Old-school “natural scientists” knew how to do everything – math, science, philosophy, linguistics, art, engineering… you name it. But there are no Renaissance people anymore. It is a rare person indeed that is multi-lingual, plays an instrument, can discuss history and philosophy at length, plays chess, and is an athlete as well as an aesthete. I am not talking about Sir Isaac Newton or Michelangelo, here – those are extreme examples. But today is not unusual to talk with someone who is tops in their field of interest only to discover that they rapidly are out of their depth when the conversation turns even slightly away from their expertise.
It doesn’t matter if it is football or Star Trek or cooking or hunting or opera or whatever. People are more interested in becoming “subject matter experts” in their own field rather than being somewhat knowledgeable over a wide range of topics. There is very little diversity of intellectual portfolios. The subjects people are comfortable with are becoming more and more specialized with very little overlap between them.
As I talked about in my Intelligence is Bliss post, I feel that all people know roughly the same number of facts – all that changes is the type of facts that each person knows. Instead of a broad and smooth curve covering a huge range of topics that lots of people can relate to, people are focusing more and more on less and less. Because the knowledge peak gets higher and higher, the reward (pay, praise, personal satisfaction, etc.) for that knowledge also goes up and this hides a problem.
The area under the “knowledge curve” has not changed so the base becomes narrower and narrower. The overlaps between people’s knowledge begin to disappear. Let use a Jenga analogy. You only have a certain number of blocks. The higher the blocks, the more unstable the structure. Any way you decide to look at it, this is a problem.
But individually, this is behavior to be praised – it is the very definition of success – so people pursue this goal without regard for what is being ignored. This single-dimensionality is rewarded because it is a very, very good short term strategy for success. It allows for no “back-up plan” because that implies that the primary plan could be just a little bit better if those “wasted” resources were used toward the primary goal instead. To further compound the problem, people actually get angry when terms like “cross-training” are brought up because there is friction and disharmony when someone’s personal fiefdom is threatened.
As another example, picture a couple of dozen plate spinners at a circus sideshow, each with their own plate to deal with. If one person gets tired, needs to go to the bathroom, steps out to feed the lions, or whatever it is no big deal because any of the others can pick up the slack. So why have 24 people on the payroll when 23 can do the job just as well? Or 22? Just bump up the pay a little bit for each of the remaining spinners – the saved money can be spent elsewhere, while the remaining people get a few extra bucks and get to become better at what they do. Win-win.
Over time that line of thinking results in the dependence of one or two highly paid specialists that can do nothing but their primary task. They can’t stop without seriously disrupting things, they can’t (or don’t want to) learn a new skill, no one else in the organization is qualified to take their place, and the budget for hiring and training new people has been used for other things. When that person eventually calls in sick, quits, or gets hit by a bus, knowledge is disrupted and the whole system feels the shock as it struggles to recover.
It is not sustainable. As the buttresses that make up the overlap between our skill sets dissolve the structure becomes weaker and weaker. Every single person is now a fragile yet critical load-bearing entity in some form or fashion. It is only a matter of time before the roof collapses from lack of internal support.
This seems to be a fairly recent phenomenon. Actors and actresses from the 1920s needed to excel at a huge range of skills (acting, dancing, singing, playing an instrument, horseback riding, etc.) just to be considered for a job and they got paid a fraction of what someone today who specializes in just one of those things. Your great-grandfather knew how to do everything from hunting to sewing to building a house, but you are hard pressed to figure out why the mower won’t start or why the fridge is making a funny noise – better call “the guy” and have him come out and look at it. Over the decades, “learned helplessness“ has been nurtured and rewarded by the pursuit of specialization and re-Christened "efficiency".
Expanding the view a bit from a personal or group level we see we are becoming more and more interdependent as a functioning society– not in the way a spider-web becomes stronger with the addition of each new thread, but in the way that the fractures on a thawing pond join just before the ice breaks with a resounding “CRACK”.
(To be continued…)
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