Yostivanich

Recently Steve Rubel posted about What’s the Future Like for a “Renais­sance Man” in a Con­nected World?. In this post he dis­cuses how even though we would think that with the inter­net an indi­vid­ual could have broad knowl­edge about the world, instead peo­ple spe­cial­ize in their par­tic­u­lar area of exper­tise. He then says that he him­self has instead shifted to being spe­cial­ist rather than a broad spec­trum of knowledge.

I find this puz­zling, for sev­eral rea­sons. First off I have seen the inter­net both increase my knowl­edge in spe­cific areas that I deeply value as well as increase my knowl­edge in areas that I may not be overly inter­ested in. The inter­net brings to me a great vari­ety of infor­ma­tion that is mine to read and ana­lyze and digest. Of course it prob­a­bly helps that with the excep­tion of few sub­jects (sports and farm­ing) I am gen­uinely inter­ested in just about every­thing. From all areas of sci­en­tific research, com­put­ing and tech­nol­ogy of course, psy­chol­ogy, social sci­ences, med­i­cine, pol­i­tics, you name I have on some level a gen­uine inter­est in it.

I think one can gen­uinely spe­cial­ize in a par­tic­u­lar field, in my case pro­gram­ming with regards to Java, PHP and AJAX. But at the same time I can and do read up on a vari­ety of infor­ma­tion on a host of other fields and sub­ject areas. Part of the rea­son I write this blog is to edu­cate myself on a vari­ety of sub­jects. Granted a lot of posts cen­ter around tech­nol­ogy as to be excepted, yet I hope to talk about other things. Or take a look at the dif­fer­ent links that I read around the web with my daily links posts. I’m read­ing from 200+ RSS feeds, with any­where from 500 — 1,000 arti­cles a day being read. You know what else, I love it. I love edu­cat­ing myself on some­thing new, I love the idea that I can talk on a decently high enough level on just about any sub­ject. True I may not be able to pre­form a DNA repli­ca­tion, but I know how it works and why it is important.

Spe­cial­iza­tion is not a bad thing, but what hap­pens when all we have are spe­cial­ist. Will peo­ple be able to be inde­pen­dent thinkers or hir­ing a spe­cial­ist to do their think­ing for them? What about man­agers as well, a boss has to be a gen­er­al­ist. A boss has to at least have some knowl­edge of every­thing that his/her employ­ees do even if they don’t spe­cial­ize in it to be able to make a decent decision.

The idea that peo­ple will always defer to the expert in a field is ridicu­lous, humans aren’t that intel­li­gent and we have too much ego in our­selves. Far too many peo­ple do think that they now bet­ter than experts right now, look at Hillary Clin­ton, a very intel­li­gent by all respects woman, who thinks econ­o­mists shouldn’t tell her that sus­pend­ing the 18 cent fed­eral gas tax will do noth­ing to help the aver­age consumer.

We need to be gen­er­al­ists to make deci­sions, spe­cial­iza­tion is good, but going too far is just as bad as know­ing nothing.

Update: I for­got about Seth Godin’s blog post this morn­ing about the same topic in which he argues we should be spe­cial­ist rather than generalist.