VOX SAPIENTIAE

Ours is an age of highly sophisticated division of labor. It seems that this principle of specialization has been embraced everywhere as indispensible to human development in industry and trade. Yet, it seems to me that in the world of science and technology, such a principle should be qualified and cautioned against.

It is true that specialists can never be done away with. Without specialization, modern science could never have been developed. It is hard to imagine that the very enormous volume of knowledge could be acquired and mastered by a single person, provided man's life is always short against his ambitions. It is no longer that age of a certain Aristotle, nor of a certain Leonado da Vinci, but an age of endowed chairs and funded laboratories, of department deans and professors. Therefore, a scientist has to specialize in his own, at most several, fields while entrusting his citations to other specializers. Likewise, an engineer has to be focused in his part and leave other parts of the project to be finished by specializers in another end of the globe. After all, academics is still subject to the laws set by Adam Smith.

However, specilization should never be identified as unqualified isolationism. It is crucial that every specialists have to be at least familiar with several adjacent diciplines in order to ensure smooth cooparation. How can division of labor be possible if each person pays no respect to ensure another one's task fulfillment? If each specializer knows nothing beyond his own field, then disasters will surely come about. Imagine a locomotive that cannot move in deep snow just because the engineer never takes weather into accound, or imagine a building whose insufficiant number of elevators result in huge loss of time, we cannot help but ask: why are these designers so shortsighted of "other" concerns, often commonsensical? Without adequate generalist training, it is likely that many more specialists will fall into similar pits as these.

Moreover, generalists have their own merits. The progress of science always needs man of vision. Imagination is always the precursor of experiments. Yet imagination itself is the result of collisions of diverse ideas, often from different disiplines. Hence, a generalist has the advantage of having more perspectives from which to look into the problem as well as to make syntheses based on cross-disiplinary researches. Was not Newton benefited from both Physics and Mathematics, and perhaps even Theology, in building his Newtonian empire? Specialists can perform well in well defined tracks, but it is generalists that we should look for to explore scientific virginlands.

To sum up, in this age of specilization, we should not reject generalists, but to encourage them. Specialists are necessary and crucial to modern science and modern production. Yet without a generalist training, specialist are prone to make ludicrous errors due to lack of familiarity of other related fields. What's more, generalists have the perspective that is much valuable in exploring new fields. Therefore, we need both specialists and generalists, and of cause, their cross-breeds.

    The advertising director of the Silver Screen Movie Production Company ascribes the decline of movie attendence to poor advertising. In order to support his argument, he takes the favorable reviews of the company's movies as the proof that blames should not be put on the quality of the movies. He further prescribes, after drawing his conclusion, that more money should be invested in advertising so as to boost ticket sale. At first glance, it seems that this argument posesses some plausibility. Yet in failing to prove that his line of causality is the only possibility, the director's reasoning is an insufficient deduction, and consequently his prescription is also sussceptible to failure.
    First, the director erroneously assumes that quality of movie is the only criterion by which people decide wether to attend a certain movie or not. This assumption is both arbitrary and unfounded. There are many other possible variables that affect movie attendence. For example, people normally go to cinemas less often when economy is in decline and unemployment rate rises. Or in another case, a general shift in esthetic taste might also lead to loss of audience if the company's movies become less favored by the general public despite of the acclamation from professional critics. Therefore, the unfairly exclusion of other potential causes makes the diagnosis of the director unconvincing.
    Second, even if the director's diagnosis were right, which I am reluctant to concede, he still could not convince me that his prescription would be effective. There are many reasons for me to believe that spending more will not necessary lead to gaining more. A company's total budget is limited, spending more in one direction in many occasions can lead to reduction of spending in another direction, or reduction of overall profit. The director has to show quantitative proofs that the overall profit will increase in order to validate his prescription. However, such calculations or balance sheets are not provided, not to mention the important opportunity/risk calcutions. How can we be convinced when there is not even partial calculation of investment verses reward? Therefore, the feasibility of the director's prescription is highly questionable.
    To sum up, both the diagnosis and prescription of the advertising director are not well supported with facts. The director would have to rule out other potential causes to validate his diagnosis and provide convincing overall benefit-cost calculations to justify his prescription. Unfortunately he did neither. Although there may be the possibility that his argument were the case, he still needs to demonstrate his rationales. After all, the board of directors is not a hord of gamblers.

當霓虹閃耀時，我們遺忘了星光。

當高樓林立時，我們遺忘了故鄉。

當名利在望時，我們遺忘了理想。

當物欲橫流時，我們遺忘了遺忘。 

惆悵的底蘊，泛黃的情感，昨日在逆光中，黯淡。

舒緩的慢鏡，華麗的行板，心曲在落幕后，消散。

 

Athens was based on Liberty, Sparta on Virtue, Rome on Simplicity, Barbarian States on Ignorance, Arabian Empire on Religious Fervor, Tartars on Fear, Modern Powers on Greed.