A Generalist Manifesto

Traditional wisdom always advices us to narrow down. To specialize, to stay in your lane, to dare not cross over to that which is outside your narrow domain. We do this to each other because it is useful, it is easier to think about a small subset of problems rather than doing the work of finding connections in new areas. We do this because it is easier(1), because it is profitable to be an expert, because people don't want to hire someone that is spread too thin, or because in order to produce something that has not been thought of before, it is best to narrow down as specific as possible. (2)

This is useful, insofar as it allows us to find which areas of distinct knowledge are lacking in our inventory of facts and curiosities about specific disciplines. It is also difficult work, and a lot of bright minds are spending their time attempting to publish their findings in journals which are incentivized to make the distinction of what is relevant to the discipline at hand and what is not. Which box this idea fits in and whether it is relevant to the discipline which it guards. This is not exclusive, and journals have appeared that focus on interdisciplinary approaches to conducting science(3), but after half a century of complexity theory being discovered, validated, and put into practice it is still the exception to think in terms of systems, across disciplines, and strive to get answers to questions which require boldly stepping into the unknown, drawing connections that have never been drawn before. Our world is more complex and interconnected than ever, and our answer still seems to be "specialize further".

So what kind of challenges do we face today? Off the top of my head, in no particular order: - Economic and environmental migration towards industrialized economies, - the possibility of carbon emissions creating irreparable damage to our atmosphere, overconsumption, industrial processes that do not account for externalities, - social cohesion seemingly evaporating due to intolerance towards opposing beliefs - So much human capital being unable to tap into networks of production and global economies - Urban centers becoming overpopulated with unorganized unsanitary and substandard housing conditions - Technological companies moving towards erradicating the notion of private transactions and communication, threatening privacy

The problems faced by each one of these challenges simply cannot be addressed by staying in the domain of a single discipline. Economics, engineering, social theory, communication, game theory, cryptography, manufacturing, logistics, networks, to name a few. It is not only narrow sighted to focus on a single dimension of one of these issues, but insufficient to tackle these problems. Focusing on the problem is useful, but limiting the solution to the domain that you are working in is not. We know that work done in states of deep focus is valuable, but only when combined with wide exploration and drawing connections from distinct ideas that you get to the most valuable insights. (4)

Taking it even further, our specialization in distinct domains makes us not want to tackle these problems. We are likely to say things like, I am just a climate scientist, or I am just an economist instead of venturing to understand the territory which we need to traverse to find a solution which requires the combination of these things. Climate issues will not be solved by climate scientists but by economists, sociologists, urban planners, and engineers working together and drawing connections between things that we usually consider as separate.

The truth is that reality is one massively interconnected and messy spaghetti of synergetic systems that are beyond our comprehension. Every time that we create a model to represent it, or invent a concept to describe it, we reduce the complexity so that our lizard brains can make sense of an extremely thin slice of it all. This is necessary as models are some of the best tools that we have to the impossible task of making sense of an unintelligible totality. Sometimes, we even arrive at useful abstractions in the process. Like George Box says, "[[all models are wrong but some are useful]]".

This is a calling to resist falling in love with our models and our abstractions. Yes, they help us make sense of something too complex to understand, but they are not the thing that we want to understand. Statistics, for example, is useful methodology to see the world through, but let's not get so enamored with the tool that we forget the object of study. We want to get insights into the things that motivate us, into life, into beauty, into living well - however you may define it. Being blinded by the pull of an idea can make us miss the beauty of the world, of what is actually there. In its most extreme scenarios like the case of Joseph Stalin, his deep and twisted passion for an ideal world that would never come to be led him to justify some of the most treacherous and vile human behaviors in history. A beautiful idea can have deep and ugly consequences, especially if it blinds you to what is actually in front of our eyes.

Let me be clear, ideas are useful, and they can bring about beauty in the world as much as destruction. We should not stop our inherent and passionate desire to seek them, to venture to new territories of thought that we have never encountered, to speculate against the abyss of the unknown. We should always keep that inherent curiosity, and nurture that amazing capacity for discovery and representation through artistic, mathematical, and technological mediums. What I am arguing agains, and what many brighter minds have spoken about, that we are blinding ourselves to the object of our inquiries by prioritizing the tools that we have to study them. The result - thinking within my domain, having the audacity to say that the larger problems that we are facing as humans are not mine to solve, that I am not an expert on that, so I shouldn't get into it. Our mind has the capacity to discover relationships between phenomena, intangible principles of the functioning of the universe, models to explain the relationships between these, to say that this is not what we should focus on because it is not our expertise is a truly unfortunate disposition, that we are not able to afford right now. Let's venture to the world that is unknown, that is impossible to comprehend, and let's think about it in new ways that we have not seen before. Let's get an architect's opinion on scaling software, and a botanists opinion on designing bicycles. Let's break down the silos of our minds and aim for something greater that we have achieved. Let's resist society's pressure to think small.

Notes

1. It is easier only in the fact that there is a prescribed way to put in effort and get a result if you specialize. The effort needed is enormous, and I do not intend to make it sound like it is effortless. I do think, however, that it can be easy to waste close to a decade in creating research that will only ever be relevant to the 3 other people that are aware of the topic at this level, and that you will spend the rest of your academic career arguing with until one of you dies. [Back]

2. This is why we end up with thesis' titles that sound like "The evolution of the west indie variant of the proto indo european language during the Poneysian drought of 311 to 315". [Back]

3. The Santa Fe Institute, for example is a model to follow for lateral, widespread, interdisciplinary thinking.[Back]

4. Variable attention facilitates creative problem solving. [Back]