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Comment by kevincox | Hacker News Reader

This. The strength of modern civilization is the ability to abstract. This means that you can let Joe deal with the frobnicator and Jane design with the fritzer and you just need to trust them enough that you can plug the two together and it works.

Joe and Jane don't need to understand what you are doing, and you don't need to understand what they are doing. Of course partial understanding, especially for related technology is helpful, but the farther away you get the less you know, and the more you need to rely on others.

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Ahh... labor alienation. One of the great drawbacks and geniuses of our primary modes of production in modern society. As we become more and more separated from the things we actually work on, what are the drawbacks though? The general trend becomes if we want to do more, we create more separation. The social impact, for one, is in general a large extent of estrangement from our human essence. Tangibility is intuitive, abstraction, not so much.

This comment feels like something written by GPT-3. What are you actually trying to say here?

GP is saying that hyper-specialization is intrinsically fragile.

What is fragile? We have had specialized roles for the entire history of society and it hasn't caused anything to crumble.

I suppose you could say many things have failed due to no one seeing the big picture among all the tiny details but without people focusing on the details none of that would have been possible to begin with.

As things are getting more complex, more people become specialized, and there are a lot more interfaces between specialties that need to be properly defined so things don't break. The more interfaces mean a higher likelihood of a system going wrong. That, and I feel that as long as you have a good big picture, you have a higher fault tolerance because there is a general goal you can identify to strive towards when something does go wrong to correct it. Certainly, I feel that in any field that has become sufficiently complex, there is a practical human limit for a single person to understand the field as a whole. Even if someone can claim to understand a field as a whole in a general sense and how it's major components interact, they will still lose information because of how much they have to abstract.

The reality does not seem to match that though. Pretty much everything not born out of negative emotions is better than it was 10, 20, 30 years ago. Tons of jobs don't need to be done anymore, and more are becoming automated, which is quite often better than human beings's much stronger randomness.

What is fragile? We have had specialized roles for the entire history of society and it hasn't caused anything to crumble.

You should read Collapse Of Complex Societies by Professor Joseph Tainter.

Tl;dr a step change in complexity of ancient societies more often than not lead to their downfall. They were unable to train/retrain specialists quickly enough to deal with surprises.

> What is fragile? We have had specialized roles for the entire history of society and it hasn't caused anything to crumble.

I'm not a historian but I can imagine that a medieval specialist, such as for example blacksmith, could very much fix his own house (or maybe even build a new one), grow food, take care of animals, make wooden tools, make some simple herbal medicine etc. I'm guessing a lot of he was consuming was produced by himself and his family. Today, for engineers it's the total opposite - we only consume things produced by others, and essentially by strangers whom we've never met.

Regarding fragility specifically, if a major crisis comes (say a war), the desk jockeys, esp. ones didn't have the wisdom to accumulate resources, will fare much worse than someone who's say running a homestead. If they did accumulate resources (provided they don't become worthless by hiperinflation etc.), they will be able to buy the essentials and hope their stash lasts until the end of the crisis.

I can't agree with that.

>> The social impact, for one, is in general a large extent of estrangement from our human essence. Tangibility is intuitive, abstraction, not so much.

Specialization does introduce fragility, but that's something you brought to the discussion, not something that was present in the comment. This seems more like the common complaint that working on abstract fuzzy intangible things is damaging to your soul.

Labor alienation is a Marx theory that private labor alienates the laborer from their humanity, their coworkers and the product they are ultimately making. It’s a high-minded way of saying “you’re a cog in the machine and that is very bad”.

Using it as a counter argument against specialization isn’t very insightful though. Not even Marx tried to argue that (to Marx specialization was only alienating when you did it for the benefit of the bourgeoisie). Specialization is one of the most fundamental components of a developed economy. If you look at any ancient agrarian society, they had barely any specialization compared to a modern developed economy, and if you track the economic development of any society, you’ll notice specialization ticks upward along with it.

There are concrete measurable benefits to the complex things we build. Improvements to quality of life, increased time for recreation, etc.

On the other hand, you make a fair point - tangible contribution to Things is probably built into us from our origin as tool-makers.

But isn't the gradual separation from direct contact with Made Things inevitable? At some point the body of knowledge required to make a meaningful contribution grows so large that learning it approaches the human lifespan. How can we avoid too much hyper-specialization in that case?

I fear there is another potential pitfall to this. When you've heard "the Linux Kernel is 15M LOC" you might conclude "reading other code is unnatainable", as quite some commenters do in this thread. It is not: there's very neat OSS out there that you can pick apart in a spare hour and go "AHA!".

It might even span across to other niches. "Baking your own bread" is not that hard, if you get to it. But, becausethe entire process (fertilising ground, selecting seeds, growing grain, milling it) is too much for one person, lot's of people just give up alltogether and conclude that "today it is impossible to make your own food". Especially once you learn that bread mostly comes from large, complex industrial complexes today. Yet "just doing it" is very rewarding, as all the home-bakers will tell you.

And it spans across time as well: Sure, no-one can make a toaster from 0: mine own ore, distill your own plastics etc (there's a brilliant documentary from someone attempting just this, forgot its name). So people conclude that when the toaster stops working, there's nothing one can do, and they turn to Ali-express or Amazon and just buy a new one.

In short: I think labor alienation is toxic, in that it seeds itself into areas that don't need hyper specialisation.

I picked up this book in a bookstore years ago, still have it on my shelf.

The Linux Core Kernel Commentary [1]

It takes only the parts of the kernel you need to understand, leaving out the drivers, device classes, and much of te ancillary pieces. For the parts it chooses, it goes through them line by line and follows the boot process, explains the concepts of a Unix and SYSV-like kernel.

The 15M lines becomes much less intractible.

[1] https://books.google.com/books/about/Linux_Core_Kernel_Comme...

What if computing is less like building tangible products and more like reading and writing?

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