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Comment by eimrine | Hacker News Reader

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, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

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You're quoting someone — you should use quote marks and add an attribution.

We are not at school.

Should is a banned word

Why is that? Is it against english grammar or something?

The world is full of ‘should’s but most of them are just constructs.

- Robert Heinlein

Thank you for that. Please ignore me and vote parent up.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12051-a-human-being-should-...

All that and now I have to learn k8s! Grrrrrr!

A popular quote among those who believe they're on its good side, but also specialization is the basis of our entire society and economy. All of software is a specialty. The most successful people are neither 100% specialist nor 100% generalist. "T-shaped" is the common term - at least slightly competent across many skill areas, very deep in a few. A team or larger organization made up of people with complementary skills (and temperaments) will consistently outperform one where everyone came out of the same cookie cutter.

BTW that's not the worst way Heinlein misled half of my nerd generation, but that's a topic for a different day and certainly a better venue.

Thank you for making me laugh on my more than crappy day :)

> plan an invasion

Why would one need this ? [hahahaha]

I actually, for real, have a slide deck about starting an empire. I did it as a joke for my friends, it's formatted and phrased as a startup pitch deck, but an invasion is required for one of the milestones. So you never know!

> Take over a small country

Should be on every todo list.

> Why would one need this?

You'll see! :) (seriously though, even if you are not planning any invasions in the foreseeable future, you need to think like an attacker to successfully defend against attackers).

If you're not invading because you can't, you're not good: you're just useless.

You need to be able to invade and not do it to be good.

What if you know you /can/ learn how to do that but make a conscious choice not to take on that ability? Then what if you know you can but rank that ability as being too far down the list in terms of its benefit to you, your family, your neighbors and the human race to supplant time spent learning X or doing Y. For whatever you feel are a good values of X & Y?

This more "not invading AND you can't" rather than "because." Seems like a reasonable thing to me.

"I decline to shoot anyone with a gun and I can't." That seems like a position taken by some large number of pretty reasonable people in a many contexts that seem, at the very least, justifiable.

Fair enough :)

The day you decide to play Crusader Kings 3 or a grand strategy game.

It requires some lateral thinking to figure out how can your dynasty conquer the entire British island, subduing the Scots, the Norwegian, the Saxons while being at war with France and you're just a lowly Irish duke with a crippled heir.

On the flip side, that’s a 50-year old quote and maybe times have changed?

What do you think of HN's cstross take in his novel _Saturn's Children_ ?

> Please excuse my lack of depth; I'm a generalist, not a specialist.

> Why bother learning all that biochemistry stuff --- or how to design a building, or conn a boat, or balance accounts, or solve equations, or comfort the dying --- when you can get other people to do all that for you in exchange for a blow job?

(to me, it seems to be more a blow job specialist's view than that of an actual generalist, but ...)

Have humans really changed in the last 2000 years? You can still find books today published back during Roman times complaining about kids these days and how they mispronounce latin.

We have changed in some important ways in the last 20 years, and are yet the same in other ways as our nearest primates today and therefore probably our ancestors 2 million years ago.

When we all have smartphones with access to WolframAlpha, do we need to know how to solve equations ourselves, or is it sufficient to just know how to phrase the problem so the software can answer it? Even excluding vegetarians and vegans, who even has access to hogs to butcher them — and given food delivery options, how many need to bother even if they can?

Why 2000?

Mispronounced in Latin: "emm an' emm years"

https://australian.museum/learn/science/human-evolution/homo...

I’d add:

  - write an effective contract and be able to tell if one that someone hands you is reasonable
  - be able to explain to people you feel some responsibility towards how to install and operate a VPN
  - have a grip on basic statistics and economics
  - cook a tasty meal from grains, legumes, vegetables and/or fungi

Vegeterian?

Not necessarily. Just to be able to.

Fair enough, nowadays you're probably better off writing a non-rhyming poem as opposed to a sonnet (at least if you're trying to be trendy). However I think a lot of the other skills are attainable and even worthwhile.

I don’t know know if anything has changed but sometimes it feels like most people today can’t do a single one of those things. Maybe it was always an unrealistic expectation, though.

Maybe the specifics have changed but I'd argue the general sentiment remains valid. And at least half of those specifics still apply.

It's more relevant than ever.

You can replace some parts of it, but the core message is timeless.

"A human being should be mediocre at everything"

Great advice there.

"Jack of all trades, master of none, is oftentimes better than master of one."

An average human to have an average life must know how to cook food, do arithmetic, read a book, write a letter, use a computer, learn a trade. Even living a primitive life, a human to survive needs to know and do more than any other animal. This is why we have our own enormous and very energy-intensive brains and not a shared hive mind. Being average is what we excel at as a species.

love that: specialization is for insects.

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