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Comment by PenguinCoder | Hacker News Reader

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

We shouldn't be hyper focused on becoming "especially good" at one thing but . Jack of all trades, master of none, makes you better able to see and apply relevant knowledge to different areas. It's good to know your own limits, but not good to to only focus on one area and ignore others.

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The world economy and the mega-prosperity of the 20th century onwards depends solely on providing the means for individuals to become highly specialized in return for a livelihood comfortable in proportion to the utility of their specialization.

Of course it's good always to learn new things, but expecting everyone to be able to "plan an invasion, butcher a hog.. program a computer" is a rhetorical judgement on the potential of humans that ignores the realities of the modern world.

It's not that specialisation is bad, more that you can be specialised in an area but that doesn't mean you should not have a wider range of skills, that you are not expert at but you can do it without fucking things up entirely.

Fair point, but I have a counterpoint. The dunning krueger effect means most "widely specialized" people assume their competence is leagues higher than it actually is in fields they have marginal understanding of. This leads to people overestimating their abilities and fucking things up, when they really should rely on 0.1% experts. This of course isn't true for simple things like cooking, knot tying and email writing, but the more technical a task, the greater the threat of overestimated competence vs known incompetence.

On the other hand, we have so many programmers who are only good at programming and have no understanding (or interest) in the world beyond, meaning their algorithms and design patterns might be good, but their product is not, because they do not really understand the problems their users are facing and even if explained, cannot relate, therefore cannot really solve it.

There exists jobs for "pure programmers", but most programmers should have at least a basic understanding for the problem space they are solving. Bonus points if they really understand it and still listen to the full time experts of the field.

This quote actually defines an archetype for a fictional character.

The interesting part is that it says "specialization is for insects". Eusocial insects are amazingly successful from an evolutionary point of view, and their social structure is one of the only things in nature humans can't match. Being more like insects is actually progress.

Social insects have nothing on human social structures in either complexity or diversity. Social structures is what humans excel at.

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