But then, you have to discern whether the person in front of you is an actual generalist or an ADDled dilettante who spent their formative years just flitting from subject to subject.
From The Brownstone Institute, May 1:
In 1893, French sociologist Emile Durkheim remarked in his treatise, The Division of Labour in Society, that humanity grew more prosperous due to greater specialisation. His insight has gone virtually unchallenged since, both among sociologists and economists: ‘we’ nearly all agree that with greater specialisation, technology improves and total productivity increases, leading to higher levels of health and happiness.Specialisation is both the benefit and the motor of international trade, of tranquil domestic relations, of extended education programs, and of technological innovation. The praises of specialisation have been sung for over a century.
So what’s the catch?
The more that the knowledge held in people’s heads is super-specialised, the less any individual knows about the whole picture, and the more he must blindly trust that ‘the system’ functions properly. Abuse of that trust then becomes possible by people in other parts of the system, and by those empowered to oversee the system. It also gets easier for anyone to get away with doing really stupid things, because so few people will be able to judge whether something being done is really stupid.
This is a big catch, and it is getting bigger all the time.
Super-specialists are like smart, enthusiastic 12-year-olds who get great grades in science class but know almost nothing about how the world works and need an ‘adult in the room’ to stop them from making big mistakes. The adult in the room is the generalist, able to see far more than the 12-year-old and stop him and his inflated sense of understanding from breaking the TV, poisoning the guinea pig, or setting the garage on fire.
One of the major problems in Western society has become the retreat of the adults, and the gradual takeover of the tweenies.
The advent of specialisation
How much does the average person today really know about the world?Imagine a simple society with just 5 specialised professions – say, hunter, gatherer, priest, medic, and warrior – and suppose everyone in each profession reaches total mastery of knowledge in his field. Assuming no overlap in knowledge, each trained person then knows 20 percent of what is known by professionals in this simple society. With 100 professions, each person knows 1 percent of society’s stock of professional knowledge.
If there are thousands of professions, as is the case today, then each professional knows only a tiny fraction of total knowledge, and is basically clueless about the whole picture. If you are very smart or specialise in a field whose knowledge overlaps with that of other fields, then you might know more than your fair share, but still you will know almost nothing about the whole system....
....MUCH MORE
If interested see also 2015's "So You Think You're Smart: The Last Person To Know Everything", now with rotted links but still unique and accessible.
