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GENERAL

Being a renaissance man, a generalist....

The smart money is always on specialization,
on narrowing your field of focus,
concentrating your efforts...

Cutting away pieces of your brain,
to let other pieces flourish.

The temptations are obvious:
to try to do everything,
to be everything you can be instead
of just one thing you can be.


Ted Nelson's one excuse offered for
the problems he has had in his
career:

    "The problem with being a generalist                 NELSON
     is that you have no territory to
     defend."



Alfred Bester's claim that Science
Fiction is a refuge for Renaissance        People like Asimov,
Men, for people interested in              who cut wide, but
everything.                                never deep.


Think about some others.
Feynman?  An interesting
example: someone who
started tightly focused,          Stuart Reges sounds like the
and only branched out             same kind of guy, in a way.
later.                            Computer Science first, only
                                  later did he become more
                                  politically active.  I think
                                  he credits Bloom for
                                  encouraging him to read more
                                  widely.




Specialize in what you're working on
at the moment.                           (Said by who? A Russian physicist?
                                          Perhaps Sakharov?)

(John McCarthy also offered excuses
for working outside of his field...
what were they again?)

    Maybe more interesting: he mentions a
    case where he felt bad about having
    done it.  Nuclear rockets, limited by
    the melting point of Uranium.  He
    suggested a centrifugal design using
    molten uranium, and wrote a paper about
    it.  Years later, someone contacted
    him, inviting him to submit an article
    about his recent work on the idea, but                    It would have
    of course, he had done no such                            been someone's
    work... and if only he'd never written                    territory to
    the article, maybe someone else would                     defend.
    have come up with the idea, and
    followed up on it.



"The writer will offer no apology for making
this experiment.  His disqualifications are
manifest.  But such work needs to be done by
as many people as possible...."
     H.G. Wells,  "Outline of History", p.vi



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