The Generalist's Dilemma
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hippiesque.com
Generalists are more likely to do that than specialists. And in my experience they are more fun to hang out with.
However it is true that nobody can be good at everything. Therefore one of the most important skills there are IMO is realizing who is better than you at what. In fact I consider people who can keep track of the skills of people around them to be valuable in their own right. But my experience is that people who gain this ability inevitably learn something about a lot of different things. Therefore people with this key ability tend to be generalists!
Therefore I value specialists, but prefer a good generalist more. Particularly in a small organization where people get varied responsibilities.
Disclaimer: I am a generalist and hence am quite biased. (In case that wasn't obvious.)
This is the premise to the book "The Medici Effect" by Frans Johansson, which states that innovation is found in the intersections between disciplines. It's a good read.
Go for depth. Go for breadth. Just don't be shallow and narrow.
Scour the earth for things you love, then plumb their depths entirely.
agreed! what's to prevent you from going into depth in 1 (or maybe 2-3) things, and then going for breadth on a dozen more, getting decently at good at them as hobbies but not becoming world-class? seems like a good balance. 1-2 things in which you're an expert, and 6-8 more in which you're a proficient hobbyist
Beautifully articulated!
Ideally, you'd have to compare generalists who are mediocre in lots of fields with a specialist whom is very good on a field.
Or, in your case, like you said (being an accomplished practitioner of many different fields), comparing that to being like Marie Curie or Einstein, to quote your examples. That is, if you took all the time and effort from being a writer, orchestra musician, etc, and put it into a single field.
Even if you can say your life's been very fulfilling (and you're probably right), its a hard argument for the generalist to say he's better than the specialist in the specialists' field.
As for 'you can't be good at everything', that really means 'you wont be as good as you can be at something if you keep learning everything'. But putting in lots of work on everything obviously make you good on everything.
But even mozart, being very talented a musician in a young age, had to choose (at age 4?) the violin or the piano (he chose the later)
Isn't the whole point of the essay to suggest that generalists need not be mediocre at all? It's not obvious that the energy spread over several activities would be as efficiently spent on one specialist activity - if you do (without proof) assume that that's feasible, then that's actually begging the question...
Suppose Alice and Bob have similar levels of talent. Alice spent 10000 hours learning the piano. Bob spent 2000 hours learning the piano, 2000 learning the violin, 2000 learning percussion, 2000 learning to sing and 2000 writing a novel. The above argues that Alice will be better at playing the piano than Bob. Probably not five times better (assuming that could be defined in a sensible fashion) - there are diminishing returns - but still better.
It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive...
-Oriah Mountain Dreamer, "The Invitation"
1. Become a specialist
2. Become a generalist
This has two advantages. Firstly, you'll be useful and employable in your youth, since a specialist with a few years' experience is a valuable asset, but a half-baked generalist is pretty useless. Secondly, and more importantly, you'll know what it's like to really understand a subject, which should help you in your quest to partially understand all the others.
I humbly submit that this single idea is the root of so much of the mental incompetence in the world today. It encourages the spread of religion and it's comparison with real science, it discourages attempting to comprehend and apply deep unifying principles between all things and a breadth of thought that comes far easier when one isn't afraid of exposing their preconceived ideas and views to the light of critical enquiry.
Last but not least, it encourages the emergence of a political class that at best exists purely to coordinate and rule the "underclass" specialists, and at worst offers no independent value themselves.
I might not be a true Master, but I can tell learning the inner workings of an API that's only lasts for 10 years is not the way to get there. ASM, C, LISP, and SQL are far more important than Rails.
PS: I am all for Memorizing constants but API's are a dime a dozen. One of the few masters I have seen rewrote a system ~90% from scratch in 3 weeks in a language he had never seen that a well respected team was unable to finish in a year.
Edit: Focus on the things that let you do a month long task in a a few days not a hour long task in minutes because the little short cuts are easily found when you need them but the big stuff is far harder to stumble upon when you need it.
An attempt at an analogy; I assume you're familiar with jQuery as that's your nickname so I'll use that. One could memorise every single API method and syntactical quirk of the framework and be rightfully considered a specialist, but this does not innately suggest that they understand the absolute multitude of concepts that are likely to be bought together in a project making use of this specialty, or how the fabric of a jQuery object might be incorporated into a larger project using a full polyglot of development languages and spanning JRuby, Java, Groovy, Scheme, Scala etc. Knowing the underlying concepts that unite them gives a person the ability to solve problems in any one specific area potentially better than someone who had simply memorised all the API documentation for the jQuery framework.
Going through the rote memorisation of all these disparate things you're likely to eventually notice the patterns and ideas that they share, but in my opinion this is a backward way of doing things. Starting with patterns and ideas and fleshing out the specifics with reference documentation on a case by case basis has always been my preferred approach, it's much easier to find a base pattern and go through it's iterations than it is to simply memorise all the potential iterations of a given pattern. How easy is it to memorise a table of results on several thousand experiments demonstrating F=ma compared to simply applying F=ma several thousand times?
Even more so with something that moves as fast as development; when the framework changes and your memorised documentation needs to be updated, it is much easier to understand the change from the perspective of cause and effect rather than just "here's how it was including all edge cases and implications, and here's how it is now, including all edge cases and implications."
The manner of specialization also depends on the field. In programming we have the luxury of time and a search engine, so knowing basic concepts are more important than API details. A surgeon has no such luxury--your heart transplant specialist had better know everything down cold.
Granted, when someone shows up in the ER with a gunshot wound they don't have the time, but that's hack and slash medicine where the goal to keep the patent alive for the next few hours so they can get time to deal with any major problems.
Anyway, that is not intended as an argument in favor of religious belief today. But it's worth asking whether any rational justification could have been given in the 13th century for a belief in the deep underlying unity of the universe, before we had available the fruits of the research based on that assumption. I think it would have been far more sensible in those days to believe that the universe is just a complicated place with a lot of different kinds of stuff in it, and a lot of different kinds of principle governing what happens to that stuff.
Interestingly, this sort of pluralistic conception of reality is coming back into fashion in some circles, under the heading of the "dappled universe". Nancy Cartwright's work on these topics is really interesting. (FTR: She is trained as a physicist and has no religious agenda.) It's actually shocking how little reason there is to believe in a single set of underlying natural laws when you consider these issues with an open mind.
edit: There's a good (somewhat critical) review of one of Cartwright's book's here [doc]: http://personal.lse.ac.uk/CARTWRIG/PDF%20various/Book%20revi...
What's the alternative to a single set of natural laws?
Perhaps one set of natural laws that applies around here, and a slightly different set that applies in Andromeda, but only on Tuesdays? But surely the two sets, plus the Andromeda/Tuesdays restriction, put together form one slightly more complicated set of physical laws?
Perhaps an infinite set of subtly different natural laws which apply at different points in space and time? But that's still just one very large set of laws, right?
I take the point that however many natural laws there are, there is a set containing all of them. However, you did delete the important adjective "underlying" when asking your question. Isn't it pretty clear what it would mean for there to be no single set of underlying natural laws? It would mean, for example, that laws of chemistry would not necessarily be reducible to laws of physics, laws of psychology would not necessarily be reducible to laws of biology, etc. etc. You may think that this is wrong, but it's a perfectly intelligible idea.
Cartwright argues that there is no "ultimate", universal set of laws to which all other true laws inevitably reduce. From her point of view, laws are relatively local and specific. She goes through a lot of physical phenomena, particularly involving lasers, and shows that although physicists are able to make very precise predictions, they virtually never make these predictions merely by special-casing general principles. Her argument (which I don't have the space or expertise to summarize here) is that there is consequently no reason to think that the general principles are really true, even though they are fantastically interesting and useful.
Also, you seem to be tacitly assuming that all natural laws are necessarily going to be laws of physics, but that is one of the questions at issue. E.g., are we right to assume that all the laws of chemistry are "in principle" reducible to physics, even though we can never hope to make such a reduction in practice? Perhaps that is just a kind of unjustified faith in the unity of reality.
Anyway, I am sort of on the fence on these issues, but I found her arguments unexpectedly persuasive. It really is surprising how non-stupid the idea of a pluralistic reality is when you look at these questions in detail.
Actually, making that reduction in practice is pretty much what I do for a living.
This is not in any way intended as a criticism of physicists or chemists, in case it comes across like that. They're both incredibly successful at what they do.
Just googling around, this paper gives quite a nice overview of what sensible scepticism about the possibility of reduction looks like: http://www.springerlink.com/content/v05g613468p6xk17/
Even if that were granted, I'm still not so certain that it makes sense. Humans have been finding laws to apply for much of recorded history. I realise it's quite a long way from the elegance of something like general relativity to the simplicity of something like pythagoras' theorem, but the emergence of the former depended upon the epistemological grounding of the latter.
It was not my intent to make allusions to a unifying great spirit or any such nonsense, merely that for the vast majority of recorded history searching for the patterns and relations in material reality has given humanity most of it's most spectacular successes. To cast this all away and try to parcel everything into microscopic localities which are not thematically related at all and thus discard what can be learned by taking a wider view.
That said, I'll check out the dappled universe idea, I've not come across it before. It amuses me more than a little that this particular concept is being pushed by someone neatly straddling the disciplines of philosophy and physics though, isn't that in itself something of a defense of a broader view?
Oh yes, of course. But there's a lot of middle ground between a complete jumble and complete unity. I don't think anyone is suggesting that there are no regularities at all, just that the ones that there are may be relatively local and particular. (They're still pretty damn impressive for all that, though.)
I think this is an aesthetic problem in a way. Everyone seems to have a kind of Platonic aesthetic these days -- everything has to be ultimately simple and unified and abstractly beautiful. If you'll excuse a stupid metaphor, it's sort of a question of how you visualize God's office. Does it just have a plain desk with a couple of pens and two equations written neatly on a notepad, or is it a huge jumble of dusty books and papers covering every conceivable topic at every conceivable level of analysis? I think part of the reason for my "conversion" to the dappled view of things was that I started to find the Platonic aesthetic less and less appealing. (Of course, it might be a really bad idea to let aesthetic considerations have this much influence, but maybe that's another topic.)
>It amuses me more than a little that this particular concept is being pushed by someone neatly straddling the disciplines of philosophy and physics though, isn't that in itself something of a defense of a broader view?
I think it's a bad kind of slippery slope argument to go from "there are some interesting connections between some things" (certainly true) to "everything is deeply connected and unified" (plausible, appealing in some ways, but not something a rational person has to believe).
So many times I see a cool new API and say that would be great to have a play around with if I had the time.
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The author never claims to be great at everything; merely to be good at many things. Your point is not ridiculous, but it is mostly irrelevant. To be fair, I don't think you deserved the downvote, but I can see why it might be given.
If the author was merely arguing that one can be good at many things, then he/she was burning down a strawman, because no one who says "Jack of all trades, Master of none" is saying that a Jack is no good.
Anyway I deleted my post because I felt it was detracting from the discussion above.