be good.
- harry8 4y agoWhat if you know you /can/ learn how to do that but make a conscious choice not to take on that ability? Then what if you know you can but rank that ability as being too far down the list in terms of its benefit to you, your family, your neighbors and the human race to supplant time spent learning X or doing Y. For whatever you feel are a good values of X & Y? This more "not invading AND you can't" rather than "because." Seems like a reasonable thing to me. "I decline to shoot anyone with a gun and I can't." That seems like a position taken by some large number of pretty reasonable people in a many contexts that seem, at the very least, justifiable.
- ggambetta 4y agoI actually, for real, have a slide deck about starting an empire. I did it as a joke for my friends, it's formatted and phrased as a startup pitch deck, but an invasion is required for one of the milestones. So you never know!
- cyberge99 4y ago- Robert Heinlein
- drewcoo 4y agoThank you for that. Please ignore me and vote parent up. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12051-a-human-being-should-be-able-to-change-a-diaper https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12051-a-human-being-should-...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- perilunar 4y agoYou're quoting someone — you should use quote marks and add an attribution.
- RHSman2 4y agoShould is a banned word
- throwaw32823 4y agoWhy is that? Is it against english grammar or something?
- RHSman2 4y agoThe world is full of ‘should’s but most of them are just constructs.
- WHATDOESIT 4y agoWe are not at school.
- melonrusk 4y ago"A human being should be mediocre at everything" Great advice there.
- sph 4y ago"Jack of all trades, master of none, is oftentimes better than master of one." An average human to have an average life must know how to cook food, do arithmetic, read a book, write a letter, use a computer, learn a trade. Even living a primitive life, a human to survive needs to know and do more than any other animal. This is why we have our own enormous and very energy-intensive brains and not a shared hive mind. Being average is what we excel at as a species.
- quickthrower2 4y agoAll that and now I have to learn k8s! Grrrrrr!
- mmargerum 4y agolove that: specialization is for insects.
- notacoward 4y agoA popular quote among those who believe they're on its good side, but also specialization is the basis of our entire society and economy. All of software is a specialty. The most successful people are neither 100% specialist nor 100% generalist. "T-shaped" is the common term - at least slightly competent across many skill areas, very deep in a few. A team or larger organization made up of people with complementary skills (and temperaments) will consistently outperform one where everyone came out of the same cookie cutter. BTW that's not the worst way Heinlein misled half of my nerd generation, but that's a topic for a different day and certainly a better venue.