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Multidisciplinary

themultidisciplinarian.com

72 pointsAmorymeltzer11 comments

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

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 :)

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.

> 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". :).

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 :)

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

> A famous example from another field is the case of the derivation of the double-helix model of DNA by Watson and Crick. Their advantage in the field, mostly regarded as a weakness before their discovery, was their failure – unlike all their rivals – to specialize in a discipline.

It's sad to see yet another source gloss over the central roles of Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin in the understanding of the nature of DNA.

Very interesting stuff. In the context of software development, I definitely feel the silo of programming around me. While I enjoy it, it's all I do and now I naturally have to compete with all other programmers for jobs and other forms of professional attention. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way. Having a multidisciplinary approach to the work I do in my life may open up some doors. Thanks for posting.

I realized that the pursuit of being a jack of all trades (and master of few) was worthwhile when I was cleaning drains for a ceramic class i was TA-ing for. Long story short teacher comes up to me when i was scooping clay out of the drain, says "just spin it clockwise" and voila the drain began to pull the loose clay and drained the excess water as well.

Learned a lot from that dude, started reverse casting cement to make body parts for cars too. Learned how to drop a skimboard with maximum velocity without the water weight reducing the speed.

(i.e. everybody in academia has a job because a discipline exists; question the disciplinary boundaries and that calls the whole physical structure into question.)

I want his job. I like having eagle, fusion 360 and pycharm open next to each other.

If you have a position open for that kind of people, send me a message, please.

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