How University Students Use Claude

This reply brings to mind the well-known Heinlein quote:

    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.

The sheer amount of activities that he left out because he couldn't even remember they existed would turn this paragraph into a book.

This is a fantastic and underrated quote, despite all of the problems I have with Heinlein's fascism-glorifying work.

That's a quote that sounds great until, say, that self-built building by somebody who's neither engineer nor architect at best turns out to have some intractible design flaw and at worst collapses and kills people.

It's also a quote from a character who's literally immortal and so has all the time in the world to learn things, which really undermines the premise.

What an awful quote. Literally all progress we've made is due to ever increasing specialization.

It’s a quote from a character in Heinlein’s fiction. A human character with a lifespan of over a thousand years.

I too liked that quote and found it inspiring. Until I read the book, that is.

That is literally not true.

I'd be interested in counter-examples?

I sort of view that list as table stakes for a well rounded capable person.. Well barring the invasion bit. Then again, being familiar with guns and or other forms of self defense is valuable.

I think most farmers would be somewhat capable on most of that list. Equations for farm production. Programming tractor equipment. Setting bones. Giving and taking orders. Building houses and barns.

Building a single story building isn’t that difficult, but time consuming. Especially nowadays with YouTube videos and pre-planned plans.

I haven't butchered a hog or died yet.

> pre-planned plans

Isn't that cheating? Shouldn't a properly self-reliant human be able to come up with the plans too?

The quote is more reasonable in context.

> self-built building by somebody who's neither engineer nor architect

That is exactly how our ancestors built houses. Also a traditional wooden house doesn't look complicated.

And what happened to them, I wonder?

Well, they reproduced so we could exist now. Definition of ancestors.

Learning from others doesn’t mean you are not learning.

I'm not saying that our ancestors were wrong. Hell, I live in a house that was originally built under similar conditions.

That being said, buildings collapse a lot less frequently these days. House fires happen at a lower rate. Insulation was either nonexistent or present in much lower quantities.

I guess the point I'm making is that the lesson here shouldn't be "we used to make our houses, why don't we go back to that?" It also shouldn't be "we should leave every task to a specialist."

Know how to maintain and fix the things around your house that are broken. You don't need a plumber to replace the flush valve on your toilet. But maybe don't try to replace a load-bearing joist in your house unless you know what you're doing? The people building their own homes weren't engineers, but they had a lot more carpentry experience than (I assume) you and I.

That’s…not what I asked. Y’all need to recognize that Darwinism was intended as an explanatory theory, not as an ethos. And it’s not how we judge building practices.

I know the character is Lazarus Long. Which book was this quote in?

This is one of the cases where you should indeed rely on Google.

> That is exactly how our ancestors built houses. Also a traditional wooden house doesn't look complicated.

The only homes built by our ancestors that you see are those that didn't collapsed and killed whoever was inside, burned down, were too unstable to live in, were too much of a burden to maintain and keep around, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

You just created a modern take on LMGTFY

It's now pronounced LMCGPTTFY

Honestly having gone through the self build process for a house it’s not that hard if you keep it simple. Habitat for humanity has some good learning material

Ask the LLM to create plans and step by step guides then!

Counter-examples are not really their area, evidently.

I've had people do this to me (albeit in an attempt to be helpful, not snarky) and it felt so weird. The answers are something a copywriter would have thrown together in an hour. Generic, unhelpful drivel.

I would like to replay with another quote by another immortal(or long lived) character, Professor „Reg“ Chronotis from Douglas Adams:

"That I lived so much longer, just means, that I forgot much more, not that I know much more."

Memory might have a limited capacity, but of course, I doubt most humans use that capacity, or well, for useful things. I know I have plenty of useless knowledge ..

A lot of discoveries come from someone applying their scientific knowledge to a curious thing happening in their hobby or private life. A lot of successful businesses apply software engineering to a specific business problem that is invisible to all other engineers.

To bake a cake from scratch, first, you must create the universe

>Law § 229 of Hammurabi's Code

>If a house builder built a house for a man but did not secure/fortify his work so that the house he built collapsed and caused the death of the house owner, that house builder will be executed.

If even professionals did get it wrong so often that there had to be law for it... Yeah, maybe it is not that simple.

Given the original, ludicrous, claim was:

> Literally all progress we've made is due to ever increasing specialization.

Then we don't really need plural examples, right?

Anyway - language, wheel, fire, tool-making, social constructs like reciprocity principle - I think gave us some progress as a species and a society.

All of these examples are done by specialist because I don't see many cars being build by dentists.

Even in mankind's beginning specialization existed in the form of hunter and gatherer. This specialization in combination with team work brought us to the top of the food chain to a point where we can strive beyond basic survival.

The people making space crafts (designing and building, another example of specialization) don't need to know how to repair or build a microwave to heat there for food.

Of course everybody still needs to know basic knowledge (how to turn on microwave) to get by.

> All of these examples are done by specialist because I don't see many cars being build by dentists.

I'm not sure how you get from pre-agricultural humans developing fire, to dentists building cars.

I don't doubt that after fire was 'understood', there was specialisation to some degree, probably, around management of fire, what burns well, how best to cook, etc.

But any claim that fire was the result of specialisation seems a bit hard to substantiate. A committee was established to direct Thag Simmons to develop a way to .. something involving wood?

Wheel, the setting of broken bones, language etc - specialisation happened subsequently, but not as a prerequisite for those advances.

> Even in mankind's beginning specialization existed in the form of hunter and gatherer. This specialization in combination with team work brought us to the top of the food chain to a point where we can strive beyond basic survival.

Totally agree that we advanced because of two key capabilities - a) persistence hunting, b) team / communication.

You seem to be conflating the result of those advancements with "all progress", as was GP.

> The people making space crafts (designing and building, another example of specialization) don't need to know how to repair or build a microwave to heat there for food.

I am not, was not, arguing that highly specialised skills in modern society are not ... highly specialised.

I was arguing against the lofty claim that:

"All progress we've made is due to ever increasing specialization."

Noting the poster of that was responding to a quote from a work of fiction - claiming it was awful - that the author had suggested everyone should be familiar with (among other things) 'changing a diaper, comfort the dying, cooperate, cook a tasty meal, analyse a problem, solve equations' etc.

If you're suggesting that you think some people in society should be exempt from some basic skills like those - that's an interesting position I'd like to see you defend.

> Of course everybody still needs to know basic knowledge (how to turn on microwave) to get by.

FWIW I don't have a microwave oven.

The discovery of fire itself was not progress, but how to use it very much is. They most likely didn't have a "discover fire" specialization in the modern sense but I doubt the one first to create a fire starter was afterwards deligated to only collect berries. The discovery and creation of something obviously often comes before the specialization or it would otherwise be impossible to discover and create anything.

>FWIW I don't have a microwave oven.

That was just an example. You still know how to use them hence basic knowledge. Seem like this discussion boils down to semantics

Seems to be from the book "Time Enough for Love"

In a village most houses were built by their owners. I am not talking here about nicely decorated brick buildings in a city: they were obviously designed and built by professionals.

I dispute your foundational claim that discovery of things != progress.

I concur that semantics have a) overtaken this thread, and b) are part of my complaint with OP when they claimed all historical progress was the result of specialisation.