Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

by David Epstein

Ibarra’s new aphorism: “I know who I am when I see what I do.”

“Knowledge is a double-edged sword. It allows you to do some things, but it also makes you blind to other things that you could do.”

Academic departments no longer merely fracture naturally into subspecialties, they elevate narrowness as an ideal.

The more information specialists create, the more opportunity exists for curious dilettantes to contribute by merging strands of widely available but disparate information—undiscovered public knowledge, as Don Swanson called it. The larger and more easily accessible the library of human knowledge, the more chances for inquisitive patrons to make connections at the cutting edge.

Specialist contributions skyrocketed around and after World War II, but more recently have declined. “Specialists specifically peaked about 1985,” Ouderkirk told me. “And then declined pretty dramatically, leveled off about 2007, and the most recent data show it’s declining again, which I’m trying to understand.” He is careful to say that he can’t pinpoint a cause of the current trend. His hypothesis is that organizations simply don’t need as many specialists. “As information becomes more broadly available, the need for somebody to just advance a field isn’t as critical because in effect they are available to everybody,” he said.

Specialization is obvious: keep going straight. Breadth is trickier to grow.

“If you’re working on well-defined and well-understood problems, specialists work very, very well,” he told me. “As ambiguity and uncertainty increases, which is the norm with systems problems, breadth becomes increasingly important.”

When all you have is a volcanologist, I learned, every extinction looks like a volcano.

“I try to teach people, ‘Don’t end up a clone of your thesis adviser,’” he told me. “Take your skills to a place that’s not doing the same sort of thing. Take your skills and apply them to a new problem, or take your problem and try completely new skills.”

Sometimes I joke that I am not interested in doing re-search, only search.”

The reason Casadevall came to Hopkins, from a comfy post at New York City’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine, is that the new gig offered him the chance to create a prototype of what he thinks graduate science education, and eventually all education, should be. Counter to the prevailing trend, Casadevall—with Gundula Bosch, a professor of both biology and education—is despecializing training, even for students who plan to become the most specialized of specialists. The program, known as the R3 Initiative

A separate, international team analyzed more than a half million research articles, and classified a paper as “novel” if it cited two other journals that had never before appeared together. Just one in ten papers made a new combination, and only one in twenty made multiple new combinations. The group tracked the impact of research papers over time. They saw that papers with new knowledge combinations were more likely to be published in less prestigious journals, and also much more likely to be ignored upon publication. They got off to a slow start in the world, but after three years, the papers with new knowledge combos surpassed the conventional papers, and began accumulating more citations from other scientists. Fifteen years after publication, studies that made multiple new knowledge combinations were way more likely to be in the top 1 percent of most-cited papers.