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Comment by II2II | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that we usually discuss things in extremes.

We don't need to know how to sew our own clothes, but knowing how to mend them is useful. Do we really want to live in a world where we toss out a shirt simply because a button falls off?

We don't need to know how to build a home, but knowing how to fix simple problems is useful. Do we really want to live in a world where we have to call in an electrician every time we trigger a circuit breaker?

We don't need to know how to churn butter, but knowing how to cook is useful. Do we really want to live in a world where we depend upon someone else decides what goes into every meal we eat?

Yes, computers are there to do stuff for us and to save time. We should be exploiting that. On the other hand, we should not be reliant upon it to the point where it interferes with control over our own destinies or the creative process.

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It's not extremes. Modern society is designed so that we don't have to do any of those things (in extreme or even in between), we just throw money (that we generated doing one specific job) at our problems.

Then when that job is no longer needed by society you are really, really lost.

I mean that's already true. The kinds of skills that people talk about in these threads are typically very domestic. Even if you had all of them you still probably have a few skills that can bring in money if you're lucky.

> I mean that's already true.

Exactly. That's why it makes a lot of sense to study/learn things outside your area of expertise, and/or if you want to lean on the more extreme side, study/learn basic survival skills (that everyone used to know before the agricultural revolution).

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.

"Specialization is for insects"

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...

Amazing to see someone celebrating helplessness for the masses.

I don't think this is a resolvable conflict in general; one person's division of labor is someone else's helplessness.

I think it's crazy that some people don't cook. Like every house and apartment comes with a kitchen, what do you mean you don't use it? "It's so much cheaper" I say ignoring the fact that I'm a cooking and baking enthusiast and so I'm not counting the fact that if I valued my time at any reasonable rate it's really not.

It's the same thing in the woodworking community -- "you'll save so much money, anything you see in the store I can make half as good, for twice the price!"

> Like every house and apartment comes with a kitchen, what do you mean you don't use it?

Traditionally in urban areas most people actually purchased food instead of making it, because most people did not have kitchens.

You can kind of still see that today; many old New York tenements have been converted into apartments with "kitchens", but really this usually describes something about the size of an airplane bathroom with a stove, a fridge and 1 counter.

Is giving the people the freedom to do what they want and not focus on the pedantry of things they're not interested in "celebrating helplessness", or is it getting work for the sake of work out of the way?

Not sure if you're directing this comment at me, but I'm surely not celebrating it, merely observing it as a fact.

50% of the population of the US and 95% of the world would be unhealthy or poor if they all adopt that philosophy about food. Sounds like your bubble not modern society.

I don't think your metaphors work. There's a huge difference between knowing how to sew a button or flipping a circuit breaker and being able to code.

Though a lot of elementary schools and junior high schools provides basic coding classes, but no sewing ones.

Many schools used to, as well as shop, etc. albeit pretty heavily split by traditional gender roles. Personally, in high school at least, I think a good case could be made for carving out a bit of time for practical life skills (also personal finance, etc.).

I didn't necessarily mean "learn to code" in such explicit manner with my original comment. More like learn technology itself and some strong basics of how everything works so people would be more equipped to grok this new world we're living in.

To get a driver's license you need some basic knowledge of car internals. I'd argue that computers are infinitely more important in our society than a car yet majority of people have absolutely no idea how computers work and are expected not only to live in this world but to ace it too.

The problem is that we live in a world and society where you're expected to know a lot about a lot. And we just keep adding to the pile we need to learn. You need to know how to sew or mend your clothes, you need to know how to tinker with your electrical system or plumbing, with your car, with your electronics, know your stuff around a kitchen. And the list can really go on and on. Now you need to know how to code.

The computer equivalent of what most people know how to do around the house is clearing the browser cache, restarting a service, running something at startup, and other troubleshooting steps like this. Stuff that you learn in under a day just like you would when learning basic clothes mending, replacing a faucet, changing a tire or your oil, or cooking a meal.

Any reasonable definition of "coding" is creating something. Like building your own electronic circuit, mechanical part, simple clothes, etc. This is beyond what a normal person is expected to know about their stuff as general knowledge in life. Everyone should just understand the principles of the tools they're using and basic "under the hood" stuff to assist with basic troubleshooting.

In reality in the parts of the world with higher standards of living (can afford stuff) this piling up of expectations just lead people to give up and pay for services rather than learn all that. And for good reason, modern society has this bad habit of taking every shred of free time and complicating your life, with unfortunate consequences.

> Any reasonable definition of "coding" is creating something.

Not necessarily creating something. The OP really did shoot themself in the foot by using the word "coding", where what they most likely meant was doing simple alterations to computing systems that require understanding some basic control flow structures - conditionals and loops. Things like, "I seem to be doing the same repetitive sequence of steps 100x a day, let me automate this somewhat". Think Tasker and bash, not JavaScript and C++.

> this piling up of expectations just lead people to give up and pay for services rather than learn all that

A small bit of knowledge can save you a lot of money in services. I can get why wealthy wouldn't care, but most people aren't wealthy. Also, I feel there's more pressure from the sales&marketing departments of services than from modern society's demands on free time.

I'm a software engineer and even I struggle to understand how some of the applications I use work. This month I had to figure out why my laptop's monitor brightness keys randomly stop doing anything and it led into a rabbit hole of systemd, udev, ACPI, the intel xorg driver and other unpleasant things. Next month I might run into a sound issue and I'll have to dig deep into completely different areas like pulseaudio and ALSA. And all this knowledge won't do me any good on Windows or MacOS.

The car is a relatively simple machine compared to a desktop computer, and unlike computers, most basic knowledge apply to all cars regardless of brand and model. Our computers are patched together with gaffa tape, they're not some timeless universal design the way the clutch in a car is.

In fact, in a way I become worse at using them because I know more about them - think about "just turn it off and on again" vs wanting to debug it and understand the root cause of whatever issue I'm having.

Don't worry, we are already putting computers into our cars, so the things will only improve from there. /s

>To get a driver's license you need some basic knowledge of car internals.

Where do you live that this is true?

At least true in Sweden. You don't have to know much, but you at least have to be able to check your tire pressure, pop the hood and check the oil and know which hole to pour which liquid into.

A lot of it comes down to what you mean by coding and what you mean by sewing (as an example).

There is much more to sewing clothes than threading a needle and guiding it through a button hole, at least if you want to make something that will fit and will last. The complexity of the product also plays a strong role.

Much the same can be said of coding. Being able to issue a command in a shell or compose a function in a spreadsheet is probably the closes analog to sewing on a button, but how many people can even do those things?

We live in a world where our phone's calculators are typically as powerful as a four function calculator from decades ago, perhaps with a subset of functions found on a scientific calculator. How do we expand our minds beyond that limited scope if vendors are afraid of creating software that allows us to compose anything more complex? With the status quo, we have to seek out options and those options are mostly targeted at professionals.

Similar things can be said for other domains. While writing of coding, I was actually thinking of graphics design and word processing and databases and the many other domains that have been over simplified by modern consumer applications. For the most part, their functionality has been simplified to the point where you can perform a very narrow range of tasks and have very little scope of the imagination. For example: that database that backs your address book cannot be adapted to catalogue your books, or the online word processor that is fine for writing reports is poorly suited for preparing a book for publications. Sure, there are professional alternatives out there. On the other hand, it seems as though people has a lot more flexibility with the software of the 1990's than the 2010's.

statistically speaking most people today make a living coding in js, if we where going to extremes we would be talking about soldering your own board, assembling your own language, rolling your own OS, the shit Bell labs used to do. Coding is by all means an adequate analog to sewing my dude/dudette

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