3 ms·

I think western societies are doing themselves a disservice by training people to do just one thing as a career (college "Majors" considered harmful in my view

I think western societies are doing themselves a disservice by training people to do just one thing as a career (college "Majors" considered harmful in my view and minors are practically useless). In Neal Stephenson's book "Anathem" all the monks had a fallback profession called an "avocation" which they could do if they failed out of their primary study. And they trained for both when they were young. We'd be much better off as a society right now if we had invested in that sort of approach for the last few decades. Mid-life career retraining is really hard and scary to even contemplate.

jemmyw 4y ago
The problem with that is that you just get better and better at the thing you do all the time. Specialisation to the extreme is probably most optimal for society as a whole when there are enough people.
- ephbit 4y ago
  Societies' gains as an effect of this specialisation is just one (albeit an important one) aspect of the whole optimisation. Anti-fragility and redundancy typically decrease the number of (costly) disruptions in a system and thus the proposed fallback profession might actually be a net positive for efficiency rather than a loss.
than3 4y ago
While the book is thought provoking in some regards its fiction, also it doesn't really touch on the important parts of what does or doesn't make things work (largely because that wouldn't be entertaining). You may find the Wealth of Nations (1778) an interesting read as that goes into the importance of many factors that are not paid attention to today by most people (or even policy makers if you factor their actions in). It has some choice things to say about the indirect effects from the interference of labor relations which are historically backed. Make no mistake, the main reason we are where we are now is because of the consistent failures to address items that fall into that area.

jemmyw 4y ago

The problem with that is that you just get better and better at the thing you do all the time. Specialisation to the extreme is probably most optimal for society as a whole when there are enough people.

ephbit 4y ago
Societies' gains as an effect of this specialisation is just one (albeit an important one) aspect of the whole optimisation. Anti-fragility and redundancy typically decrease the number of (costly) disruptions in a system and thus the proposed fallback profession might actually be a net positive for efficiency rather than a loss.

than3 4y ago

While the book is thought provoking in some regards its fiction, also it doesn't really touch on the important parts of what does or doesn't make things work (largely because that wouldn't be entertaining). You may find the Wealth of Nations (1778) an interesting read as that goes into the importance of many factors that are not paid attention to today by most people (or even policy makers if you factor their actions in). It has some choice things to say about the indirect effects from the interference of labor relations which are historically backed. Make no mistake, the main reason we are where we are now is because of the consistent failures to address items that fall into that area.