“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.
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.
Isn’t it “defusers” instead of “diffusers”? Or maybe I’m missing a joke-inside-a-joke; the main punch line was dy-no-mite!
Interesting discussion on specialists vs. generalists, John. A common feeling of inadequacy I had early in my career was lacking a deep knowledge of any particular field that would qualify me to call myself a specialist. I was, and am, interested in too many things to become an expert on any of them. It took a long time to appreciate the value in the three strengths I did have. One, if I needed to know something, I could research and grok it on my own, and enjoy the journey in getting there. Two, by having such broad interests, I could often see and make connections between things that others could not. And three, by making endless generalist mistakes along the way that a specialist would not, I developed the ability to not become discouraged by failure, laugh at my folly, and try, try again.
I ended my career with the title of Senior Systems Engineer and was proud of it.
The most important thing to know is how to learn the things you don’t know.
https://xkcd.com/1053/
Typo. I’ll fix it in a bit.
Thanks, Ricky. My meme is fixed!
I’m still smarting from my typo. My only excuse? I was sober.
That’s a wonderful trio of skills. They stack nicely. I still have to think deeply on mine. Perhaps a future post?
Grok.
Perfect word for this post.
Perhaps we need both some specialists and some generalists?
In general, yes. But in specific situations, no.
I saw what you did there. 😉
Maybe we also need some encyclopedic synthesists as in Heinlein’s “Beyond This Horizon.”
We do. But the proportion that we can afford changes based on the level of the civilization we have. The higher, the more we can afford specialists.
Ah, perseverance. I could go on and on and on and on and on and on and on about it. I’ve landed more than one job in my life because my prospective employer just wished me to desist from badgering them about considering my sparse resume. And I suspect that my wife only married me to get me to stop bugging her for a date.
Perseverance is, in fact, the solid rock upon which Marxism is founded. So yeah, a few score million eggs have to be broken to get it just right. But any day now we can expect souffle.
‘Bomb diffuser’ is a new one on me, gotta say. Reminds me of those social workers who replaced the po-po, brought in to ‘diffuse’ a dangerous situation by spreading the wealth (generalization) such that all may profit from a lone individual’s (specialized) lunacy.
Got my error repaired. Thank you! A more lengthy response tomorrow . . .
A bomb diffuser is called a B 52
Ha!
Ah… So that’s what the cool kids are calling them these days. Back when Arch Duke Ferdinand was gallivanting about Sarajevo they called them Anarchists.
I’ll have to remember that the next time I need to come up with something in Comintern on the fly. “Sex-diffuser”, say, instead of tart.
Yup. I goofed on the diffuser point. I’ll drink more next time.
I do my best to never give up.
Because I’m hard-headed.
John – – Your “Please be gneiss” was another solid hit.
Enjoy your punishment by puns and think your ideas are just grate, like rubbing two bricks together.
Rome had to keep expanding because they grew fat and lazy after centuries of high living. Only by cannibalizing themselves (debasing their currency is one example) were they able to hang on as long as they did.
Our American empire has done the same and I fear we too will collapse. This supply disruption in Colonial pipelines computerized infrastructure shows the weakness of all systems maximized for efficient, just in time, no excess inventories business model. Such systems are vulnerable to attacks as any bumps in the road dislodge how the system is needed to work. Now perhaps alternate controls can be devised to protect against recurrence.
Think we in the “modern world” will see many more such bad events before we leave the planet to our progeny.
Pity them, but pray for their multi-talented to lead them forward;
We are Rome. Can we push back the darkness?
I was toying with a Colonial pipeline post next Wednesday. Maybe. You’ve done it perfectly in three sentences, but I think I can stretch it to 1,100 words.
Geology puns always find their quarry, but they just leave me jaded. Even if they rock, it’s just a sedimental journey, and if they fail in the aggregate, it’s no one’s fault when they dogpile into a sinkhole.
—
Generalists are good. Specialists are good.
Just, please, not in the same job. (I want the guy flying my plane, for instance, to be Jimmy Stewart, not Hardy Kruger nor Richard Attenborough. Especially in Flight Of The Phoenix.)
But my point remains that Heinlein was talking out his fourth point of contact, even as he wrote that bit about “Everyone should…”. And he knew it when he wrote it. It was both sociologically and entomologically a load of codswallop, from start to finish.
But the idea about every person rewriting it for themselves? Genius.
My riff off of this one will probably be my own Notebook Of Lazarus Long – Aesop version.
But if I’m stocking a society, I’d rather have an army of people who specialize in generalism, than one of people who generalize in specialization. One looks like renaissance men, the other one looks like an army of eclectic autistic mediocrity.
And if I’m making a list of things that “Everyone should…”, in order to bank the fires of civilization in darker times (which always curiously takes the form of setting fire to banks – weird, huh?), it wouldn’t look anything like Heinlein’s list. And he knew that too.
And as I think of it, even his list wasn’t that of a generalist; it was a list of things he could specialize in.
It was nothing like a list of things “everyone should” be able to do.
I have to wonder if Heinlein knew that too, and that knowledge itself was his Easter Egg Of Insight towards which he was leading the reader; or if he was actually that self-unaware.
BTW, back at ya:
https://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2021/05/dig-bump-spike.html
Little known fact:
Nobel founded his prizes, not because he couldn’t hear how great he was over the sound of his own awesomeness, but rather, because of something to do with too many loud noises very nearby. So he wanted people to have a non-audible means of knowing they’d accomplished something. Every time someone told Nobel about his success, his inevitable reply was “What…?”
He also wouldn’t have been nearly as rich, but somehow, all his assistant Beakers seemed to be nowhere around at the end of his experiments.
His Swedish nickname was reportedly something Scandinavian equating to the laboratory equivalent of “Napoleon Blownaparte”.
His testing wasn’t musical, but it was conducted in a “tenor lab”, because you wanted to be ten or twelve miles away.
I can do these all day.
But as the residents of the town nearest his lab telegrammed Alfred Nobel on a regular basis, “Please. Stop.”
That makes me wonder what would have happened if the nearest lab was Albert Hofmann’s. What a bike ride that would have been . . . .
And FTR, I’d teach AOC to be housebroken on Nancy Pelosi. And on her crackers.
In a week.
Ten days, tops.
Televised live on C-SPAN after that.
Well, on the geology comment, I’ll just say: “You rock.”
You know, I think that no one has really thought about that quote as much as we have – and that was all you, buddy.
But I think you’re right – Bob really meant it to push us towards more insight on ourselves. Now I have to write my own . . .
Dangit.
There was a perfect graph illustrating the point, but I couldn’t find it. It was the guestimate of the number of species that existed throughout history, going back billions of years. Basically, over time generalist species diverge into specialist species (like Darwin’s finches), which diverge into even more specialized species, creating an increase in the total number of species. Then some major catastrophe happens, and the number of species plummets (at least 5 such events so far.) Then after things stabilize, the generalists once again begin diverging into specialist species, so the total number of species rises… until the next time.
Some say we are approaching such a time again, whether due to weather (I can pun 2!) or politics. I would point out that humans do not survive as individuals, but as a group. An individual might be advantaged by being a generalist, but individuals are not likely to survive extreme change. However, a group that has many specialists would function as a generalist when it comes to surviving extreme change.
…a group that has many specialists would function as a generalist when it comes to surviving extreme change.
Not necessarily.
The Amish would be hard-pressed to survive any situation requiring warriors, for example.
They’d simply go extinct.
A group that has enough of the necessary specialists might function as a generalist, providing the tsunami of change doesn’t leave them up a creek without a paddler.
A similar group of all-generalists might do loads better, starting with basic survival, and leaving their succeeding generalist offspring to specialize.
The money quote here, which would have been a more apt choice than Heinlein’s oeuf, is:
“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.” – John Adams
The Amish would be hard-pressed to survive any situation requiring warriors, for example. They’d simply go extinct.
You are a nicer man than I am, Mr. Aesop (probably because you are male).
The Amish are far too capable to go extinct in a situation requiring warriors. They’d just lose the men. The women are 100% specialized and generalized in what they need to survive.
There’s another clue, I expect.
All the Big Thinkers and Heinleins, and Marxists and whotnot leave the mothers out of the equation. Props to Heinlein – he tried to get them back in, but he didn’t grok them.
You seem to have completely misunderstood what I said re: specialists in a group.
No, I understood you perfectly.
But some groups are simply not suited for survival under any number of actual circumstances, no matter how large.
Because they don’t have, never did, and/or never will have the right sort of specialists necessary for all situations.
Words have meanings. “Many” ╪ “All necessary”.
Positing otherwise is a theoretical exercise involving unicorns in Step Two or Three.
Let’s agree to nail the problem down to “situations occurring in Reality, as presently understood.” Just for simplicity.
The Amish, Quakers, etc., are benignly parasitical in nature, dependent on a stable and peaceful society, or one which tolerates them and will defend them as necessary from external threats, in order for them to survive at all, let alone thrive.
Faced with a more martial reality than that, they would become the modern-day equivalent of Carthaginians and Neanderthals, or the original Virginia Colony: extinct and vanished.
Had they attempted solo to settle the American frontier before it was pacified, everyone west of the Mississippi and east of the Rockies would probably still speak dialects of Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, or Apache, at least until a group with the necessary skills and will came along to make it otherwise. Just as happened in the pre-Colombian Americas times beyond numbering, for centuries and even millennia.
That goes for Codex’s attempted wiggle-out as well: when your men are killed and your women are nothing but harems of housekeepers and breeding slaves, the former group doesn’t exist anymore. And whatever’s left over will be permanently lacking about 50% of the skills: those will be the ones the men used to have.
That’s group extinction.
QED.
It happens to groups throughout history. Entire civilizations, societies, tribes, or other groups. And will continue to do so.
“Many skills” doesn’t guarantee all skills, nor ultimate survival.
Never has. Never will.
As any number of former groups have found out, to the penalty of extinction.
I’ve seen the same graph. As conditions worsen, niche after niche disappears. Or becomes really tasty.
I had many thoughts after reading your post. Mostly, the thoughts were about my career, and how it demanded a broad knowledge, that sometimes came with long hours of examining things that required me to dispel my ignorance. Simple trigonometry comes to mind, since without it, the thousands of dollars of foundations required for future piping would have become expensive blocks of useless concrete. To make matters worse, I had no electrical surveying instruments, and all my measurements were made with string lines and measuring tapes. An accomplished surveyor could have done the same thing in about 1/20th of the time I took.
One thing is for sure, everyone is a bomb diffuser at least once.
I’ve done a *lot* of things that specialists could have done in 1/10th the time. And in many of those, I’ve learned how not to do it a dozen different ways.
The Mrs. is used to it.
That doesn’t mean she’s happy with it.
This generalist really enjoys the thoughts of a couple specialists.
It’s fun, right?
Plates are a construct of the white male capitalist pig patriarchy but the Joebamessiah will burn all of that down to smite the whitey crackas.
Forward to the glorious Wakandatopia UBI/EBT favela comrade’s hovel in the spirit of unity.
Equality über alles, comrade and don’t forget your face panty and muh vaccine or there will be no buying and selling for you.
And, if you fake the vaccine card papers? Jail for you. Fake the ballot? That’s just deMoCraCy.
I’ll be going off into the woods to enjoy some separation from humanity, beginning this evening. I plan to fiddle about with some generalist skills, but you’ve inspired me. I believe I have Human Action on my Nook. I think I’ll take a swing at that one again.
And, since we’re going there…
I took it for granite that I’d need a cot camping, but I think there’s some bedrock where I can clay my head, soil be comfortable.
Solid!
Lesser efforts shale in comparison, and won’t a mound to a hill of beans.
I hope you won’t mine if I tell you you’ve struck paydirt.
It would be no rubble at all.
Enjoy! Human Action really helped with my insomnia.
I really enjoy the sediments in your comment.