Why Specialists are Grumpy and Generalists are Happy

Initially, the title bugged me because I generally associate specialists as people who are actually good as something (anything), and generalists with people who aren't, and therefore defend their lack of goodness by calling themselves generalists. This is probably the more mainstream use of the term. For instance, a computer science generalist might be very happy, because he's good at many different kinds of software and computing, and can use many different techniques to achieve a goal, but a journalist would call him a computer science specialist. A computer science specialist, by contrast, is somebody like a professor of PL research who has poured his entire career, and especially his journey to tenure, into a useless pedantic language that no one will ever use. To a journalist, both are specialists, but to a CS guy, the first is a generalist, and the second is a specialist. So, if you were a journalist, or more generally not invested in a particular field (let alone subfield), the essay wouldn't make sense.

What if you specialize in generality? I guess that explains those mood swings.

Willie Nelson might sing it thus,

"Mothers, don't let your boys grow up to be a Mycologist studying the genetic basis of host response to invasive pulmonary aspergillosis"

Why Experts are Grumpy and Amateurs are Happy.

mathematics comes to mind as an area with many obscure specialties. i think the problem is that its abstractedness makes it very easy to place stakes in horrible places. unfortunately there's no sign of whether or not even the most obscure construct will have a practical application later on, and there have been countless surprises

i guess we have to let the kooky math guys play with whatever they want :-\

And we have universities full of specialists.