
Why Specialists are Grumpy and Generalists are Happy - byrneseyeview
http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/02/why_specialists.html
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ecuzzillo
Initially, the title bugged me because I generally associate specialists as
people who are actually good as something (anything), and generalists with
people who aren't, and therefore defend their lack of goodness by calling
themselves generalists. This is probably the more mainstream use of the term.
For instance, a computer science generalist might be very happy, because he's
good at many different kinds of software and computing, and can use many
different techniques to achieve a goal, but a journalist would call him a
computer science specialist. A computer science specialist, by contrast, is
somebody like a professor of PL research who has poured his entire career, and
especially his journey to tenure, into a useless pedantic language that no one
will ever use. To a journalist, both are specialists, but to a CS guy, the
first is a generalist, and the second is a specialist. So, if you were a
journalist, or more generally not invested in a particular field (let alone
subfield), the essay wouldn't make sense.

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dood
What if you specialize in generality? I guess that explains those mood swings.

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DanielBMarkham
I had to mod you up for the recursion effect.

Of course, the guy in this article specializes in generalizing about
specialists, so that must make him very unhappy.

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MuddyMo
Willie Nelson might sing it thus,

"Mothers, don't let your boys grow up to be a Mycologist studying the genetic
basis of host response to invasive pulmonary aspergillosis"

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pixcavator
Why Experts are Grumpy and Amateurs are Happy.

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brent
How is this modded down at all? I've found this is exactly the case.

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bluishgreen
Probably because "Amateurs" is an F word?

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tokipin
mathematics comes to mind as an area with many obscure specialties. i think
the problem is that its abstractedness makes it very easy to place stakes in
horrible places. unfortunately there's no sign of whether or not even the most
obscure construct will have a practical application later on, and there have
been countless surprises

i guess we have to let the kooky math guys play with whatever they want :-\

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yters
And we have universities full of specialists.

