[HN Gopher] Profession by Isaac Asimov (1957)
___________________________________________________________________
Profession by Isaac Asimov (1957)
Author : bkudria
Score : 169 points
Date : 2026-01-18 02:17 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.abelard.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.abelard.org)
| spagettnet wrote:
| Link to the story without ads
|
| https://www.inf.ufpr.br/renato/profession.html
| cdman wrote:
| I haven't seen any ads on the site - I guess AdNauseum works
| well :)
| catoc wrote:
| Thanks - the OP's site was a truly horrible experience
| getpokedagain wrote:
| I dunno I just copied it into emacs. Another free short story
| to keep in my digital collection.
| krgyxe wrote:
| That was my exact reaction after opening this post...
| OptionOfT wrote:
| For some reason Safari's reader view skips a part of the page.
| Aeglaecia wrote:
| one of asimov's finest , a metaphor that continues to find
| relevance in my day to day existence - that the conclusions we so
| readily come to are assumptions made in the absence of the
| awareness of something more
| ameliaquining wrote:
| This is my favorite Asimov story. It's got a protagonist with
| compelling motivations, a society that has problems but also
| convincing reasons why they persist, and a great ending.
| zem wrote:
| mine too, because one of my favourite sff tropes is that the
| more you regiment society, the more you rely on outsiders and
| those pushed to the edges for any real innovation.
| lazide wrote:
| People stuck following the rules are going to struggle to
| deal with, or come up with solutions too, problems that are
| outside the rules.
| tzs wrote:
| Two other Asimov stories that are similarly relevant to much of
| what is discussed on HN for similar reasons are "In a Good
| Cause--" and "The Dead Past".
|
| I don't know of a link for the first. Here's one for the
| second.
|
| https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/dead-past/
| jimbob45 wrote:
| _Dr Antonelli said, "Or do you believe that studying some subject
| will bend the brain cells in that direction, like that other
| theory that a pregnant woman need only listen to great music
| persistently to make a composer of her child. Do you believe
| that?"_
|
| Apparently, Asimov was an early critic of the "Mozart in the
| womb" movement.
| telesilla wrote:
| It isn't to make a composer out of a baby but to expose a
| growing brain to complex music. We have no proof it benefits
| brain development, but we also have no proof it does not.
|
| I studied classical music and came from a challenged background
| which to be honest is a rarity in that field. Almost everyone I
| studied with has parents who specifically encouraged music
| education and had the means to help make that happen. I got
| mine from some gifted vinyl as a child and fell in love with
| the orchestra. If I was in this story I'd probably not have
| been recommended to be a Professional Composer (if social
| expectations were the equivalent of what Asimov is saying
| here.)
|
| So yeah, I'm pro 'play Mozart to your baby' :)
| KerrAvon wrote:
| I don't think you can assign that meaning here one way or
| another. The context in the story at that point (IIRC) is that
| he's sort of lying to the protagonist, or at least misleading
| him.
| elcapitan wrote:
| Is this still in print, maybe as part of a collection? I tried to
| find it but couldn't. Many of his other works seem to be
| available as paperback, including a bunch of story collections.
| kmaitreys wrote:
| I have it in print. As part of Isaac Asimov: The Complete
| Stories Volume 1 (Published by Harper Voyager)
| emoII wrote:
| Thanks, just went and bought it!
| kmaitreys wrote:
| It's a great collection. Do check out "The Dead Past" as
| well (it's the first story in the version I have).
| dredmorbius wrote:
| It's collected in _Nine Tomorrows_ , most recently reprinted in
| 1989 per Wikipedia. Used copies may be found online.
| hcs wrote:
| Though it doesn't directly answer your question, isfdb.org is a
| great reference for publication history of SF:
| https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?55700
| hnroo99 wrote:
| What the hell that was a good read. Ending was great (though the
| last line did confuse me)
| namanyayg wrote:
| Previously in the story it is mentioned that George as a child
| was curious about the etymology of the Olympics event and asked
| his father, only to be dismissed.
|
| The callback at the end symbolizes his renewed curiosity. He is
| no longer ashamed of the way his mind works and if it makes him
| look different.
| haritha-j wrote:
| Such a great ending. Really makes one wonder about the current AI
| hype of getting the machines to take over our work.
| mezyt wrote:
| Remind me of a recent discussion we had among Stackoverflow
| moderator:
|
| > "Think about it," he continued. "Who discovers the edge cases
| the docs don't mention? Who answers the questions that haven't
| been asked before? It can't be people trained only to repeat
| canonical answers. Somewhere, it has to stop. Somewhere, someone
| has to think."
|
| > "Yes," said the Moderator.
|
| > He leaned back. For a moment, restlessness flickered in his
| eyes.
|
| > "So why wasn't I told this at the start?"
|
| > "If we told everyone," said the Moderator gently, "we'd destroy
| the system. Most contributors must believe the goal is to fix
| their CRUD apps. They need closure. They need certainty. They
| need to get to be a Registered Something--Frontend, Backend,
| DevOps, Full stack. Only someone who suffered through the abuse
| of another moderator closing their novel question as a duplicate
| can be trusted to put enough effort to make an actual
| contribution"
| hammock wrote:
| What does "destroy the system" mean here?
| lisper wrote:
| If you have to ask, you aren't ready to know the answer.
| There are some things you have to figure out on your own.
| This is one of them.
| MarkusQ wrote:
| Use it to train an "AI"? :)
|
| Probably not the OPs intent though. I suspect there are a lot
| of ways to destroy the system.
| mezyt wrote:
| The metaphor doesn't match very well here because
| stackoverflow is not selling new tape at a premium but giving
| them for free and reading a stackoverflow answer is harder
| than asking an LLM.
|
| Could be that AI companies feeding on stackoverflow are
| selling tape at a premium, and if they tell you it's only
| supervised learning from a lot of human experts it's going to
| destroy the nice bubble they have going on around AGI.
|
| Could also be that you have to do the actual theory /
| practice / correction work for your basal ganglia to "know"
| about something without thinking about it (i.e. learn),
| contrary to the novel where the knowledge is directly
| inserted in your brain. If everyone use AI to skip the
| "practice" phase lazily then there's no one to make the AI
| evolve anymore. And the world is not a Go board where the AI
| can learn against itself indefinitely.
| dryarzeg wrote:
| I've read this a long time ago, when I was a kid. Back then I
| thought about the education system and how it sometimes inhibits
| the creativity within the students. But right now, other
| comparison comes to mind - I don't know how relevant it is,
| though, so please don't judge it strictly.
|
| Modern "AI" (LLM-based) systems are somewhat similar to the
| humans in this story who were taped. They may have a lot of
| knowledge, even a lot of knowledge that is really specialized,
| but once this knowledge becomes outdated or they are required to
| create something new - they struggle a lot. Even the systems with
| RAG and "continuous memory" (not sure if that's the right term)
| don't really learn something new. From what I know, they can
| accumulate the knowledge, but they still struggle with creativity
| and skill learning. And that may be the problem _for the users of
| these systems_ as well, because they may sometimes rely on the
| shallow knowledge provided by the LLM model or "AI" system
| instead of thinking and trying to solve the problem themselves.
|
| Luckily enough, most of the humans in our world can still follow
| the George's example. That's what makes us different from LLM-
| based systems. We can learn something new, and learn it deeply,
| creating the deep and unique networks of associations between
| different "entities" in our mind, which allows us to be truly
| creative. We also can dynamically update our knowledge and
| skills, as well as our qualities and mindset, and so on...
|
| That's what I'm hoping for, at least.
| godelski wrote:
| What concerns me is that learning depth is more discouraged
| than ever. For a long time it's been discouraged, which is
| natural as we have a preference for simple things rather than
| difficult/complex things. But we're pushing much harder than
| ever before. From the way we have influencer education videos
| to the way people push LLMs ("you can _just_ vibe code, no
| thinking required "). We've advanced enough that it's easy to
| make things look good enough but looks can be deceiving. It's
| impossible to know what's good enough without depth of
| knowledge, without mastery.
|
| No machine will ever be sufficient to overcome the fundamental
| problem: a novice is incapable of properly evaluating a system.
| No human is capable of doing this either, nor can they (despite
| many believing they can). It's a fundamental information
| problem. The best we can do is match our human system, where we
| _trust_ the experts, who have depth. But we even see the limits
| of that and how frequently they get ignored by those woefully
| unqualified to evaluate. Maybe it 'll be better as people tend
| to trust machines more. But for the same reason it could be
| significantly worse. It's near impossible to fix a problem you
| can't identify.
| bucephalos wrote:
| The page linked has some more information available, but its
| author (abelard?) cites from "Mein Kampf" later, naming the books
| author as "Adolph" (sic!). Caution is advised.
| graemep wrote:
| He is very odd. The name is presumably a reference to Peter
| Abelard who was not a nice man (very clever, of course).
|
| Nothing wrong per se with citing what someone you are writing
| about said about themselves. He has some very odd historical,
| economic and political theories, but a lot of them are rooted
| in common misconceptions.
| bradley13 wrote:
| Ah, I remember that story. Brilliant. Asimov was a wonderful
| writer.
| dxuh wrote:
| I am sort of questioning my use of LLMs again after, first
| reluctantly, starting to use them multiple times a day. This
| story seems like it was intended to be an allegory for LLM-use
| though I know it couldn't have been.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| It's an allegory about trusting "best practices", standardized
| bodies of knowledge1, and "that's the way it's always been
| done". Not that those things necessarily don't work, they do in
| the story as well as in real life, but they need to adapt to
| change and the story illustrates what happens when they harden
| from best practice into unquestioned dogma.
|
| 1 There's even a BoK for software developers, the SWEBOK, but
| I've never met anybody who's read it.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's also about hyperspecialization. A concept that was
| beginning to be noticed at the time.
| WillAdams wrote:
| There's a similar story about a progression of robot repair
| devices --- which has to end in a "Master Robot Repairman"
| profession which is the folks who repair the robots which repair
| other robots.
|
| Blanking on author and title, but read it a _long_ while ago, and
| it had a distinctly golden age feel --- maybe Murray Leinster?
| dcminter wrote:
| There's something a little like this in Strata by Pratchett
| (which is lightly sending up Niven's Ringworld and a non-robot-
| related but similar idea there).
| bibin765 wrote:
| What motivates you all to learn when you know that information
| about anything is easily accessible from anywhere ?
| bee_rider wrote:
| A very nice story, and an interesting reflection on the education
| system.
|
| Also, and this is just an aside, but "the protagonist who is too
| special for the sorting hat" is a bit of a trope in young adult
| literature at this point. Is this the first real instance of it?
| 1957. That's a while ago! I don't even know if the "sorting hat"
| trope was established enough to subvert at the time.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| No one would have recognized any tropes in 1957 beyond
| Shakespeare. Even Joseph Campbell wasn't popularized until
| decades later.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Sorry, I can't tell if this is sarcastic. Well I think it has
| a kernel of truth that overstates it for rhetorical flair.
|
| I'm willing to believe the phrase "trope" wasn't invented in
| 1957 if that's what you are saying. But surely they had the
| idea of popular little trends in contemporary literature.
|
| The must have known they were writing pulp sci-fi. At least
| when they got their copies they could feel the texture!
| lanstin wrote:
| Trope comes from classical Latin.
| onraglanroad wrote:
| It comes from Greek "tropos"
| jhbadger wrote:
| As mentioned, the word "trope" dates back to ancient times,
| although generally meaning rhetorical devices like similes
| and metaphors rather than in the "reused plot" sense
| generally used today. But even the ancients still recognized
| those. Aristotle's _Poetics_ deals with plays in addition to
| poems, and he discusses what sort of plots work in tragedies.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >No one would have recognized any tropes in 1957 beyond
| Shakespeare.
|
| Nope. Just within science fiction, early issues of _Galaxy_
| had many editorials denouncing /mocking science fiction
| stories with overused tropes, such as Western transposed to
| space, or babies being killed as aberrant after a nuclear war
| because they have ten fingers and toe.
| notahacker wrote:
| Not really an example of the trope, but suspect Asimov might
| have got some of his ideas from Huxley's Brave New World, where
| it turns out the occupation-segregated dystopia is actually run
| by an idealistic type who's committed to the system but finds
| nonconformists and forbidden literature really interesting
| study subjects to make it better, and exile to the Falklands is
| actually a reward, sort of...
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > who is too special
|
| "Fans are slans."
| tagami wrote:
| Alt link of text only - no cruft
| http://employees.oneonta.edu/blechmjb/JBpages/m360/Professio...
| mooreds wrote:
| I thought this post from Kyla Scanlon[0] did a good job of
| explaining that eventually the algorithms replace knowledge.
| Which is not a good thing.
|
| 0: https://kyla.substack.com/p/the-four-phases-of-institutional
| mooreds wrote:
| Another, less optimistic view of this same future is the short
| story "Pump Six" by Paolo Bacigalupi.
|
| https://windupstories.com/books/pump-six-and-other-stories/
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| This story is set thousands of years in the future, and yet their
| social norms are broadly those of 1960s America, conspicuously
| minus the racism. Their notion of gender equality, for instance,
| is to segregate, but add "(and women)" after every few "men"
| (respectively "(and husbands)" after "wives"). Stubby Trevelyan
| smokes, and litters the cigarette butts. This _has_ to be
| deliberate on the part of the author. I wonder what Ladislas
| Ingenescu, Registered Historian, has to say about the matter?...
| if, indeed, he has any original thoughts to share.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-01-18 23:01 UTC)