Expert Generalists

If you’re an expert navigating a novel problem, an LLM won’t imagine a new solution for you. But they become a gift for generalists, who can use them to get up to speed in new domains much more quickly, and resurface and apply knowledge from other fields easily. Generalists can use their adaptability and imagination to work through any “wickedness”... See more

Another view is that there are costs to generalizing and that you’re better off hiring specialists — employees who have very deep expertise in an important area — or encouraging your employees to become specialists in whatever they do.

“high tolerance for ambiguity”; “systems thinkers”; “additional technical knowledge from peripheral domains”; “repurposing what is already available”; “adept at using analogous domains for finding inputs to the invention process”; “ability to connect disparate pieces of information in new ways”; “synthesizing information from many different sources

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Many great thinkers are (or were) generalizing specialists. Shakespeare, Da Vinci, Kepler, and Boyd excelled by branching out from their core competencies. These men knew how to learn fast, picking up the key ideas and then returning to their specialties. Unlike their forgotten peers, they didn’t continue studying one area past the point of diminis... See more