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Specialization Quotes

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Specialization Quotes

“And the system pretends to go along, to become more supple and resourceful, less dependent on rigid categories. But even as desire tends to specialize, going silky and intimate, the force of converging markets produces an instantaneous capital that shoots across horizons at the speed of light, making for a certain furtive sameness, a planing away of particulars that affects everything from architecture to leisure time to the way people eat and sleep and dream.”

DesireCategoriesConsumptionSimilaritySpecializationProduction
Book:Underworld
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“I see a role for specialized knowledge, but I think that it's important for there to be an arena where it is shared, where it is communicated. It's not that somebody shouldn't have specialized knowledge. The ability to dig a trench and lay a cable is a kind of specialized knowledge. Farmers have specialized knowledge, too. The question is: what sort of knowledge is privileged in our societies? I don't think that a CEO is more valuable to society and ought to be paid ten million dollars a year, while farmers and laborers starve. The range of what is valued has become so extreme that one lot of people have captured it and left three-quarters of the world to live in unthinkable poverty, because their work is not valued. What would happen if the sweepers of the city went on strike or the sewage system didn't work? A CEO wouldn't be able to deal with his own shit.”

PovertyKnowledgeSpecializationCeos
Book:The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations With Arundhati Roy
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“The greatest thing about our times is that you don't need permission to express yourself the way you wish. Sometimes people tell themselves they can't do it, because they're missing this or that, but historically, specialization is a recent convention. Most of us are born natural polymaths.”

SelfSelf EsteemSelf HelpExpressionSelf ImprovementPersonal GrowthPersonal DevelopmentSelf ConfidenceSelf MotivationConventionsPermissionSpecializationConventionPolymathsExpressing YourselfPolymathSpecialistExpressing OneselfConventionalismSpecializeExpressingConventional ThinkingPermission Of Others
Author:Nuno Roque
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“This leaves us with the urgent question: How can we be or become a caring community, a community of people not trying to cover the pain or to avoid it by sophisticated bypasses, but rather share it as the source of healing and new life? It is important to realize that you cannot get a Ph.D. in caring, that caring cannot be delegated by specialists, and that therefore nobody can be excused from caring. Still, in a society like ours, we have a strong tendency to refer to specialists. When someone does not feel well, we quickly think, 'Where can we find a doctor?' When someone is confused, we easily advise him to go to a counselor. And when someone is dying, we quickly call a priest. Even when someone wants to pray we wonder if there is a minister around.”

ChurchCaringMinistrySpecializationPriesthood Of All Believers
Book:Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian Life
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“Of course, I am interested, but I would not dare to talk about them. In talking about the impact of ideas in one field on ideas in another field, one is always apt to make a fool of oneself. In these days of specialization there are too few people who have such a deep understanding of two departments of our knowledge that they do not make fools of themselves in one or the other.”

InspirationalLearningSelf AwarenessThought ProvokingSpecialization
Book:The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist
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“When a domain reaches a point where the knowledge for skillful professional practice cannot be acquired in a decade, more or less, then several adaptive developments are likely to occur. Specialization will usually increase (as it has, for example, in medicine), and practitioners will make increasing use of books and other external reference aids in their work. Architecture is a good example of a domain where much of the information a professional requires is stored in reference works, such as catalogues of available building materials, equipment, and components, and official building codes. No architect expects to keep all of this in his head or to design without frequent resort to these information sources. In fact architecture can almost be taken as a prototype for the process of design in a semantically rich task domain. The emerging design is itself incorporated in a set of external memory structures: sketches, floor plans, drawings of utility systems, and so on. At each stage in the design process, partial design reflected in these documents serves as a major stimulus suggesting to the designer what he should attend to next. This direction to new sub-goals permits in turn new information to be extracted from memory and reference sources and another step to be taken toward the development of the design.”

LearningArchitectureExpertiseRememberingSpecializationCognitive ScienceInformation Organization
Book:The Sciences of the Artificial
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“High Elf Archer: More and more demons have appeared near the capital lately, as I’m sure you know. Goblin Slayer: I do not. High Elf Archer: It’s due to the revival of the Dark Gods. They’re building an army to destroy the world! Goblin Slayer: I see. High Elf Archer: …And we were hoping… with your help… Goblin Slayer: Find someone else. I hunt goblins or nothing.”

ObsessionSpecialization
Book:Goblin Slayer, Vol. 2
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“I spent most of my life trying to specialize myself. I went to theater school, film school, music school, mime school ... Finally, I was able to gather enough knowledge to build the confidence to create my own work, that goes utterly against the sense of specialization.”

KnowledgeConfidenceConformitySchoolsSpecialistsMultiplicityKnowledge Of SelfKnowledge WisdomSchool SystemKnowing OneselfSpecializationSchool QuotesKnowledge EducationMultitaskingPolymathsPolymathSchool Of LifeSpecialized
Author:Nuno Roque
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“The quality of our thinking is largely influenced by the mental models in our heads. While we want accurate models, we also want a wide variety of models to uncover what’s really happening. The key here is variety. Most of us study something specific and don’t get exposure to the big ideas of other disciplines. We don’t develop the multidisciplinary mindset that we need to accurately see a problem. And because we don’t have the right models to understand the situation, we overuse the models we do have and use them even when they don’t belong. You’ve likely experienced this first hand. An engineer will often think in terms of systems by default. A psychologist will think in terms of incentives. A business person might think in terms of opportunity cost and risk-reward. Through their disciplines, each of these people sees part of the situation, the part of the world that makes sense to them. None of them, however, see the entire situation unless they are thinking in a multidisciplinary way. In short, they have blind spots. Big blind spots. And they’re not aware of their blind spots. [...] Relying on only a few models is like having a 400-horsepower brain that’s only generating 50 horsepower of output. To increase your mental efficiency and reach your 400-horsepower potential, you need to use a latticework of mental models. Exactly the same sort of pattern that graces backyards everywhere, a lattice is a series of points that connect to and reinforce each other. The Great Models can be understood in the same way—models influence and interact with each other to create a structure that can be used to evaluate and understand ideas. [...] Without a latticework of the Great Models our decisions become harder, slower, and less creative. But by using a mental models approach, we can complement our specializations by being curious about how the rest of the world works. A quick glance at the Nobel Prize winners list show that many of them, obviously extreme specialists in something, had multidisciplinary interests that supported their achievements. [...] The more high-quality mental models you have in your mental toolbox, the more likely you will have the ones needed to understand the problem. And understanding is everything. The better you understand, the better the potential actions you can take. The better the potential actions, the fewer problems you’ll encounter down the road. Better models make better decisions.”

Decision MakingRationalityRational ThinkingSpecializationBlind SpotsCrossfunctional ManagementModel ThinkingMultidisciplinarity
Book:The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts
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“It was the end of the era of the amateur, a time when everyone had to be a bit of everything. You helped your neighbors build their homes, fight their fires, raise and butcher and preserve their own food. You knew how to repair a weapon, pull a tooth, hammer a horseshoe, and deliver a child. But industrialization fostered specialization—and it was fantastic. Trained pros were better than self-taught amateurs, and their expertise allowed them to demand and develop better tools for their crafts—tools that only they knew how to operate. Over time, a subtle cancer spread: where you have more experts, you create more bystanders. Professionals did all the fighting and fixing we used to handle ourselves; they even took over our fun, playing our sports while we sat back and watched.”

Self RelianceSpecializationIndustrializationProfessionalsAmateurs
Book:Natural Born Heroes: How a Daring Band of Misfits Mastered the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance
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“Extreme specialization has been the greatest disaster of the modern academic world. It has created narrow Mandarins, ignorant of the universal nature of reality, incapable of connecting concepts from different fields to bring everything together in one ultimate, unified subject. The AC is everything the academic world is not. It’s about connecting everything. It demands that people be generalists, not the most narrow, blinkered specialists.”

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Author:David Sinclair
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“Favoring specialization over intelligence is exactly wrong, especially in high tech. The world is changing so fast across every industry and endeavor that it's a given the role for which you're hiring is going to change. Yesterday's widget will be obsolete tomorrow, and hiring a specialist in such a dynamic environment can backfire. A specialist brings an inherent bias to solving problems that spawns from the very expertise that is his putative advantage, and may be threatened by a new type of solution that requires new expertise. A smart generalist doesn't have bias, so is free to survey the wide range of solutions and gravitate to the best one.”

IntelligenceHiringSpecializationSpecialistGeneralist
Book:How Google Works
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“an official with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission learned I was writing about specialization and contacted me to make sure I knew that specialization had played a critical role in the 2008 global financial crisis. “Insurance regulators regulated insurance, bank regulators regulated banks, securities regulators regulated securities, and consumer regulators regulated consumers,” the official told me. “But the provision of credit goes across all those markets. So we specialized products, we specialized regulation, and the question is, ‘Who looks across those markets?’ The specialized approach to regulation missed systemic issues.”

RegulationFinancial CrisisSpecialization
Book:Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
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“Imagine if one should drag an innocent passer-by from the street to the operating room of a nearby hospital and force him at gunpoint to perform a delicate operation. The man would burst into tears. However, if one were to ask him to sound off on problems such as nuclear experiments, Vietnam, the borders of Israel, support for Indonesia, aid to Latin America, or recognition of Red China, in most cases he would start spouting opinions.”

PoliticsDemocracyExpertsSpecialistsSpecializationUniversal Suffrage
Book:Leftism Revisited: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot
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“There must be bands of enthusiasts for everything on earth-fanatics who shared a vocabulary, a batch of technical skills and equipment, and, perhaps, a vision of some single slice of the beauty and mystery of things, of their complexity, fascination, and unexpectedness.”

EarthWorkVisionMysteryBandSkillsComplexityHobbiesEquipmentVocabularyFascinationFanaticsSpecializationTechnical SkillsUnexpectedness
Book:An American Childhood
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“In the general tendency toward specialization, philosophy too has established itself as a specialized discipline, one purified of all specific content. In so doing, philosophy has denied its own constitutive concept: the intellectual freedom that does not obey the dictates of specialized knowledge.”

DoePhilosophyDisciplineIntellectualConceptsTendenciesDeniedSpecializationIntellectual Freedom
Book:Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords
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“Let us admit that most of us writers feel an essential aversion to politics. By taking such a position, however, we accept the perverted principle of specialization, according to which some are paid to write about the horrors of the world and human responsibility and others to deal with those horrors and bear the human responsibility for them.”

WorldFeelsWritingHumansDealsResponsibilityAcceptingPrinciplesPositionBearsHorrorEssentialsPaidAversionSpecialization
Author:Vaclav Havel
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“When profits are pursued by geographic interchange of goods, so that commerce for profit becomes the central mechanism of the system, we usually call it "commercial capitalism." In such a system goods are conveyed from ares where they are more common (and therefore cheaper) to areas where they are less common (and therefore less cheap). This process leads to regional specialization and to division of labor, both in agricultural production and in handicrafts.”

ProcessCommonCapitalismAreasLaborProfitProductionsGoodsDivisionMechanismCommercePursuedCheaperSpecializationInterchangeDivision Of LaborHandicrafts
Author:Carroll Quigley
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“Specialization and organization are the basis of human progress.”

HumansProgressOrganizationBasesHuman ProgressSpecialization
Book:Women and Economics - A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution: From the famous American writer, feminist, social reformer and a respected sociologist who holds an important place in feminist fiction, well-known for her stories The Yellow Wallpaper and Herland
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“We develop all our sciences, archeology, cosmology, psychology, we tabulate and classify and cling to our sacred definitions, our divisions, without any attempt to synthesis, without the humility to see that these are only parts of a total knowledge. ... But somehow we ought to be able to keep the idea of the totality of experience and knowledge at the back of our minds even though the front's busy from morning til night with the life cycle of the liver fluke.”

MindIdeasAbleNightKnowledgeMorningPsychologyFrontsHumilityOughtSacredBusyDefinitionsCyclesDivisionCosmologyTotalityLiverSynthesisSpecializationFlukesArcheology
Author:Maureen Duffy
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“The profession of magician, is one of the most perilous and arduous specializations of the imagination. On the one hand there is the hostility of God and the police to be guarded against; on the other it is as difficult as music, as deep as poetry, as ingenious as stage-craft, as nervous as the manufacture of high explosives, and as delicate as the trade in narcotics.”

HandsDifficultImaginationMagicStagePoliceTradeProfessionNervousCraftsDelicateMagicianHostilityIngeniousGuardedExplosivesSpecializationNarcotics
Author:William Bolitho
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“In 1600 the specialization of games and pastimes did not extend beyond infancy; after the age of three or four it decreased and disappeared. From then on the child played the same games as the adult, either with other children or with adults. . . . Conversely, adults used to play games which today only children play.”

ChildrenPlayAgeTodayUsedThreeGamesFourAdultsInfancyPastimeOnly ChildSpecializationChildren Playing
Book:Centuries of childhood: a social history of family life
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