“If you do not return with the plumbers and the rock, I shall personally . . . kill you.” – Super Mario Brothers (Movie)
I bombed southern France too many times. Now I don’t have too much Toulouse.
Last week I wrote a post about specialization versus generalization (LINK). As a part of the discussion, Aesop chimed in with a rebuttal post.
Specialization Versus Generalization: The Economy Chooses
I love it.
His post was called, “Yes, BUT…” and can be found here (LINK). RTWT. If Aesop were President, during his first term he’d solve all our national problems in the first 10 days and then would be able to take the rest of the 1451 days of his reign teaching Nancy Pelosi to beg for crackers. Heck, he might even take the time to housebreak AOC.
There are very few words I’d disagree with in his entire post.
Von Mises (he of the incredibly heavy tome “Human Action” that I’ve referenced before LINK) wrote about just this. Von Mises noted that you could if you really wanted to, break a rock with another rock. You could get gravel that way.
A Brief Guide To Human Action – Which Leads To Human Freedom
Ugh, Grug make gravel.
Please be gneiss.
But it’s as slow as Biden trying to do a connect-the-dot picture of a straight line.
Pounding one rock against another is the most direct, the most general way to make gravel. You can use this tried and true method pretty much any time. Heck, I did that when I was a kid and tried to make arrowheads out of the rocks up on Wilder Mountain. I do know that it didn’t take long to knap an edge so sharp it could do my algebra homework for me.
There is, however, an alternative to pounding one rock against another. You could, if you had patience, get a hammer. But, first, someone had to make the hammer, which involved mining ore, smelting, and then casting or forging the head and mating this with a wooden handle. Plus, you could use the hammer to smash avocados and make whack-a-molé, guacamolé’s ugly sister.
A hammer is much better at making little gravel than hitting a rock with another rock, but it’s more indirect. Even better is to wait until a chemical industry forms, wait for dynamite, use that hammer to drill a hole in the rock, drop in some dynamite, and make lots of little rocks, all at once. Von Mises successfully showed that indirect methods are much more efficient than direct methods.
Indirect methods require specialization, and more than one chemist blown to bits before rocks can be blown to bits.
A terrorist blew up my rugs. That’s what I call carpet bombing.
I have no disagreement that this is, by far, the more efficient way to do it. It’s the best way to do it, until (of course) people develop the metallurgy to make complex rock crushers that make tons of gravel hourly.
This all happens in a stable society.
That stability has waxed and waned throughout history.
Once upon a time, the Romans controlled Britain. They did this because they decided they didn’t want to control the whole world, they just wanted to control the countries that were adjacent to the Empire. And then the next set of countries that were adjacent to the new, larger, Empire. And so on.
Archeologists love dinner plates because people (like Pugsley) washing dishes drop them and break them. Because they’re ceramic, they last nearly forever in a garbage dump. Imagine the archeologists from Tau Ceti visiting Earth in the year 1,238,631 thinking that the people in our time sat on toilets all of the time because that’s one thing that will definitely outlast anything that mankind ever made.
Our future name, “The Poopy Potty Sitters of Planet Three” will be chosen by Zamorg Flooglplaz, Ph.D., Polaris University (Mascot: Gelatinous Brainsuckers).
I didn’t have breakfast on the tectonic plate, instead, I had the continental breakfast.
Like I said, archeologists love plates. And when they dug into the trash heaps in London (no, I don’t mean Johnny Depp’s house) they found that when the Romans were there, people ate off of “pretty nice” plates, “pretty nice” being a technical description that by definition excludes Johnny Depp’s place. It turns out that most of those plates were made in the south of France (which we now call, “France”), and then shipped throughout the Roman Empire.
The people in the south of France were really good at making plates because they had yet to learn how to smoke and wear berets, and the Roman Empire was big enough and stable enough that the French could specialize in making plates. Since they specialized, they got pretty good at it.
But then society became unstable. The Romans Legions left, promising, “Hey, Britain, I’ve got to go to work. I’ll call you next week, promise. Oh, look at the time.”
When the Roman Empire collapsed, so did the trade in plates. 100 years after the Romans (and their cool plates) left Britain, the king ate off of plates that were worse than any commoner could easily afford when things were nice, stable, and efficient under Roman rule.
Stability in society leads to specialization which leads to efficiency which leads to (generally) higher standards of living for everyone.
But instability doesn’t have to impact an entire Empire. Instability can impact individuals throughout their careers. Why did the journalists hate it when their “learn to code” mantra go thrown back in their face when they were booted to the curb and they found that they had no other remotely marketable skills?
Because journalists are rich kids who weren’t smart enough to get into law school. Writing snarky columns about “10 Reasons Your Dog Is Transgender” isn’t really a marketable skill after HuffPo® decides to fire them.
What programming language did George Lucas use? Jabbascript.
Unlike most journalists, I’ve had (sort of) a Swiss Army Career™. I’ve developed a particular set of skills (not the Liam Neeson ones) that have allowed me to do a lot of different things, but I’m only an expert in one or two. But that suite of “pretty good” skills has allowed me to, like a Swiss Army knife, be incredibly useful from time to time. Scott Adams calls this a “talent stack” and not all of them are equal.
Had I limited them to a single expertise, I would have been less valuable, and much less employable when the industry I was in slowed down and another one was hot. As I look at the success level of many of my colleagues, it has been due to their variation in skills rather than their expertise in a single skill that led them to success – and some of them are wildly successful.
To further explain Swiss Army talent, Steve Martin can do several things at a world-class level, (including comedy, and acting), and is really good at musicianship and writing and sort of okay at singing. Together, this blend elevated him to a national treasure.
(And no, I’m not comparing me to him, just using him as an example of someone who inspires me.)
If Martin had kept slaying them nightly as a standup, odds are that as fashions change he would have been a “Remember that guy with the arrow through his head in the 1970s? He was funny,” trivia answer.
He would have been the Gary Mule Deer of his generation.
“Thankfully, perseverance is a good substitute for talent.” – Steve Martin
Another point I raised was certification. In last week’s post, I made light of certification that can be found in many, many careers.
In a highly technical (and stable) world, certification is (sadly) essential to keeping people alive in certain professions. Aesop brought up William Mulholland. To quote Aesop,
“He (Mulholland) emigrated to America from Ireland, and started out as a literal ditch-digger for the city of Los Angeles, scraping mud out of the irrigation canals that supplied the bustling metropolis of 10,000 with all the water that could be gotten from the muddy semi-annual creek known as the Los Angeles River. He was an uneducated, unlettered, self-taught civil engineer who worked his way up to chief engineer of the city from scratch, just because he could figure things out.”
But, (also from Aesop):
“He (still Mulholland) was working on another project, still large and in charge, and he placed an earthen dam in one of the canyons north of Los Angeles. What he didn’t know was that the rock there was a terrible location for a dam. Which hydraulics, geology, and physics all demonstrated rather rudely one night in 1928, when the whole thing collapsed, killing at least 431 people (they’ve found bodies up to as recently as 1994) in the ensuing flood, ending Mulholland’s career, and he died a broken man.”
Mulholland’s error can be found again and again, even with credentialed professionals – re: Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which was designed by the best and the brightest. Stuff happens when you push the envelope of what we can do. Part of the reasons that people don’t die on commercial airlines (very much) anymore is because we’ve discovered most of the ways that the airplanes can fall out of the skies. Because airplanes built by credentialed engineers fell out of the skies, other credentialed engineers fixed the mistakes that made them fall out of the skies.
To be clear, before the planes fell out of the sky, the designers (mostly) had no idea they were making a mistake.
Mario’s™ favorite state? Luigiana.
Our reliability is built on a sea of failure, sort of like I always imagined that the Marios® I killed in Super Mario Brothers fell on an infinitely deep pile of Mario skeletons. It’s like the Tom Cruise movie, Edge of Tomorrow (If you haven’t seen it, it’s like Groundhog Day with the backdrop of an alien invasion of Earth). Cruise’s character dies again and again but is reborn right where he was the previous morning with the knowledge of why he failed.
Engineering is like that. Fail and learn and fix and stop failing. Elon Musk’s SpaceX® exemplifies that sprit. There’s another spirit that he exemplifies, and that’s the Robert Anson Heinlein quote that I tossed up last week:
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.
Specialization is for insects.
I’ll admit that, off of RAH’s list, I haven’t conned a ship, I haven’t set a bone, and I haven’t yet died. I do think I could plan an invasion as well as Churchill did at Gallipoli. Probably better, though I think Churchill could have taken me in a drinking contest. I have done most of the others if you replace “hog” with “deer”.
Yes, that exact list? Okay, it’s not my list. But I’ll bet that you (and most people who end up here or at Aesop’s place) have multiple talents on a comparable list. You can do lots of things that Bob never could have done – heck, I bet your list is better.
And being a generalist matters when novel solutions are required. Novel solutions require (often) a combination of lots of different knowledge and experience. Generalists are the pioneers and the people who keep the fires going after Rome leaves. Generalists are the ones who figure out how to make the next sets of dishes after the supply from ancient France (now known as “France”) goes dry.
Aesop is right. Specialists win when the weather is fair and the seas are calm.
I’m right. Generalists win when the path is unclear and the seas are rough.
If I discover a way to make gravel out of rocks faster, I’ll let you know – it will be a ground-breaking discovery.
I prefer to live in a society where specialists help us create a great standard of living and keep increasing human knowledge. But I also know that humanity forgot how to make concrete (which the Romans used in making the Pantheon in 126 A.D., which is still standing today) until about 1750 A.D., and we really didn’t get good at it until 1900 A.D.
Specialists make the world better and can achieve far more than generalists ever could. They help the world see farther, and do more. Generalists help the world advance in weird leaps that sometimes have horrible unintended consequences, but they also keep the fire of civilization burning.
Why not both? Me? I’ll be in the other room, making little rocks out of big rocks.
