Hi Friends,
Greetings from Brooklyn!
Welcome to the 14 new subscribers who joined this week. Every Friday, I share a piece about an idea I’m exploring and two or three links that I think are worth your time.
I hope you’ll enjoy this week’s edition and if you do, hit reply and let me know!
Until next week,
Florian
The Ugly Face of Specialization
It must have been around 5 am.
In the chaos of the hospital room getting cleaned up for the next birth, my wife asked a nurse about breastfeeding.
“Sorry, I don’t do mothers”, she answered.
My wife and I looked at each other, bewildered. We should have known better. There are “baby nurses” and “mother nurses”. Just one hour earlier “the baby” was inside “the mother” but now they required two distinct scientific fields.
More recently a friend of mine went for an X-ray with pretty serious implications. When she heard the results, she burst out crying.
“Are you in pain or are you emotional?”, the radiologist asked.
“I’m just relieved”, she answered.
The doctor walked off without saying a word. Pain wasn’t involved. Emotions were not her department. Her job was done.
You could dismiss these stories as isolated examples of health professionals having a bad day. But what I see is a system that disaggregates the reality of the human experience into manageable parts for the sake of efficiency.
It is a system that has ceased to treat the body as a whole. Instead, doctors are assigned to fragments of anatomy in the name of specialization. Patients become parts in a healthcare system that operates like Henry Ford’s assembly line.
The result is the dehumanization of a discipline whose foundations are empathy and healing.
This phenomenon is not limited to healthcare. Fragmentation through specialization is the defining feature of our modern age. If you look closely, you can see it at play across many different fields.
Monocropping is a way to bring nature’s complex ecosystem under control to suit our needs. The result is depletion of biological diversity.
Organizations, public and private, break down work into an infinite number of tasks. The result is meaninglessness and alienation.
Academia rewards specialization over interdisciplinary approaches to research. The result is our society’s inability to approach systemic challenges.
In the words of Agnes Denes:
The great power gained by this specialization cost man his sense of purpose; it has become almost impossible to have an overview necessary to harness human progress into safe and beneficial directions. Fragments of knowledge are used on an ad hoc basis, but coherent direction for mankind is lacking.
Specialization might give us a boost in efficiency but left unchecked, it’s a threat to our humanity.
Weekly Wisdom
🤖 Techno-optimism: One of my favorite recent discoveries is Czech author and journalist Karel Capek. In 1920 he wrote an essay called “The Wireless World” in which he predicted the positive societal impact of the radio. Cities would become useless because people in the country side could now entertain themselves from the comfort of their home. Radio would “reinforce the awareness of one big, shared world and awaken the belief there are and can be bonds transcending state boundaries”. He might have been a tad too optimistic. Capek died in 1938, one year before the start of the bloodiest war the world would ever know.
🗣️ Opinions as a Learning Tool: I tend to shy away from expressing an opinion on something I feel I don’t know much about. This thread made me think about the opportunity cost of that approach: if you don’t dare to make hypotheses, you’re missing out on an opportunity to learn.
🗽New York Life: I stumbled upon this absurdly well written piece of humor and couldn’t resist sharing it with you. Guaranteed to crack you up, especially if you live in New York.
Lateral Thought
“There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible and wrong.”
H. L. Mencken
Hi Florian, this is very good and if you allow I will respond in detail to your “Specialisation” critique. There has been a discussion raging since about the 1950s (actually well before that in the field of general economics, but of your particular focus 1950 will do) on the benefits and evils of specialisation. The fields most often quoted as witnesses for the prosecution are medicine and academics for all the reasons you mention.
In business the “core competencw focus” or “diverisfied holding structure” debate goes in cycles. In the 50s & 60s conglomerates were the rage (think Teledyne, Ling Industries and Harold Geenan) only to see them crumble in the 1970s, re-emerge in the 1980s (think Daimler-Chrysler and itsGlobal Technology Holding strategy which ended in disaster). Currently conglomerates or diversified holdings are everywhere (PE companies are nothing but glorified conglomerates) and as usual for our fucked up time no odybcan quite seem to make up their mind conclusively about anything.
However imho there is a fundamental error being made around the subject of specialisation which my friend Kerstin Friedrich pointed out in her outstanding book “Spezialisierung” (only available in German unfortunately) which is that we tend to specialise in ways and on aspects that increase risk instead of mitigating them. I can elaboratebon this if you like, but it is a fascinating and very valuable issue you have highlighted. Nice work!