“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
Just to put things into perspective. I'm glad we have insects :)
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". :).
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.
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.