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Specialization is productive and efficient, diversity is creative and resilient. I tend to see people wanting to optimize for one or the other, and that they t

Specialization is productive and efficient, diversity is creative and resilient. I tend to see people wanting to optimize for one or the other, and that they they even manage to tie it to politics and morality.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
> diversity is creative and resilient. I spent a majority of my career in "R&D-heavy" companies, so I'm fairly used to diverse teams.
mananaysiempre 3y ago
> Specialization is productive and efficient [...] ... When the solution fits inside the lines of a particular specialty; otherwise, you need a different specialist, and knowing which one is not at all trivial. From time to time, the solution doesn’t fit within any established lines, in which case you’ll never find it at all this way. Which is why the commonly expressed sentiment that domain experts should stick to their domains of expertise drives me up the wall. Especially the experts in question are scientists and the specific lines can be ... less than well established, to put it mildly. That is not to say there aren’t plenty of examples of people being wrong outside their domain, but that’s not even a problem. Being confidently wrong would be one. Unfortunately, that’s not how the incentives are set in most places.
- barathr 3y ago
  Chapman wrote a nice piece on what a hypothetical "meta-rational" workplace, one with a lot of interdisciplinarity and generalists -- would be like: https://metarationality.com/meta-rational-workplace https://metarationality.com/meta-rational-workplace
- pixl97 3y ago
  The fact is we need both. A team of generalists and specialists should be able to achieve far more than one or another. Specialists have deep domain knowledge and experience, but at the same time they are "standing too close to the elephant". Generalists, especially those that have shallower experience but over a wide range of different domains can provide a framework of analogies that can bridge the gap between domains.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

> diversity is creative and resilient. I spent a majority of my career in "R&D-heavy" companies, so I'm fairly used to diverse teams.

mananaysiempre 3y ago

> Specialization is productive and efficient [...] ... When the solution fits inside the lines of a particular specialty; otherwise, you need a different specialist, and knowing which one is not at all trivial. From time to time, the solution doesn’t fit within any established lines, in which case you’ll never find it at all this way. Which is why the commonly expressed sentiment that domain experts should stick to their domains of expertise drives me up the wall. Especially the experts in question are scientists and the specific lines can be ... less than well established, to put it mildly. That is not to say there aren’t plenty of examples of people being wrong outside their domain, but that’s not even a problem. Being confidently wrong would be one. Unfortunately, that’s not how the incentives are set in most places.

barathr 3y ago
Chapman wrote a nice piece on what a hypothetical "meta-rational" workplace, one with a lot of interdisciplinarity and generalists -- would be like: https://metarationality.com/meta-rational-workplace https://metarationality.com/meta-rational-workplace
pixl97 3y ago
The fact is we need both. A team of generalists and specialists should be able to achieve far more than one or another. Specialists have deep domain knowledge and experience, but at the same time they are "standing too close to the elephant". Generalists, especially those that have shallower experience but over a wide range of different domains can provide a framework of analogies that can bridge the gap between domains.