I think the other thing missing is how narrow the knowledge is. Everything is niche and field-specific and narrow nowadays. The world was a much better place when scientists were doing astronomy at night, chemistry on a monday morning and then reading the latest in geology and anthropology on a tuesday afternoon.
Knowledge being narrow makes mid-to-low wis people think they are far smarter than they actually are, and its preventing some important innovation I think. This is one of my soapbox issues.
Generalists are definitely under-appreciated. One of the refuges of the scientismo is to knock people back by saying akshully black is white because you don't have enough detailed knowledge in X field.
It has ramifications for human progress for sure. I was recently watching the Tucker podcast with Casey Means, the former surgeon and health researcher. She described medical education in the USA as multiple disciplines where no specialist is ever taught to look at the whole system of the body, hardly any being taught about nutrition for example. And as it turns out, of course, one of the best ways to never reach a solution to a profitable problem (chronic health issues in the wider public) is to break it down into various sub-specialties, all of which need their own paid specialist, gatekeeping their field using opaque language, and discouraging them from talking to eachother or from forming a generalised overview of how human health works. So you end up just finding multiple expensive non-solutions and that's more important than being actually correct, because you respected all the various specialists sufficiently and you followed the accepted process.
I think the other thing missing is how narrow the knowledge is. Everything is niche and field-specific and narrow nowadays. The world was a much better place when scientists were doing astronomy at night, chemistry on a monday morning and then reading the latest in geology and anthropology on a tuesday afternoon.
Knowledge being narrow makes mid-to-low wis people think they are far smarter than they actually are, and its preventing some important innovation I think. This is one of my soapbox issues.
Generalists are definitely under-appreciated. One of the refuges of the scientismo is to knock people back by saying akshully black is white because you don't have enough detailed knowledge in X field.
It has ramifications for human progress for sure. I was recently watching the Tucker podcast with Casey Means, the former surgeon and health researcher. She described medical education in the USA as multiple disciplines where no specialist is ever taught to look at the whole system of the body, hardly any being taught about nutrition for example. And as it turns out, of course, one of the best ways to never reach a solution to a profitable problem (chronic health issues in the wider public) is to break it down into various sub-specialties, all of which need their own paid specialist, gatekeeping their field using opaque language, and discouraging them from talking to eachother or from forming a generalised overview of how human health works. So you end up just finding multiple expensive non-solutions and that's more important than being actually correct, because you respected all the various specialists sufficiently and you followed the accepted process.