Since you are aware of the fox and hedgehog dichotomy, you might be aware of Tetlock’s book and long-term study showing how foxes best hedgehogs in political prediction, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?
Although depth in specialties has its merits, I can see how that depth also leads to a kind of blindness, a ‘man with a hammer’ problem, while polymaths, or people with broad awareness can sometimes pull together diverse facts to form insights that are not bound by one’s expertise.
Along the same lines, many insights in technology don’t come so much from depth, but by ‘cross-pollination’ of ideas, of taking the basic concepts of one specialty and applying them to a peripherally-related one.
Although depth in specialties has its merits, I can see how that depth also leads to a kind of blindness, a ‘man with a hammer’ problem, while polymaths, or people with broad awareness can sometimes pull together diverse facts to form insights that are not bound by one’s expertise.
Along the same lines, many insights in technology don’t come so much from depth, but by ‘cross-pollination’ of ideas, of taking the basic concepts of one specialty and applying them to a peripherally-related one.
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