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Comment by cherryteastain | Hacker News Reader

> THE GREATEST IMPROVEMENTS in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment, with which it is anywhere directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour.

> To take an example, therefore, from a very trifling manufacture, but one in which the division of labour has been very often taken notice of, the trade of a pin-maker...a workman not educated to this business...could scarce, perhaps..make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. I have seen a small manufactory...where ten men only were employed...Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day.

- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, 1776

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When you divide and specialize manufacture, you get efficiency.

When you divide and specialize design, you get design by commitee.

You clearly don't.

If you design a desk lamp, it wasn't designed by a committee just because a person designed the screws, another designed the plate stamping machine, another designed the bulb socket and etc.

> When you divide and specialize design, you get design by commitee.

In your counter-example, the design was not divided, and thus it is not a counter-example at all.

The division of design doesn't stop because some of the pieces can be bought at a store.

The lamp design clearly was divided -- the final designer did not design the screws, lightbulb, wiring, and perhaps many other components. Someone had to design those components that were then combined creatively into a lamp.

Dividing design into components that can be effectively reused is tricky, but it remains essential.

Real examples often work better.

Last week I was learning about Itanium. It was a processor designed specifically for HP. Its goal was to replace both x86 and PowerPC.

HP would design the new systems to run on Itanium, and Intel would design the chip.

There was an attempt at specializing design here, with both companies running on design constraints from another. They formed a design comittee.

This was like the screw company making screws _specifically_ for one kind of desk lamp. It's division and specialization of design.

A natural specialization (one company gets very good at designing some stuff) is not divided, or orchestrated by a central authority.

In manufacture, it's the other way around. If you already have a good design, the more divisions alongside a main central figure, the better. You can get tighter tolerances, timing benefits, etc.

My argument is that these aspects are not transferrable from one concept to another. Design is different from manufacturing, and it gets worse if we try to apply the optimizations we often do with manufacturing to it.

Let's skip over to a real example, it's better.

If you start designing hardware for AI, together with AI designed to run just on that hardware, and tie those design cycles together, you'll get a design by commitee. It is very likely that requirements will make an overall bad hardware (but slightly better for AI), and an overall bad AI (but slightly better in some hardware).

Eventually, these shortcuts lead to huge commitees. Sometimes they're not even formally defined.

The screw company should make good screws, not good screws for a specific desk lamp model. A good designer then _chooses_ to use those screws _because they are good_, not because they can make specific design requirements to the screw company.

My left femur is a good femur for my specific height and species. It would be a lot worse if I had to use the same femur as the pit bull next door. Why are desk lamps different? I conjecture that it's only because of the cognitive limitations of the designers.

I am sorry that you do not see yourself as different from a desk lamp.

On the contrary, my comment was all about the difference! I see my body as far better designed than any desk lamp I have ever heard of. So I am puzzled as to why you count the characteristics that give rise to desk lamps' deficiencies as advantages on the side of the desk lamp.

Your comparison with natural organisms _brightens my day_, but it is irrelevant for the context we're discussing.

Because you weren't designed on a CAD app.

The desk lamp can be designed around common parts to reduce the total number of unique parts in the world, so everything is reusable, replaceable, manufacturable in larger quantities so there's more resources to optimize the process, etc.

It sounds like you agree with me?

The problem is that you used vague sophist dialogue that could turn either way. You could say that T G A C are the designed parts, or any kind of bullshit honestly.

It's bad communication. You need to follow up the vague analogies with real examples to make a message stick. If you don't, people have no idea what you are saying.

I can assure you that both my leg and desk lamps are perfectly real examples. There is a common kind of desk lamp that is even fairly mechanically similar to a human leg, with a knee , tension springs, and a ball-and-socket joint to permit free repositioning in multiple degrees of freedom, and about the same size. But the different design processes involved have resulted in very different designs, and a major reason for that is precisely the use of standardized parts in the desk lamp, but not in my leg, which results precisely from the kind of specialization we have been talking about. I don't see how much less vague I could have been. Are you being sarcastic?

A human leg isn't designed to be repaired from the outside, it doesn't need replacement parts, it doesn't need external maintenance. It's designed around the maintenance and repair procedures of the human body which are able to fix it in situ and produce new parts on the fly. That allows it to have more freedom of design than a mechanical part that needs to be made from standardized parts in order to be serviced and manufactured.

The limitation is not cognitive, it's a matter of efficiency. We could, if we wanted to, make a lamp with all custom parts with the maximum efficiency possible in the design, but those efficiency gains would be at the cost of extremely difficult manufacturing. It's a tradeoff that the human body can make because it needs to produce only one (or two) legs, while us humans mass manufacture the stuff we make.

It sounds like you're more in favor of unique parts made to fit specific applications, wheras I prefer the more modern style of mostly generic parts with mostly only the case design and the code being unique

It's more nuanced than that. Unique parts made to fit specific applications can clearly perform better, but that doesn't mean I'm in favor of them in all contexts. Rather, I'm observing that the reason we don't use them for things like desk lamps, instead using mostly generic parts, is because of our cognitive limitations, which we cope with through specialization and generic parts with loosely-coupled, independent designs. This is a form of "dividing and specializing design", which is what alganet was saying people shouldn't do.

I am not in favor of ignoring those cognitive limitations. That wouldn't make the limitations go away; it would only keep us from taking measures to cope with them, such as dividing and specializing design into modular generic parts.

Look at the HN committee…community… perfecting the semantic design of reality.

All I see in the words is algebra where concrete terms authors use that refer to others, are variables that could sometimes be set to you.

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