Specialists

Resumen

De Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).

• “Previously men could be divided into the learned and the unlearned, … But your specialist cannot be brought in under either of these categories … We shall have to say that he is a learned ignoramus, which is a very serious matter, as it implies that he is a person who is ignorant, not in the fashion of the ignorant man, but with all the petulance of one who is learned.”

• “The underlying principle of specialization is division of labor; but the term division of labor has become associated with the individual worker, whereas specialization is, in general, far reaching in its effects, and influences industrial enterprises of all kinds.”

• “... I think the right strategy for the mass of humanity is to specialize. Nobody wants to go a doctor who is half proctologist and half dentist. ... The ordinary way to succeed is to narrowly specialize.”

• “If a man is trained, purely and simply, to be expert and contented in a particular task he will not innovate; Freud would have remained an anatomist, Marx a philosopher, Darwin a field-naturalist.”

• “It is an ancient belief, going back to classical antiquity, that specialization of any kind is illiberal in a freeman. A man willing to bury himself in the details of some small endeavor has been considered lost to these larger considerations which must occupy the mind of the ruler.”

• “The former distrust of specialization has been supplanted by its opposite, a distrust of generalization. Not only has man become a specialist in practice, he is being taught that special facts represent the highest form of knowledge.”

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.