Depth vs breadth of knowledge

**thecaptainof** · Joined: 04 May 2007 Posts: 7571 Location: ¯\(°_o)/¯

Something that I mentioned in another thread led me to wonder...

Which do you value more: expert knowledge in a limited number of subjects, or a little knowledge in many and varied subjects? Or, in British TV quiz show terms, Mastermind vs The Weakest Link.

I'm sort of on the fence here. As it is, my knowledge is broad but shallow, loads of random facts about all sorts of things but with no real expertise in any field. It's good for quizzes and games like Trivial Pursuit, as well as being 'that guy' who people go to when they want to know something about all sorts of random subjects, but I can't help thinking it'd be nice to be the utmost authority on some subject or other.

Your thoughts?
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**joekickass1234** · Joined: 10 Jan 2008 Posts: 1436 Location: Cherry Hill NJ

Expert knowledge in my opinion is better towards society. I think somewhere in between is the best though. like, 70-30 expert to worldly ratio I think is good.
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**Sarg338** · Joined: 07 Feb 2008 Posts: 5143

If i had to choose one or the other, I would go for expert knowledge in a certain field.

But as joekickass said, I would think a good balance would be optimal.
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**skinnywhitecomic** · Joined: 30 Aug 2006 Posts: 2008 Location: Atlanta, GA

Thousands of years ago, Scholars were considered very important and desired, as they knew everything there was to know about the known world (which at the time, probably wasn't much compared to today).

Centuries ago, it was common for people to have just one profession, like a blacksmith or a cobbler.

I think today, I can see how we value both types of "knowledge keepers," to coin a phrase. Pretty much anyone that has a PhD is considered to be an expert in that field, but people who are knowledgable in many fields are not as common. I personally refer to experts as "geeks" and jack-of-all-trades knowledge keepers as "nerds," and though these phrases may not be used correctly, it helps me differentiate. Ken Jennings is probably the most famous person of all "nerds." I think being a "geek" is more common on the surface, but being a "nerd" is more valuable.

However, the more I think about it, I think it's best to be as much of a nerd as possible, but it's good to have one or two areas that your firends and family will come to you for, as the authoritative voice of that subject. If anyone I know has a question about Guitar Hero or improv, they know who to talk to

.

So uh, there.

I guess I need to find a geek that knows how to end posts...
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**CorpusCollosum** · Joined: 28 Nov 2007 Posts: 1823 Location: San Francisco

Great question, Captain, one I ponder as well. I've always felt the same about sports, too. My whole life I've just sort of played everything and been average at everything. That has its advantages, but sometimes I wish I was exceptionally talented and devoted to one particular sport. Jack of all trades, master of none, as they say.
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**woozerkristen** · Posted: Wed May 11, 2011 4:55 am Post subject:

I think both are valuable, and thus I strive for both. I'm one of those PhD-possessors skinnywhitecomic is mentioning, and what I am an "expert" in is rhetoric and teaching it to college students (and I put expert in scare quotes because I don't think anyone who studies teaching should ever become complacent enough in their knowledge to call themselves that--there's always ways to learn more and teach more effectively). I think learning a whole lot about that topic was valuable and helps me to be a better teacher. Plus you really need to be familiar with what other ideas are out there if you are going to make original and useful contributions to the field. So people striving for expertise is how we have progress.

However, practicality-wise, knowing a little bit about a lot of things is helpful for both being a functional human and also for being able to get along with lots of different types of people. I like a lot of things and love learning and reading, and that breadth of knowledge helps me do basic things in life and impress people with my knowledge of trivia, but most importantly, gives me a huge well of things to use as common ground in getting to know lots of different types of people. Being friends with a variety of people is one of the most enriching aspects of my life, so I definitely see great value in this type of knowledge, as well.
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**this1neguy** · Joined: 19 Aug 2007 Posts: 5444 Location: Flint, MI

If I were to have my druthers, I would do nothing but take widespread classes - from Basket Weaving 111 to English 212 to Sailboats and You 101. Once I made my way through all of the subjects that I'm even vaguely interested in (okay, basket weaving may be a bit of a stretch in that regard) I would then be able to make a solid decision about a specialty. I know that there are people who wake up their first morning of high school and say "hey, I'm going into [profession X] and nothing anyone does can stop me!", and sure that may work out for some, but I think the best way to go about things is to learn a little bit about a wide variety of topics and after that become more engaged in a specific one.

Now, is this exactly practical in an age where your basic four-year bachelor's degree will cost $30,000? Well, I suppose if you're one of those lucky few who have a, shall we say, wealth of disposable income it may be, but for the average college student getting by on student loans and Ramen noodles, I doubt it. If our education was less expensive (besides the negative side effects such as paying teachers less and worse dorm food) it may be feasible to spend years on education, but as-is, it's just not a viable option. Given this, it seems that the large part of our society's skilled labor force is going to end up with a depth of knowledge in one field and MAYBE a bit of knowledge across the board, but not nearly as much generalized knowledge as could be possible in a perfect world.
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yksi-kaksi-kolme wrote:

I hope the April Fool's joke is expertwin becoming a mod

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**youhas** · Joined: 21 Jul 2006 Posts: 3015 Location: Santa Clara, CA

If you were asking me which one I appreciate more in my day-to-day sort of world? Well, then I'd go for the jacks of all trades, of course. I know that's the sort of person I strive to be: letting no intellectual stone go unturned, poking my nose into subjects I'm unfamiliar with, trying to become at least halfway educated in every topic under the sun. I mean, I may not be able to wax profoundly about any given topic... but I'd like to be at least passingly familiar with it, and able to intellectually converse about it, not just parroting some trivia sound bite I happened to memorize. I know my favorite meandering conversations are with people where there's a ton of aimless breadth involved, covering hopelessly unrelated topics of both the highbrow and lowbrow varieties.

If you were asking me which one I appreciate more in an abstract, "man, I'm glad that that dude or lady exists" sort of context? Then I guess I'd be really thankful for the folks who are OMG FOCUSED on their one particular field of study. They're the ones who are often advancing the sphere of human knowledge itself - pathologically focused on uncovering the Next Big Thing, often not motivated by money nor fame nor formal accolades, but simply because shit, that is a challenge, yo. Which we then all benefit from. Some guy who slaved away at improving some esoteric memory-management algorithm by 3%, which then made its way into every open-source programming routine under the sun. Some lady in the dark corner of a lab who has a niggling "y'know, I have a hunch about electron suborbitals" which leads to a room-temperature superconductor by 2016. That sort of thing, in so many random-pants fields and specialties the world over.

(I work with some people in that latter camp. At times, I feel like telling them, "I have no idea what you're talking about, but I am supremely glad that you are working on it with such abandon." I mean, I'm clearly not an idiot... but compared to them, I sometimes feel like an overall-wearin' hayseed, spouting the cubicle equivalent of kernels of wisdom like "dur, them land mines blow up if'n ya steps on 'em, hyuck". Even though in a broader context, I'm much better at being engaging, communicative, and seeking common ground. It's kind of a trip, on balance.)

So I guess on the whole, man, I know I just don't have the stomach for drilling down on such specific kernels of knowledge in the human experience. But holy jeez, am I ever so glad that there are some crazy-pants folks out there who do.
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**Vampyromaniac** · Joined: 08 Feb 2008 Posts: 1216

A lot of the people who have made the most striking advances to society have been people who specialized in multiple fields, and yet our society narrows specific doctorates to cover only a very limited scope. Now, that focused approach does work better, in general, but we really need a better system of collaborating between fields.
Take Stephen Wolfram, for example. While developing his ideas he began to see their effects on other specialized branches of science and mathematics, and ended up spending many more years than expected on most of his research, simply because it's breadth was remarkable, as well as its depth. It took someone who was willing to observe the effects of his research in other fields. Now, people from all manner of fields buy his books and study his research. They can literally grab one of his books, go to an index, and search for their own area of expertise.
In my opinion, there are a great many fields that could be vastly improved with 'liaisons' between different specialists. When you watch a lecture by someone like Wolfram, it really shows how much we may have missed by focusing almost entirely on depth at the highest levels of education.
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**GuitarHailz** · Joined: 11 Jun 2007 Posts: 4910 Location: Austin, Texas

I dunno, man, it's great to talk to people who know about a lot of things and can retain random information like crazy (my husband is one of those people). But I am definitely in the corner with the work-on-one-category folks. Granted, I don't have a PhD, so I don't have as much knowledge in design as I could, but I'm content with focusing on just one specific subject in my life and not really knowing about or caring about much else.

I'll openly admit I don't know a lot of things. Most of the time I'm not at work I usually feel like a dummy because there is so much of the world I don't know about. But it doesn't bother me much since I always retort with (in my mind) "well, I know a lot about design, so there!" I guess it's been my mental trump card ever since I was a kid... "So what if Stacey is good at sports and Marcia is good at math? I'm good at DRAWING." I sort of see it as the one thing I can hold onto and nobody can take away from me. Surely I'm not alone in treasuring that one thing that you're a so-called expert in? Someday I imagine it would feel great to go back to school and get more degrees, but who has the time or money for that?

For some reason I just imagined relating this conversation to the different ways people level up characters in RPG's. Do you get OCD and change characters, weapons, styles, etc all the time, trying to level up as much as possible, or do you pick one character and work on it til it's max level? I'm the latter, definitely.

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**googleimage** · Joined: 23 Aug 2007 Posts: 1229

I would say you can't even attain true depth without breadth. When I think of "depth", I think expertise in a very specific field - but you need breadth to understand the context of that specialty, where it fits in to the grand scheme of things, and how your specialty relates to other fields. I don't think you can call yourself an expert if you have absolutely no sense of how it connects to areas outside of your main focus. No discipline operates in isolation - it informs, and is informed by, so many other disciplines that require you invest heavily to truly grasp your specialty.
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**GuitarHailz** · Joined: 11 Jun 2007 Posts: 4910 Location: Austin, Texas

Some level of breadth, maybe, but there are so many thousands of different categories out there, and sub-categories within them. If you think of your specialty like a ripple in a pond, it touches a lot of other things before it fizzles out, but doesn't even begin to touch everything.

With design I need to know about advertising, typography, animation, media writing, information architecture, marketing, and so on. Some breadth is needed for true depth, I agree, but I'm never going to need to know about, say, physics, or chemistry, in order to be an expert at design.

Good point though.

Makes me feel even dumber than before. Hah.
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**Yewb** · Joined: 10 Jan 2008 Posts: 3020 Location: Plymouth, UK

Right now I'm learning about molecular genetics. I'm doing a very broad scientific degree (covering all aspects of biology), but scientific degrees by their nature require fairly deep knowledge of their fields. For example, tomorrow I have a final exam in immunology; the day after, genetics. However, as Hailz said, despite my degree being one of the broadest degrees possible in a scientific field (and in my opinion that isn't a good thing), it doesn't even begin to scratch the surface. Where does architecture relate to my degree? Ancient Greek*? Even mathematics is laughably shallow! And as for English literature or geography, it's not even in the same pond.

I would rather do my fairly broad, fairly deep scientific degree than, say, a degree solely in genetics. I would rather do a degree solely in genetics than a degree solely in cytogenetics. I would rather do a degree solely in cytogenetics than a degree solely in forensic cytogenetics. You see where I'm going with this? (You better, because I can't think of any individual field of forensic cytogenetics.) I like broadness. It's not particularly helpful past a certain point, at least in terms of employability, but it's better than focusing on one insanely specialised field early on and never doing anything but that.

* alright, their alphabet. But apart from that.
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expertwin wrote:

ShadoWolf wrote:

expertwin wrote:

I just want to, you know, get my name out there. BTW, it updates every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Was just the first two, decided to do Saturdays as well.

Serious advice now: No-one likes indecision in their work, so find what you like that you're even remotely good at, and stick with it. Don't flit from one thing to another, because that just smacks of a large lack of determination and drive. And people don't like you for that, and won't remember you for it. I mean, I get that you have a plucky spirit and a willingness to try new things, but there's a limit, man.

I might knock it down to just Thursday and Friday.

JOE2210 wrote:

Leave me alone, I have been drinking and your made up words mean nothing to me.

**pyrobob** · Posted: Wed May 11, 2011 10:52 pm Post subject:

Expert knowledge. You aren't the only person in the world, and combined you beat anyone who knows a little of everything.
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**Yewb** · Joined: 10 Jan 2008 Posts: 3020 Location: Plymouth, UK

I was thinking that myself, but to be honest I don't know how true that really is. There really aren't as many people working in ultraspecialised fields as people think - leaf through a few issues of a journal dedicated to coral pathogens, for example - and they do exist - and you'll see the same few names crop up time and time again. These are people working in a very specialised field, and the people next to them working on, oh - I don't know - Vibrio physiology, a related but distinct specialty, are working on largely the same terms but doing different work. There are distinct gaps in the literature which could be filled if people were digging with shovels, not drills. Breadth is nice to have - if nothing else, for fresh perspectives on old work.
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expertwin wrote:

ShadoWolf wrote:

expertwin wrote:

I just want to, you know, get my name out there. BTW, it updates every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Was just the first two, decided to do Saturdays as well.

Serious advice now: No-one likes indecision in their work, so find what you like that you're even remotely good at, and stick with it. Don't flit from one thing to another, because that just smacks of a large lack of determination and drive. And people don't like you for that, and won't remember you for it. I mean, I get that you have a plucky spirit and a willingness to try new things, but there's a limit, man.

I might knock it down to just Thursday and Friday.

JOE2210 wrote:

Leave me alone, I have been drinking and your made up words mean nothing to me.