Thursday, April 27, 2006
Deep Versus Wide
I've always been very interested in science. I had a chemistry set and a telescope when I was 13 - and I really used them all the time. I had my own bunsen burner and a bench in the garage! I read science books when I was even younger. I did those Martin Gardner math puzzle books for fun.
I was an excellent student, winning prizes, with a very high SAT score, graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a Computer Science degree, completing 4 years of undergraduate college in 2 calendar years. I have a 4.0 in my Masters degree.
You would think I was an ideal candidate for a PhD program. But, I wasn't really interested. I could see that I did not belong. I am not a "depth" person. Thus my blog's name - I am a wanderer. I am ever the multidisciplinarian. I could never devote years of my life to focusing in on some small aspect of science - my mind would wander off to other things that interested me. It's not that I lack discipline - I am a very self-disciplined person. My GPA, my career success, my always being on time, my never turning in anything late, my ability to stick to calorie restriction, my devoted blogging - they all attest to this. It's just that I am an integrator and a synthesizer by nature. I am always tying things together that other people don't see as related. It is my compulsion.
I have the deepest respect and, indeed, gratitude for the scientists all over the world who devote their lives to studying nature and figuring out how things work. We owe them much. But, I can't do what they do. I love science so much, that I have always wanted to contribute to it. But, it has always seemed to me a flaw in our system of academic and research institutions that there is no obvious place for me. Where does a very bright generalist go? My solution so far has been to spend many hours a week studying and thinking about many scientific topics on my own - and to spend my career as a supportive and facilitative manager of scientists and engineers. I understand them well, match them intellectually, and can speak all their languages enough to get by. I can help them formulate approaches and unstick them when they get stuck. I can plan and lead project teams. But, it seems like I could contribute more to science. I have lots of theories and observations that tie things together across disciplines. I see patterns and connections that others don't see.
That's why cognitive science appeals to me so much. It's a very multi-disciplinarian effort. It seems to collect all the folks who do more than one thing. Every so often, I troll around university sites, thinking there is some place there for me. The idea of study always appeals to me and I would like to publish. I've had many ideas over the years - natural language processing, linguistics, nutrition, genetics. But, it seems like their should be somewhere I can synthesize and generalize - formally. Synthesis would be a valuable thing. Science doesn't just progress by working out the details.
This issue arises at my job. We do some R&D, often internally funded, but for the most part do consulting to the government on technical and scientific things that are complicated or difficult. We have a miniculture that is like academia - a set of Fellows that are specialists in various things. Like most academics, they worry about keeping up their credentials. They publish, they focus, they know a lot about their particular topic. But, our clients rarely want to pay for their time - at least very much of it. And they don't like to work on things that are "not their area of expertise". The rest of the company tends to be mostly generalists - systems engineers, physicists turned into computer scientists, computer scientists turned into project management experts, for instance. I am one of these - a very experienced and versatile one of these. My company sometimes struggles to figure out how to make all this hang together well. How do we make the best use of the specialists? Apply their knowledge in all the places it could be used? How do we formalize the ideas and work of the generalists? It's the same problem.
One thought I have had is that I should work on this very problem. Why not try to come up with ways to formalize synthesis? Maybe this should be what Departments of Philosophy should be focused on - love of knowledge, after all. Maybe the Web is the answer. After all, it is the World Wide Web. And wide is my dimension.
I've always been very interested in science. I had a chemistry set and a telescope when I was 13 - and I really used them all the time. I had my own bunsen burner and a bench in the garage! I read science books when I was even younger. I did those Martin Gardner math puzzle books for fun.
I was an excellent student, winning prizes, with a very high SAT score, graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a Computer Science degree, completing 4 years of undergraduate college in 2 calendar years. I have a 4.0 in my Masters degree.
You would think I was an ideal candidate for a PhD program. But, I wasn't really interested. I could see that I did not belong. I am not a "depth" person. Thus my blog's name - I am a wanderer. I am ever the multidisciplinarian. I could never devote years of my life to focusing in on some small aspect of science - my mind would wander off to other things that interested me. It's not that I lack discipline - I am a very self-disciplined person. My GPA, my career success, my always being on time, my never turning in anything late, my ability to stick to calorie restriction, my devoted blogging - they all attest to this. It's just that I am an integrator and a synthesizer by nature. I am always tying things together that other people don't see as related. It is my compulsion.
I have the deepest respect and, indeed, gratitude for the scientists all over the world who devote their lives to studying nature and figuring out how things work. We owe them much. But, I can't do what they do. I love science so much, that I have always wanted to contribute to it. But, it has always seemed to me a flaw in our system of academic and research institutions that there is no obvious place for me. Where does a very bright generalist go? My solution so far has been to spend many hours a week studying and thinking about many scientific topics on my own - and to spend my career as a supportive and facilitative manager of scientists and engineers. I understand them well, match them intellectually, and can speak all their languages enough to get by. I can help them formulate approaches and unstick them when they get stuck. I can plan and lead project teams. But, it seems like I could contribute more to science. I have lots of theories and observations that tie things together across disciplines. I see patterns and connections that others don't see.
That's why cognitive science appeals to me so much. It's a very multi-disciplinarian effort. It seems to collect all the folks who do more than one thing. Every so often, I troll around university sites, thinking there is some place there for me. The idea of study always appeals to me and I would like to publish. I've had many ideas over the years - natural language processing, linguistics, nutrition, genetics. But, it seems like their should be somewhere I can synthesize and generalize - formally. Synthesis would be a valuable thing. Science doesn't just progress by working out the details.
This issue arises at my job. We do some R&D, often internally funded, but for the most part do consulting to the government on technical and scientific things that are complicated or difficult. We have a miniculture that is like academia - a set of Fellows that are specialists in various things. Like most academics, they worry about keeping up their credentials. They publish, they focus, they know a lot about their particular topic. But, our clients rarely want to pay for their time - at least very much of it. And they don't like to work on things that are "not their area of expertise". The rest of the company tends to be mostly generalists - systems engineers, physicists turned into computer scientists, computer scientists turned into project management experts, for instance. I am one of these - a very experienced and versatile one of these. My company sometimes struggles to figure out how to make all this hang together well. How do we make the best use of the specialists? Apply their knowledge in all the places it could be used? How do we formalize the ideas and work of the generalists? It's the same problem.
One thought I have had is that I should work on this very problem. Why not try to come up with ways to formalize synthesis? Maybe this should be what Departments of Philosophy should be focused on - love of knowledge, after all. Maybe the Web is the answer. After all, it is the World Wide Web. And wide is my dimension.
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