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The segregation of knowledgeable people into sets of experts based on domains of expertise is more the problem than individuals specializing. People will dogged
by 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 agoAh 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.