On specialization

There’s an old Onion article that’s been rattling around in my head for over a quarter-century. The headline: Ad-Agency Print Buyer Can't Believe They Want To Add A Perf This Late In The Game. Long story short, the customer wants to add a hole to a print ad (remember those?) and the irate buyer goes through all the consequences that will entail: changes to suppliers, cardstock, layout, artwork and so on. The whole tone of the article is that all these things are obvious to a professional, but not to a regular consumer—and that a big part of being a professional is dealing with all these details.*

I mention this to make a general point: everything is more complicated than you think. And as a corollary, everything seems easy if you don’t understand how it works.

There are a lot of realms where I don’t think this mindset has penetrated yet: generally speaking with laying out a freeway or charging a home A/C system, expertise is valued. But specifically in the realm of politics, there’s a large section of the population who thinks the profession is inherently worthless (or worse than worthless), and therefore it doesn’t matter who we put in charge. And medicine has recently been beset by this mindset as well: that following the vibe and doing your own research is an adequate substitute for expertise and experience.

I don’t really know the origin of this weird combination: not understanding a thing and also being confident you can handle it. I suspect it’s an outgrowth of not really experiencing the negative consequences of ignorance, or of experiencing those consequences but misattributing them to some other cause. But when this “specialization doesn’t matter” mindset is ascendant, it’s really just shorthand for giving power to people whose primary expertise is in convincing others to let them try wielding it.

*For a more expansive take on the same issue, you can go back to a classic 1958 essay about how no single person knows how to make a regular wooden pencil. That article is a bit messianic about the power of the free market, but it makes a good point about specialized knowledge and the enormous complexity of everyday things.