Hacker News Reader

Comment by afarrell | Hacker News Reader

But what is the real-life practical alternative?

It is makes lovely and invigorating fiction to imagine men who have learned to competently conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, butcher a hog, set a bone, and program a 1973-era computer. But life is short and any art takes long to learn to sufficient depth that you can solve dynamic complex problems.

How many more men would have died if Eisenhower had planned the D-day invasion without being able to delegate a huge number of urgent and important tasks like weather prediction to specialists like Meteorologist James Martin Stagg?

How easily could a hobbyist Cessna pilot land a passenger jet in the Hudson river?

View on HN

You’re not looking at it radically enough. “How would a non-specialist survive in a specialized world?” is not the question the author seeks to answer. Rather, the question is “what would a non-specialized world look like?” and I think the answer is something resembling pre-agricultural society.

Wanted to call out that this would probably require most of us to never have existed. Specialization is more efficient at the macro level; this efficiency is why there are 7b humans instead of many fewer.

Yes and this gets into some very difficult questions of population ethics. What is the right amount of people for the world? Is it 7 billion or 70 billion or 700 billion? Or is it 700 million or just 70 million?

Increases in economic output, agricultural and industrial, make it possible for more people to survive. If further and further specialization lead to more and more efficiency with ever growing population, is there a point where we decide things have gotten worse? Or do we slide down the slippery slope into some hellish future dystopia with 700 trillion people, crammed into skyscrapers full of capsule apartments, subsisting on genetically engineered bio-protein sludge and pacified by neuro-electrical stimulation? Not far off from The Matrix.

Apart from there being a 'right answer', there does appear to be an answer for how many people we will be: the world population is expected to level off at 11 billion or so as global birthrates drop off (mainly as most countries catch up to a transition a few have already gone through). Without substantial changes to our society it seems it will stay there or slowly decline.

And once we get there, there will be some very tough questions about how to ensure the rate of economic growth that we’ve come to expect to ensure a sustainable quality of life for people.

Perhaps there will be breakthroughs in preventing aging, automation etc. that will allow for sustainable living then? Maybe. It’s an interesting question.

OTOH, we could also simply descend into nuclear war and reset civilization.

Or have more deadly pandemics ravage our cities.

Strange times indeed.

Your line of questioning goes against the intent of the critique. Which is: while perhaps (but not always) good for the institution and the societal whole, the gains from specialization are at the cost of individual wholeness.

Questioning how shifting the focus from society to the individual would harm the larger whole seems to skirt around the discussion.

Was the unidimensional valor given for Stagg’s meteorological accomplishments a worthy reward for a lifetime of hyper-specialization?

And to the, in my opinion more important, flipside: how does the psyche heal when, perhaps for reasons entirely outside of an individuals’ control, the specialized-man fails the one task they spent a lifetime training for. What happens when you define a man by one function and in the critical moment they fail?

This seems like a majorly contrived line of reasoning to me.

A person does not spend their entire lives training to succeed at one particular task on one particular day. The career of a specialist will comprise decades worth of accomplishments and failures, both big and small.

Such a career will also be only one portion of a persons life. If a person were to derive their entire reason for existing from their career, then they’re going to have a shallow and unfulfilling life. No matter whether they specialize or not, or whether they’re successful or not.

The critique that specialists lack the broader contextual knowledge/skills required to apply their speciality also seems invalid to me. Such people are simply skilled ICs, who are instructed on how to apply their skills by others. A highly skilled programmer may not know what programs to write, or what problems they should try and solve. But that’s fine if they work with a skilled product manager who can tell them what to do. Why would it be necessary for all of the roles required to solve a problem to be performed by a single person?

A world without specialists would simply be a world where nothing that requires specialist skills/knowledge can be accomplished. Aside from the obvious problems that would cause, I don’t see how that would actually solve any of the problems that are purportedly being attributed to specialization.

I think these are excellent things to keep in mind, but the vast majority of real life is not D-Day or crash landing in the Hudson. I'd go so far as to say that most people hardly ever even spend any time solving "dynamic complex problems." People being really, really good at stuff is important, but I don't think it follows that everyone should only do one thing.

I have a hunch that Eisenhower himself was probably a person who could do most of the things on that list.

> I have a hunch that Eisenhower himself was probably a person who could do most of the things on that list.

Further supporting your point, that is perhaps why they are called “Generals”, IE: they have mastered enough areas that they are now generalists able to approach many subject areas and problem sets.

Wiki says: "The term general is used in two ways: as the generic title for all grades of general officer and as a specific rank. It originates in the 16th century, as a shortening of captain general, which rank was taken from Middle French capitaine général. The adjective general had been affixed to officer designations since the late medieval period to indicate relative superiority or an extended jurisdiction." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_officer

Okay, just going off of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwight_D._Eisenhower#Family_ba...

- conn a ship: It mentions no naval career. It does mention fishing, so there is a decent probability that he could handle a canoe. But if that is the standard for "conn a ship", then this whole argument is basically just "people should have hobbies" which...okay sure. And they already do.

- design a building: No mention of this. He attended West Point, which is also an engineering school, but that is very weak evidence. I went to MIT and the only building design I've ever done is that of a shed. Again, people should have hobbies.

- write a sonnet: Google searches for "poetry by Dwight D Eisenhower", "Ike sonnet", "Eisenhower Sonnet", and "Sonnet by Eisenhower" do not turn up anything. Maybe he wrote poetry to his wife, but we have no evidence of it. Again, people should have hobbies.

- balance accounts: I'm happy to just assume this to be true as part of his career's focus in being able to organize troops.

- butcher a hog: His father worked as a railroad mechanic and then at a creamery. They were not wealthy. There's no mention of his working in agriculture. He did like hunting, so its totally plausable that he could dress a deer. But he didn't work on a farm or in a slaughterhouse or meat-packing plant. Why would someone who owned pigs waste the meat/time/money to teach someone how to slaughter them as even a hobby?

- set a bone: Plausable, but I see a number of sports-related leg injuries.

- program a 1973-era computer: He died in 1969

I could go and try to research this more thoroughly, but it is hard to prove a negative and time is a global variable.

[1] https://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/Washington/Pub...

Sure, people should indeed become "sorta good" at multiple skills. In practice, they do. Many people know how to doodle or play charades or tell stories or sing sea-shanties. Otherwise, hobbyist Cessna pilots would not exist -- nor the word "hobby". In real life, statements like "he is even unable to entertain himself" are pretty false.

> the vast majority of real life is not D-Day or crash landing in the Hudson

Sure, but a significant portion of life is spent interacting with the results of other people's work. When you get into a car, would you rather that its microcontrollers were programmed by someone who

A: Felt continually distressed and defeated that he had not thoroughly mastered sailing, animal husbandry, military history, rhetoric, first aid, copy-editing, painting, masonry, carpentry, and several other skills.

B: Felt fulfilled that the only domains in which he had deep knowledge were microcontroller programming, cooking seafood to his wife's taste, and the emotional/medical meanings of their child's sounds -- yet that they had merely a hobbyists' knowledge of hiking, sketching, kites, anime, and the history of flight.

Because I'd rather a world with more of B and less of A.

> But what is the real-life practical alternative?

> But life is short and any art takes long to learn to sufficient depth that you can solve dynamic complex problems.

In the time I spent playing DOTA my brother learned Chinese AND learned enough about programming to get his first programming gig paying about $80k/year.

While it can take a long time, even a lifetime, to master a field you can get to a competent level surprisingly quickly.

> How easily could a hobbyist Cessna pilot land a passenger jet in the Hudson river?

Poorly, but he would have a heck of a shot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com