in what world can I type in "historical economics of japan" and get a result

[Lanny]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_Japan

That's a real life article what the fuck. I just randomly typed brain vomit into google (the link was I was arguing if a particular japanese female had any use for a razor -> middle school -> education in japan -> private education in japan -> economic history of japan) and like fucking it's a thing. What the hell. What kind of world do we live in?

A good one, if nothing else. Like wow, it's amazing that I can become a semi-expert in the field of japanese economics because I wanted to know if some fucking cartoon character needed a razor. Like what the fuck am I even doing pursuing an education if I wikipedia? Straight up someone wiht an internet connection is smarter than basically anyone else in the world. This is a strange time to be alive but it's alsoes prestty awesome.

[fanglekai]

Looking up facts is easy. Becoming an expert means learning a shitload of stuff and being able to use it. You won't become an expert on calculus by looking up a couple things, for example.

[Lanny]

I mean true, you won't become the world's foremost expert on sometime by reading a wiki article, but in less than 20 minutes I can learn more about some subject than like 99% of the population. That's pretty crazy dude. Esp. considering that much knowledge is enough to make a pretty damn well informed decision on most things. Like anyone with an internet connection today can learn more in a couple of hours than the majority of historical rulers ever knew. More than most historical scholars ever know in a particular field. Like legit, go read the article on infinitesimals and you'll know a lot more than Newton did when he set out.

[fanglekai]

Yeah you can learn a shitload of things that people in the past didn't know. That's the beauty of continuous studies. The truly amusing yet depressing thing is that at any moment in time we know more than we did before at any other moment in time, yet people are ignorant as fuck about literally almost everything. People don't want to learn things that don't directly affect them (or that they think don't directly affect them).

But let's take that further and look at practical skills. Look at how few people actually know how to cook, fix their car, or tend a garden. The difference between ignorant fucks and smart people is that smart people recognize when they don't know something and they try to learn it. If I decide to do some gardening I'll accept I don't know much so I'll go read what people who know about the subject have to say. Ignorant people will remain ignorant.

[Lanny]

That's a beauty though. A virtue, not a sin! How awesome is it to live in a world where you don't even need to know how to prepare your own food? I can commit the vast majority of my lifespan to something and just outsource almost every aspect of sustaining my existence. Sure some people won't use this intense potential for specialization to do anything particularly worthwhile but still, we live in a society finely tuned to produce maximal expertise. I'll gladly suffer a hundred thousand shitty gardeners if it means one beethoven can spend more time composing and less time figuring out how to grow vegetables. Today we're seeing the near conclusion of what agrarian society promised. When our ancestors started to produce more sustenance in a day of work than it took to feed a person for a day we started down a road that led inevitably to either human extinction or post scarcity society. And we're approaching a post scarcity society. Every sort of hyper specialized individual from NEETs to super high-powered CEOs are the logical conclusion (or close there-to) of the path the entirety of our civilization started down when be began sewing seeds.

The fact that people can exist with such a minimum of practical skills is only a testament to the mind-blowing efficiency of our society in proving for it's members.