I came across this article How Specialization Enables Systemic Evil. It’s overblown and seems LLM-influenced, but I really like the central connection it makes: society keeps doing foolish things and hurting itself because too many of its members are too specialized to look around and notice the danger/fraud/waste.
It’s a social force that is parallel to Moloch, but different. Moloch says we all must make the game harder for ourselves because uncoordinated agents have to escalate efficient competition in order to survive. This thing is more like, we make the game worse because we each take such a narrow, reductive view of the game that we don’t notice what we’re doing.
Economists see everything through their overly reductive model; lawyers see everything through their overly reductive model; etc. But worse still, everyone defends the meta-system of “give each person an overly reductive model,” because it makes them feel special! “Universities don’t just churn out specialists—they create a credentialed class psychologically invested in defending the system that elevated them, even when that system causes harm.”
Not only special, but comfortable. “If public health professionals are thinking about the problem, then I don’t have to,” and so on, for a thousand different problems we hear about but don’t want to engage with. Experts don’t have to be malicious or even incompetent for this system to fail; it fails because their expertise is just too narrow to catch the second-order problems they’re causing.
“We need generalists—people who refuse to be watchers in their own lives. Before industrialization, healers and polymaths wove together physical, spiritual, and social knowledge.” “Read outside your lane—doctors, study economics; economists, learn biology.” And so on. Become an expert on the chaotic interaction between fields.