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The problem with this line of thinking is that there is a distinction between you and your current skillset. In nature a finch can't deliberately change the sha

by jjk166 6y ago

The problem with this line of thinking is that there is a distinction between you and your current skillset. In nature a finch can't deliberately change the shape of its beak, but a human can alter their behavior. A fast learner can be deeply specialized in terms of knowledge during times of stability but then quickly switch over to being a generalist when conditions change - on the other hand someone who took a long time to become a jack of all trades may struggle just as hard as anyone else to adapt to a genuinely new development. When most of us picture a specialist, we think of someone with perhaps an advanced degree or years of experience in a narrow field, while a generalist has invested much less time in a niche, but really a specialist is someone inflexible in their thinking and focused on details whereas the true generalist is someone more focused on broad concepts and open to new ideas, regardless of career history.

glial 6y ago
> The problem with this line of thinking I don't think it's a problem. It's just that specialization can happen in skill AND in genetic adaptability to the environment. We think of skill and genetics as separate things, but in this context it can be helpful to think of them as existing along a continuum of how we learn about the environment and adapt to it. Genetic adaptations 'learn' about the environment over multiple generations, and behavior changes happen within a single generation. So for example, the finch is specialized exactly because it can't change its beak, and the human is a generalist exactly because it can alter its behavior. I think you could argue that any human behavioral 'specialization' is still probably less adapted to any given environment than animals who evolved for a million years to be suited to that environment.
- jjk166 6y ago
  But it is not useful here to think of skill and genetics as being on a continuum, it just produces confusion because these two orthogonal concepts have very similar terminologies, but its a mixed metaphor. It's good to be a genetic generalist during times of instability specifically because you are incapable of changing your genes during the upheaval - and thus while you may not thrive in any circumstance the risk of extinction is also mitigated. If we had advanced genetic engineering, and could rapidly adopt different genes to suit the circumstances without having to wait for generations of random mutations, there would be no reason not to specialize genetically. While this is a pure hypothetical for genetics, it is reality for behavior - no matter how much you've invested into learning one skill, you can instantly switch to learning another, and you can choose exactly the skillset you want to curate. When a new field emerges, your experience in other, unrelated fields is irrelevant - the specialist is at no disadvantage compared to the generalist, and so they sacrifice nothing by specializing in a field. In contrast to genetic evolution, which has very discrete goals (reproduce, survive, etc) and is agnostic about how these goals are achieved, skillsets can have a much wider range of objectives and the 'how' is integral. A finch might optimize for eating nuts or insects, or could remain a generalist to handle both, but is unlikely to come across a nut-insect hybrid where the generalist beak outperforms either the nut or the insect beak. But such interdisciplinary situations happen all the time - for example the roboticist with understanding of mechanics and software can do better than either a pure mechanical engineer or pure software engineer. The roboticist has a wider, shallower skillset, but that is only beneficial for tasks which happen to overlap - they won't have any easier time switching to say pharmaceutical development. It simply doesn't make sense to think of the roboticist as a generalist and the other engineers as specialists in the evolutionary sense. Certainly any direct comparison of specific behavioral to genetic specializations is illogical. By what metric would you compare how well adapted a lion is to a big game hunter with a gun? How could you compare a dam-building construction crew to a family of beavers? Again, we might use similar words to describe what they are doing, but we are describing totally distinct concepts.

by jjk166 6y ago

glial 6y ago

> The problem with this line of thinking I don't think it's a problem. It's just that specialization can happen in skill AND in genetic adaptability to the environment. We think of skill and genetics as separate things, but in this context it can be helpful to think of them as existing along a continuum of how we learn about the environment and adapt to it. Genetic adaptations 'learn' about the environment over multiple generations, and behavior changes happen within a single generation. So for example, the finch is specialized exactly because it can't change its beak, and the human is a generalist exactly because it can alter its behavior. I think you could argue that any human behavioral 'specialization' is still probably less adapted to any given environment than animals who evolved for a million years to be suited to that environment.

jjk166 6y ago
But it is not useful here to think of skill and genetics as being on a continuum, it just produces confusion because these two orthogonal concepts have very similar terminologies, but its a mixed metaphor. It's good to be a genetic generalist during times of instability specifically because you are incapable of changing your genes during the upheaval - and thus while you may not thrive in any circumstance the risk of extinction is also mitigated. If we had advanced genetic engineering, and could rapidly adopt different genes to suit the circumstances without having to wait for generations of random mutations, there would be no reason not to specialize genetically. While this is a pure hypothetical for genetics, it is reality for behavior - no matter how much you've invested into learning one skill, you can instantly switch to learning another, and you can choose exactly the skillset you want to curate. When a new field emerges, your experience in other, unrelated fields is irrelevant - the specialist is at no disadvantage compared to the generalist, and so they sacrifice nothing by specializing in a field. In contrast to genetic evolution, which has very discrete goals (reproduce, survive, etc) and is agnostic about how these goals are achieved, skillsets can have a much wider range of objectives and the 'how' is integral. A finch might optimize for eating nuts or insects, or could remain a generalist to handle both, but is unlikely to come across a nut-insect hybrid where the generalist beak outperforms either the nut or the insect beak. But such interdisciplinary situations happen all the time - for example the roboticist with understanding of mechanics and software can do better than either a pure mechanical engineer or pure software engineer. The roboticist has a wider, shallower skillset, but that is only beneficial for tasks which happen to overlap - they won't have any easier time switching to say pharmaceutical development. It simply doesn't make sense to think of the roboticist as a generalist and the other engineers as specialists in the evolutionary sense. Certainly any direct comparison of specific behavioral to genetic specializations is illogical. By what metric would you compare how well adapted a lion is to a big game hunter with a gun? How could you compare a dam-building construction crew to a family of beavers? Again, we might use similar words to describe what they are doing, but we are describing totally distinct concepts.