>Quote: "The Overhang consists of the unrealized capital gains of past mathematical creativity, the latent value from connecting the dots in the existing corpus. It is a dividend of canonization. Mathematician X states problem A, mathematician Y crafts concept B, then mathematician Z notices that B trivially solves A and “captures” the social reward.
I've made an entire career out of being 'jack of all trades, master of none'. Being able to synthesize connections from relatively trivial knowledge in a bunch of domains is SOP for many humans as well. I think AI just has deeper knowledge and better pattern matching to make up for it's (at least now) lack of strength in cognition and 'ex nihilo' creativity.
(Which probably isn't 'ex nihilo' at all, and has more to do with the plethora of modalities that humans live in vs. large language models. For example, why do we pick the color red for notating important things and why do we say a schedule 'slips'...these are informed by a shared human experience borne of distinct physical sensation deep in our wiring that LLMs can only infer from what we write.)
A college advisor I had 20 years ago was a firm believer that interdisciplinarity was the future, that generalist skills and the ability to make connections between different fields would be paramount in advancing science. I suppose he was right in the big picture, even if the career prospects for human generalists aren't looking so rosy.
I'm actually still quite bullish on generalists. Specialists advance every front but build the supply lines between them.
In favor of the generalist, I think AI is also quite limited in its scope of how it generalizes. I'm mowing through hundreds of mythos-generated security findings right now for work and while it's amazing that it can build an exploit chain 20 steps deep, it's completely lacking in all of the external layers that render it's speculation moot.
How do you thrive in an environment of specialists? That's is the problem I seem to have. I'm spread a little across a few of the domains involved with what I do. Because of that, I have a bit more insight, so am very often the person pointing out relatively fundamental problems, usually caused by either not understanding the problems from a "first principles" perspective, resulting in, or being caused by, categorical type errors, where they've boxed a problem into a tiny space it doesn't belong.
I've been trending "quiet" lately, because I don't like the "friction"/convincing aspect of it all. It's hard to get people to see things from a different angle, or even convincing them there's a problem to begin with!
The last project required a complete redesign from a problem I pointed out during the first review, and second, and third, but now I'm seeing even more friction.
Maybe this is just corporate life, after a group gets large.
Any tricks/advice?