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God forbid college educated professionals know a minimum about communication and speaking. Aren't you/we supposed to be society's elite? You're not supposed to

God forbid college educated professionals know a minimum about communication and speaking. Aren't you/we supposed to be society's elite? You're not supposed to "miscommunicate" by the time you graduate. College students in the 1910s could read Greek and Latin. Before beginning college. And there were no fancy apps to help them. Everything was by the book and hard memorization. But it would be asking too much of a graduate in 2023 to be fluent in English? 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.

ChuckNorris89 3y ago
>God forbid college educated professionals know a minimum about communication and speaking. You're not supposed to "miscommunicate" by the time you graduate. I think in the era of remote work one might assumes that all communication is done via slack/email and no real time verbal communication is needed.
darth_avocado 3y ago
And yet somehow the world’s richest man and a world renowned journalist, both arguably fluent in English, can’t communicate with each other. https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/10/23678105/elon-musk-substack-notes-battle-matt-taibbi https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/10/23678105/elon-musk-substa... The core of the problem lies with your expectation that just being fluent in English is sufficient to not have miscommunication. Communication is a lot more involved and something as trivial as not having a good night’s sleep can take your attention away from what others are saying. Written communication helps because you can read something back quickly if you skipped over something or were not paying attention.
Night_Thastus 3y ago
>Specialization is for insects. Specialization is the only way we can currently make progress as a species, and is the only way we will be able to for the foreseeable future. If everyone only had a passing or surface level knowledge of every field, they could not add to our collective understanding of any field. To actually advance human understanding in a field, an individual needs to catch up on everything that has been learned about it up to this point. For some fields, that is hundreds of years of research and knowledge gained. That's not practical to learn for more than one or two fields - we simply don't live long enough. If you want the person who makes the next alloy that makes planes another 20% lighter, you're going to need someone who has dedicated most of their life to just learning material sciences and is putting all their effort into that topic. It isn't going to be done by someone who had one quarter of a semester in college on it. (With rare exceptions)

ChuckNorris89 3y ago

>God forbid college educated professionals know a minimum about communication and speaking. You're not supposed to "miscommunicate" by the time you graduate. I think in the era of remote work one might assumes that all communication is done via slack/email and no real time verbal communication is needed.

darth_avocado 3y ago

And yet somehow the world’s richest man and a world renowned journalist, both arguably fluent in English, can’t communicate with each other. https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/10/23678105/elon-musk-substack-notes-battle-matt-taibbi https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/10/23678105/elon-musk-substa... The core of the problem lies with your expectation that just being fluent in English is sufficient to not have miscommunication. Communication is a lot more involved and something as trivial as not having a good night’s sleep can take your attention away from what others are saying. Written communication helps because you can read something back quickly if you skipped over something or were not paying attention.

Night_Thastus 3y ago

>Specialization is for insects. Specialization is the only way we can currently make progress as a species, and is the only way we will be able to for the foreseeable future. If everyone only had a passing or surface level knowledge of every field, they could not add to our collective understanding of any field. To actually advance human understanding in a field, an individual needs to catch up on everything that has been learned about it up to this point. For some fields, that is hundreds of years of research and knowledge gained. That's not practical to learn for more than one or two fields - we simply don't live long enough. If you want the person who makes the next alloy that makes planes another 20% lighter, you're going to need someone who has dedicated most of their life to just learning material sciences and is putting all their effort into that topic. It isn't going to be done by someone who had one quarter of a semester in college on it. (With rare exceptions)