Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

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It's a strong point. Personally, I find it both hard to argue against and at the same time extremely dehumanizing.

Related to this is the phenomenon of turning everything into service. Why would you own things and accept responsibility for maintaining them, if you could just throw money at the service provider and have the thing be present when it's needed? Of course the thing will be extremely limited in what you can do with it, subject to Terms&Conditions, but why would you want to do anything non-standard with stuff? There's always another service you can throw money at to solve the same problem.

What's the end-game here? That we specialize into sub-species of humans, forever stuck in one role, with zero autonomy? No longer building wealth, we'll only be allocating the flow of money - from what Society gives us in reward for our work, straight to Services of said Society? Will we become specialized cells of the meta-multicellular organism Society becomes?

I can see how we're on the path towards that reality, and I absolutely hate it.

No the ideal end game is that we specialize into whatever role we want with full autonomy without having to worry about things we don't want to worry about. I dont want to have to know how to build a house or do construction work. Once upon a time, I would have had to know how to make a shelter. Now, because that's become a service, I can focus my energy on things I enjoy. But if I wanted to, I could focus my energy on construction. But I dont want to - instead I specialize in ields im good at and build a competitive advantage to generate wealth. We are a species are wealthier than ever (well, maybe we were wealthier a few months ago) and have accomplished more and more because of specialization. We were stuck in the role of "generalist survivor" for a couple million years, never really advancing, until specialization happened.

Correction: You _have_ to specialize in the fields that you are good at; not what you want to be good at because you can't compete in the other fields.

A couple of million years without advancing is hyperbole to the extreme; specialization which you are touting has only existed for 100-150 years or so (see Foucault, Frankfurt school etc...).

Specialization and division of labor is literally a defining aspect of civilization. Did you forget a couple zeros? The industrial revolution alone was starting around 1760, which is 260 years ago, and evidence for the existence of civilization extends quite a bit further back than that...

No; I don’t agree with that at all — the idea of extreme specialization for greater prosperity is from the foundations of Capitalism. /The Wealth Of Nations/ was only published in 1776. The Industrial revolution certainly introduced part of the idea of the modern workforce; see /Discipline and Punish/ [1] for a good overview of the evolution of attitudes, but extreme specialization of /worker skills/ was an alien idea. The existence of cottage industries prior to the Industrial revolution is illustrative of this fact.

/Collaboration/ has been a hallmark of civilization; but it is revisionist to say that we have always specialized to this extreme or seen it as a necessary goal. For example, the blacksmith of feudal society didn’t only make spoons, nor the farmer a single crop. If we want to critique previous civilizations; we even need to be wary of the fact that such systems were determined primarily through morality, such as /Plato’s Republic/ or /Confucianism/ rather than any ideal of prosperity. The farmer was a farmer because that was his/her place not because they were better or worse at it.

Even if I’m being charitable and equate division-of-labour to specialization; which, I think is a /huge/ leap — it does not counter the original point which is there is little autonomy in what you choose to do for a living in the logical conclusion of a system where you must specialize to compete.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish

A blacksmith is a specialized trade. You cant make up a new definition for an adjective and then use the nonstandard definition to make your point. Division of labor is synonymous with specialization. If you don't like it, make up a new term for what you want to convey.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour

Leaving aside the fact whether a blacksmith represents a specialist trade; in my post I specifically alluded to a /more/ specialist blacksmith which /only/ made spoons as an illustration of extreme specialization, I believe that my point still stands — that, I challenge your three assertions:

1) Specialization leads to more autonomy

2) Extreme specialization is as "old as civilization"

3) Extreme specialization leading directly to prosperity as an idea is older than the 18th century

On 1) I don’t see any further arguments on your side; so I assume that you have no qualms with such a correction. On 2) I believe that I’ve adequately addressed your concerns — I acknowledge /Plato/ specifically in my reply as shown in your link and my critique on "Ancient theories" is covered in a previous post. The last point overlaps with the 2nd point and I have found no criticisms to the contrary in your answers.

On semantics and pendantry of terms I’m disinterested — we could debate all day and I could argue that the very term "Division of Labour" originated in Adam Smith’s work [1] and therefore isn’t the same as specialization. Such a debate would neither be useful nor productive.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/division%20of%20l...

"Specialization is for insects"

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