The rise of the specialist

Do yourself a favour and read 'Out of our minds' by Ken Robinson. No sooner had I written about how Garr Reynolds had introduced him to me through his blog, Garr co-incidentally wrote another post about him the next day and linked to this short clip...
In 'Out of our minds', Robinson looks at the challenges we face in approaching a new world and the need to redefine how we go about seeking out intelligence, and in particular creativity. We need to look across definitions and categories, 'bright' and 'stupid', and actively seek new solutions to new problems.

While many of his points jumped out at me, one in particular stands out...

'Individual mathematicians, for example, can usually deal competently with only a small part of mathematics. It is a rare mathematician who fully understands more than half a dozen out of 50 papers presented to a mathematical congress. According to Michael Polanyi, the very language in which the others who are presented goes clear over the head of the person who follows the six reports nearest to their own speciality. Adding to this my own experience in chemistry and physics, it seems to me that the situation may be similar for all major scientific provinces, so that any single scientist may be competent to judge at first-hand only about a hundredth of the total current output of science.'

Anyone who has had the 'fortune' of attending profession specific conferences knows exactly what this quote means. I don't think the answer is that we need to dumb down conferences. I think TED has the right idea. You limit presentations to 20 minutes and you target the presentations at 'bright' people, but people from completely different disciplines to you. Those who are able to get the most out of your papers academically will read them anyway, but what the conferences could do would be to spark ideas. Stop just having actuarial, financial planning, accounting, medical, engineering etc. conferences. We need to start having more cross-disciplinary exchanges. We need to stop defining ourselves narrowly.

Yes, there is still a need and perhaps a growing need for super-specialists since it is virtually impossible to have a grasp of the full big picture. Technology and science have progressed so fast that each expert can only really be an expert in one link in the chain.

But, along with Robinson, I bet that the real jump in ideas will come when we start looking beyond... when we think in pictures, in words, in movement and in sound, and when we learn to listen to each other.

Exciting Times.