> Some people deal with complexity through science. This sounds great, until you realize that science is currently systematic (step by step) and not systemic (whole picture). Reality is made of interconnected systems. A systematic approach leaves blind spots.
The counter argument is that human minds are limited and very few people in history are able keep even a large % of the entire system in their head.
A huge problem we face as a species is that as the amount of information that needs to be connected to each other in order to make progress grows, fewer and fewer people are able to make large contributions, meaning we'll accumulate knowledge and understanding at a slower rate.
Hopefully technology will help here, and people have been working at using computers to try and connect those points, but I am not aware as to how successful those efforts have been.
The problem we face is being a culture of many specialists, with few generalists. Generalists are capable of managing a wide range of information and have the ability to transfer skills and knowledge between domains.
You don't have to model an entire system in your head to understand the dynamics. That's a specialist, systematic point of view.
The technology will only help if we change the culture and change how we educate and incentivize the next generation of humans.
> The problem we face is being a culture of many specialists, with few generalists. Generalists are capable of managing a wide range of information and have the ability to transfer skills and knowledge between domains.
Sadly different fields of science can each take a lifetime to master, and even closely related fields use different jargon[1] internally, meaning that a person can be an expert in something, read a journal article about that topic but written by an expert in another field, and not fully understand what is being said w/o significant mental work translating concepts from how one field talks about them vs the language and terms the reader is used to from their own field of study.
[1] Defined as specialized language to make communication within the field easier
You're describing a procedural problem - different words for the same concepts. This is one way science is not systemic. As a result, experts end up solving the same problems in different silos.
Generalists can spend time "translating" between subjects, find the common threads, and find missing pieces from other domains. Most domains have developed independently from each other, and there are a lot of missing pieces.
Specialists are important, but specialists without generalists gets us to where we are today.
The counter argument is that human minds are limited and very few people in history are able keep even a large % of the entire system in their head.
A huge problem we face as a species is that as the amount of information that needs to be connected to each other in order to make progress grows, fewer and fewer people are able to make large contributions, meaning we'll accumulate knowledge and understanding at a slower rate.
Hopefully technology will help here, and people have been working at using computers to try and connect those points, but I am not aware as to how successful those efforts have been.