Division of labor between men and women and children and slaves was happening among our ancestors to a degree I'm not sure speaking of them as living by their own strength is accurate.
The idea that either discovering something or reading a book is fun isn't shared by everyone. For some people both are awful experiences. High-iq people forget that the high-iq people we surround ourselves with are not representative.
Well yeah - Our ancestors did some things on their own and yet they didn't make the progress we make today. Of course we have to think in relative terms here but still ... If you look at it from this point of view: Every person has other strenghs and flaws and so if we work in a group of specialists on - let's say a mysterious crime case - the case will be cracked way faster than if one person has to try to solve it alone - 'work on his own strenght' ...
Additionally you can't just internalize new strenghts! Of course you can learn things to a specific degree but many people specializing on different things will help community more and that's what counts in the end. And if we're not talking about mankind but about individual people I just ask you one question: Would you want to have to make your own tools and not be able to learn what you really want, or would you like to buy tools from someone who knows how to make them perfectly and concentrate on your life?
Thanks - that's all ;)
Today's post, Living By Your Own Strength was originally published on 22 December 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors strung their own bows, wove their own baskets and whittled their own flutes. Part of our alienation from our design environment is the number of tools we use that we don't understand and couldn't make for ourselves. It's much less fun to read something in a book than to discover it for yourself. Specialization is critical to our current civilization. But the future does not have to be a continuation of this trend in which we rely more and more on things outside ourselves which become less and less comprehensible. With a surplus of power, you could begin to rethink the life experience as a road to internalizing new strengths, not just staying alive efficiently through extreme specialization.
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Sensual Experience, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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