Integrative, Macroscopic Thinking is antithetical to higher education

In general, higher education has emphasized specialization (and even ultra-specialization). Advanced degrees tend to prioritize deeper specialization with less scope or connectivity into other specializations. This is the opposite of “range.”

The modern graduate degree has become the realm of the ultraspecialized. A typical doctoral thesis focuses on a topic so insanely obscure that few can decipher its title, forget about content. While such extreme narrowness is important to specialization… it has also created a world where the best universities rarely produce integrative, macroscopic thinkers.^[1]

A clear example of this (though by no means the only one) is in the domain of medicine. Gawande notes that specialization does not prevent mistakes (or missed opportunities) that would otherwise be addressed with greater range across domains.

We live in the era of the superspecialist—of clinicians who have taken the time to practice, practice, practice at one narrow thing until they can do it better than anyone else. They have two advantages over ordinary specialists: greater knowledge of the details that matter and a learned ability to handle the complexities of the particular job. There are degrees of complexity, though, and medicine and other fields like it have grown so far beyond the usual kind that avoiding daily mistakes is proving impossible even for our most superspecialized.^[2]

#polymath