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Maybe you're exaggerating a bit on specialization? Unless humans reach immortality (or you live alone in a world), there's no other solution for progress. Most

Maybe you're exaggerating a bit on specialization? Unless humans reach immortality (or you live alone in a world), there's no other solution for progress. Most modern specialists out there actually know superficially a broad number of fields (and any of them likely much better than Da Vinci ever knew), but must specialize in one to optimize progress. There's only so much time to reach the frontier of progress, and you need to be at least reasonably quick to get there, lest your work be made obsolete by others before it's even published. I don't think any expert should be unhappy for "missing out on knowledge" of many fields, because knowledge is infinite -- he should instead be happy to know the essential knowledge of some fields and be able to expand the frontier of human knowledge, which I believe is more satisfying than just soaking up results of all is out there (and probably can pay your lunch). In popular words, "Jack of all trades, master of none" (unless you're in the middle ages).

danharaj 11y ago
The segregation of knowledgeable people into sets of experts based on domains of expertise is more the problem than individuals specializing. People will doggedly pursue answers to their questions without such rigid social structures, but it prevents the interaction between people that would otherwise fruitfully cooperate together. These structures, I believe, mostly serve political and bureaucratic functions rather than the facilitation of human inquiry. We like to pretend our institutions are optimized for their ends, but usually they're optimized for the allocation of resources and power. Cutting people up into experts, giving them titles, making them clique together, impairs them but it makes them 'easier to manage'.
- darkmighty 11y ago
  Ah now I can see a more valid point. The problem is not so much that people specialize in certain problems/'issues'/fields/tools/..., it's more that the fields are arbitrarily drawn and rigid. That I can agree with. "People will doggedly pursue answers to their questions without such rigid social structures" -- that is a good observation imo, and I think science progresses best when it is oriented around problems. The specialization then comes as devoting large amounts of time to a deep understanding of the problem and the different tools necessary to get it solved. But perhaps it's only natural (or human nature) to split tools into categories to study them separately and effectively, and be able to draw upon people who know those tools very well.

danharaj 11y ago

The segregation of knowledgeable people into sets of experts based on domains of expertise is more the problem than individuals specializing. People will doggedly pursue answers to their questions without such rigid social structures, but it prevents the interaction between people that would otherwise fruitfully cooperate together. These structures, I believe, mostly serve political and bureaucratic functions rather than the facilitation of human inquiry. We like to pretend our institutions are optimized for their ends, but usually they're optimized for the allocation of resources and power. Cutting people up into experts, giving them titles, making them clique together, impairs them but it makes them 'easier to manage'.

darkmighty 11y ago
Ah now I can see a more valid point. The problem is not so much that people specialize in certain problems/'issues'/fields/tools/..., it's more that the fields are arbitrarily drawn and rigid. That I can agree with. "People will doggedly pursue answers to their questions without such rigid social structures" -- that is a good observation imo, and I think science progresses best when it is oriented around problems. The specialization then comes as devoting large amounts of time to a deep understanding of the problem and the different tools necessary to get it solved. But perhaps it's only natural (or human nature) to split tools into categories to study them separately and effectively, and be able to draw upon people who know those tools very well.