(I hope you’ll forgive me if this is a bit meandering.)
I’ve not yet read the book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, but my vague understanding is that the general argument is about how exploring a wide range of fields is beneficial. I’m certainly biased, because I’m a person who is interested in a variety of different topics, so of course I’ll love any argument saying that the way I naturally tend to do things is good/right/beneficial. Whether wide-ranging learning tends to have direct benefit is going to depend on the specific topics learned, but I do find that there are unexpected connections that are revealed only once you do some kind of cross-disciplinary study.
I strongly suspect that certain areas/subjects a more “transferable benefit rich” than others. As a silly example : I enjoy learning about history, but I’ve been able to use my elementary knowledge of social psychology and statistics in a much wider range of contexts than the various books I’ve read about the Opium Wars or about the Aztec perspective of the conquest of Mexico.
I also suspect that we can’t really make a confident claim about how much a particular field will or won’t contribute to another field if we haven’t studied both. I assume that learning biology wouldn’t contribute much to AI safety, but this ends up being an issue of “I don’t see anything there, therefore I claim that nothing is there.” So it is hard to claim which fields are ‘worth’ exploring if you haven’t explored them yet. I vaguely remember reading something about a collaboration between professors of music and… something.[1]
So I guess my non-expert answer to your question would be something like “some Effective Altruists should learn a wide range of subjects, but not all of them. Some subjects should be encouraged for cross-disciplinary study more than others. There is benefit to specialization, just like there is benefit to being a jack of all trades, but not everyone should specialize.”
(I hope you’ll forgive me if this is a bit meandering.)
I’ve not yet read the book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, but my vague understanding is that the general argument is about how exploring a wide range of fields is beneficial. I’m certainly biased, because I’m a person who is interested in a variety of different topics, so of course I’ll love any argument saying that the way I naturally tend to do things is good/right/beneficial. Whether wide-ranging learning tends to have direct benefit is going to depend on the specific topics learned, but I do find that there are unexpected connections that are revealed only once you do some kind of cross-disciplinary study.
I strongly suspect that certain areas/subjects a more “transferable benefit rich” than others. As a silly example : I enjoy learning about history, but I’ve been able to use my elementary knowledge of social psychology and statistics in a much wider range of contexts than the various books I’ve read about the Opium Wars or about the Aztec perspective of the conquest of Mexico.
I also suspect that we can’t really make a confident claim about how much a particular field will or won’t contribute to another field if we haven’t studied both. I assume that learning biology wouldn’t contribute much to AI safety, but this ends up being an issue of “I don’t see anything there, therefore I claim that nothing is there.” So it is hard to claim which fields are ‘worth’ exploring if you haven’t explored them yet. I vaguely remember reading something about a collaboration between professors of music and… something.[1]
So I guess my non-expert answer to your question would be something like “some Effective Altruists should learn a wide range of subjects, but not all of them. Some subjects should be encouraged for cross-disciplinary study more than others. There is benefit to specialization, just like there is benefit to being a jack of all trades, but not everyone should specialize.”
Out of curiosity, I asked ChatGPT about the most successful cross-disciplinary collaborations, and was told about:
• the human genome project (genetics, biology, computer science)
• climate research (atmospheric science, ecology, economics, sociology, and policy-making)
• translational medicine (basic science, clinical research, and healthcare delivery)
• smart cities (urban planners, architects, engineers, computer scientists, economists, and policymakers)