Is it possible for an individual to have value in a world where

No.

>specialization is meaningless

t. humanities major

>>2703767
I'm working on a degree in Computer Science actually. But so many resources are available online that anyone could learn what I am learning regardless of the degree. But it goes beyond that, the world doesn't need any of us. There is nothing essential about anyone anymore.

>>2703764
Don't let your profession define you. The quest for meaning never ends, but where you're looking is a dead end.

File: image.jpg (38KB, 630x603px) Image search: [Google]

38KB, 630x603px

>>2703764
>In some technical sense anyone can become or do anything thanks to the internet.
But it never happens. The internet is a terrible learning tool unless you're actually a genius: for everyone else books (way less distracting) and direct confrontation with a professor/mentor will be infinitely more effective. In most fields it's not the knowledge that is valuable, rather the experience you've matured after having internalized said knowledge.

By the way this is way truer for STEM fields: to misinterpret something and get EVERYTHING in a field wrong is trivial. The more math there is, the easier it is for you to just miss completely the point and end up wasting years of your life.

tl;dr: autodidacticism is a meme, universities and colleges are still the best preliminarh path towards mastery of any field and craft

>>2704177
This is true only if you're mediocre and inherently talentless. If that's not the case you should try to put all of your eggs in one basket and try to excel fully in your passion. To accept mediocrity preemptively is just to normalize failure before even starting.

>>2704189
>to accept mediocrity
You don't understand. It's not about being mediocre. Even successful businessmen are not content with being "just" that, but engage in other meaningful activities, because profession is only a means to an end, not the end itself.

>>2703764
I know what you mean. I have thought of the same things too. But I think this is around for quite some time.

I heard one woman saying that she used to worship music performers but when she began to practice instruments herself she realized the performers are not special but that they spend hours to practice.

I think what she implied was that those hours of practice doesn't make the performers "smart". In contrast the technique took away their opportunity to do the really amazing things.

So back to op's question. I think this is part of individual growth, and of progress of all humans. Once upon a time the trades, the disciplines, and the professions were thought to be incomparable. Now they can all be put onto the same scale and compared against the same standard.

The old "value" would disappear but a new value would rise. One can now say "it's more worthy to study STEM rather than humanities" etc. because now we can safely say that a person could choose either side and the only difference would be his choice and he can't use "I am more suitable for humanities" as excuse.

>>2704266
>One can now say "it's more worthy to study STEM rather than humanities
Humanities is pretty worthless though.

>>2703764
Not exactly responding to your assumption that all knowledges become free, but I think this is relevant.

This is Ernest Gellner's idea:
Because industrial economies continually make and put into practice technical and organizational innovations, they continually change how they employ resources, especially human resources. Their occupational structures change significantly in a generation at most, and often more quickly, so no one can expect to follow in the family profession. (A hundred years ago, there were no system administrators, but there were carriage-drivers.) In Agraria, training could be left to families or guilds, be largely tacit and physical and tied up with the rituals and social context of the trade, and different parts of the same society could be almost unintelligible to each other, provided only they could go through the customary haggling or tithing. None of this will do in an industrial, changing society, in which training must be much more explicit, be couched in a far more universal idiom, ...

http://bactra.org/reviews/nations-and-nationalism/

>>2703772
Really these days going to school for easy self-taught shit like CS, foreign languages, writing, history, etc. is just a waste of money for a piece of paper since a NEET can acquire the same knowledge at the same time, if not faster, than the student. Nowadays, only physically-demanding specializations like trades have real value in the modern world since acquiring training involves in-person work.

Automation will only make the issue worse.

>>2703772
>I'm working on a degree in Computer Science actually. But so many resources are available online that anyone could learn what I am learning regardless of the degree.
Yes they COULD.
> But it goes beyond that, the world doesn't need any of us.
How much of the globe currently has network capability? How much more work needs to be done?

Now every one has literacy. So they can read humanities works by themselves and realize most of them are bullshits.

>>2703764
Labor theory of value