4 ms·

You missed the point of the "nobody knows how a pencil is made". It is not about gathering all the knowledge in one place, but how knowing just enough enables u

• hwillis 3y ago
  I'm not really trying to make a big statement, since the general gist of 'I, Pencil'[1] is obviously indisputable. But the point is actually about self-organization rather than atomization (ie maximum specialization). It doesn't make particularly strong statements about whether breaking knowledge down into parts is intrinsically better, just that a self-organizing system (specifically a profit incentive) will cause actors to move towards whatever level of specialization is most effective. There are known caveats to the general idea (Nash equilibrium, Hotellings's law) but I'm just trying to point out that even despite the general correctness, there are people who are very heavily vertically integrated. And you would in fact expect those people to exist, because local minima are a fact of reality and you need people to understand larger parts in order to see past local phenomena. 'Ars Longa, Vita Brevis'[2] is a well-liked post that is in line with what you're describing. It's a bit funny, because the weak form argument (specialization is generally good) is totally obvious and there's basically no way to attack it. Specialization is the thing that has made society possible, and if anything it's more effective now than it was at the invention of simple tools. But the strong form requires some pretty specific assumptions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Pencil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Pencil [2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/