When I was an undergrad, I used to reach out to alumni for all sorts of curiosity conversations to learn about their respective career paths and life interests. In all of these chats, I would inevitably ask the same question over and over: "Is it better to be a specialist or a generalist?"
Some people said that it was better to be a specialist since generalists have a cursory knowledge that isn't sufficient to push any fields forward — the "jack of all trades, master of none" argument. Others argued that specialization is for insects, and generalists were able to see the forest for the trees and avoid myopic mistakes that plague specialists.
I now realize that was the wrong question, attempting to force a binary decision between being a specialist or a generalist. In the modern age where software is eating the world, you need both specialized knowledge (in multiple domains) paired with general understanding.
When Mark Zuckerberg was building Facebook at Harvard, there was no way he could have predicted that Facebook's influence would grow so much that he would have to testify in front of Congress. Today, Facebook's leader must be facile in not only machine learning and the design of data-intensive systems, but ethics, regulations, politics, and so much more. Zuckerberg's technical expertise is a necessary but not sufficient condition for Facebook's continued survival.
Specialization is not enough. The nature of technology and its potential spillover effects requires deep care from its leaders — with great power comes great responsibility.
On the other side of the table, we have the senators and representatives who drilled into Mark Zuckerberg on Capitol Hill. These men and women are responsible for drafting and ratifying legislation across the entirety of American industry — education, energy, transportation, healthcare, technology, and everything else — demonstrating a broad understanding which seems to imply a generalist perspective.1 Yet, there's the illusion of knowledge in these generalist populations.
Perhaps the ultimate demonstration of this was when a senator asked Zuckerberg how Facebook could run such a large business that was free to users. Zuckerberg, a flash of bemusement flitted almost imperceptibly across his face, responded: "Senator, we run ads."
These critiques aren't meant as moral condemnations against individual people, but simply as illustrations of a harsh reality. The 21st century is an incredibly difficult environment, with interconnections between every single domain. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the world of technology.
Each of these groups was right in their critiques of the other. Specialists are vulnerable to the Einstellung effect and the inflexibility to reason and explore different conceptual frameworks outside their domains; when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Generalists often suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect and inflated confidence, and they often realize their abstractions are much leakier than they had initially realized.
There's no free lunch here — there are no perfect solutions, but there are only tradeoffs. We only have so much time and ability to learn information. A common piece of advice is to become a "T-shaped" person. A "T-shaped" person is someone who has deep expertise in one singular topic and also has a general understanding across a breadth of other topics.
We should push this further, realizing that a grasp of the intricacies of a few disciplines allows you to access more of the adjacent possible, fueling connection insights. I believe it's better to be an "M-shaped" person: develop expertise in a few orthogonal disciplines, and then supplement it with a rich understanding of mental models derived from exploration of other topics. Understand enough about the base ideas in every discipline, such that you can still interface with experts in any arbitrary field.
What is almost certainly true is that the world is on an accelerating pace of change. There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.
The cognitive toolkit of an M-shaped person gives you the best chance to adapt to the constantly shifting complex world that we live in.
Alternatively, help support my reading habit (and/or my tuition) so I can be slightly less cash flow negative.
You can argue that they don't even have a generalist understanding of these topics, which makes the legislative process even scarier.