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The ancient Greek poet Archilochus once wrote: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ Isaiah Berlin, who found this mysterious line in the surviving scraps of Archilochus’ poetry, famously used it as a metaphor to distinguish between two types of human being: people who know a little about a lot (the foxes) and people wh

Daniel Susskind • A World Without Work: Technology, Automation and How We Should Respond

as Nagel predicted. But there is value and glory in the striving. On this journey through nature’s Umwelten, our intuitions will be our biggest liabilities, and our imaginations will be our greatest assets.

Ed Yong • An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

do strive as individuals, but we are also part of something larger than ourselves, with a complex physiology and mental life that we carry out but only dimly understand.

Howard Bloom • The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History

Humans carry around legacy behaviors and biases, jerry-rigged holdovers from earlier stages of evolution that follow their own obsolete rules. What seem like erratic, irrational choices are, in fact, strategies created long ago for solving other kinds of problems. We’re all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to surviv

Richard Powers • The Overstory: A Novel

An internationally renowned scientist (whom you will meet toward the end of this book) told me that increasing specialization has created a “system of parallel trenches” in the quest for innovation. Everyone is digging deeper into their own trench and rarely standing up to look in the next trench over, even though the solution to their problem happ

(Journalist) David Epstein • Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

There are, however, on this planet phenomena that are hidden in plain sight. These are the phenomena that we study as complex systems: the convoluted exhibitions of the adaptive world—from cells to societies.

Jessica C. Flack • Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, 1984–2019 (Compass)

Maybe once we were, maybe once, long ago we were nothing but a little knot of signals that was able to remain stable far out of equilibrium with its environment, a little loop of Bayesian inference that was able to climb the signal gradient towards more and more complex and robust forms of stability. But now that we know that, now that we can look ... See more

Frank Lantz • Playing Balatro

Finally, there appears to be reasonable and robust data suggesting that generalists are better at navigating uncertainty.

Vikram Mansharamani • All Hail the Generalist

This paradox of comprehension was articulated explicitly by a great physicist of an earlier age: “Sir Isaac Newton, when asked what he thought of the infatuations of the people, answered that he could calculate the motions of erratic bodies, but not the madness of a multitude” (quoted from The Church of England Quarterly Review, 1850).