In Frank Herbert's Dune series, there is a powerful faction known as the Spacing Guild. Their pilots navigate interstellar space through extreme hyper-specialization, relying entirely on a mind-altering substance called "spice". Because the spice is only produced on the desert planet Arrakis, whoever controls that planet controls the bedrock of their society. Herbert explicitly lays out the existential trap this hyper-specialization has left the Guild in: "They might have taken Arrakis when they realized the error of specializing on the melange awareness-spectrum narcotic for their navigators. They could have done this, lived their glorious day and died. Instead, they'd existed from moment to moment, hoping the seas in which they swam might produce a new host when the old one died". 

We face a similar trap today. Our modern systems are so complex and intricate that there is a constant societal pressure to specialize. We declare major specialties in college and are siloed into specific workplace tasks. While efficient to have a designated expert for a certain problem, it makes the organization as a whole intellectually brittle. When we hyper-specialize, we lose the ability to see the bigger picture and become dependent on narrow processes. We become trapped in habitual, routine ways of thinking, unable to pivot when the landscape inevitably changes.

Fortunately, our brains are incredibly flexible. Through neuroplasticity, they constantly rewire and reconstruct themselves in response to the changing environment. As the world grows more complex, holding onto this cognitive flexibility is critical for me. I notice this trap especially in my computer science studies. We have built vast and complex webs of interconnections that are so intricate that no single person fully understands them. But I'm realizing that to learn and innovate, I don't need a complete understanding of the system. I just need to grasp the connections between domains to spot how things can improve.

The best way for me to build this connective knowledge is through varied experience. But since experience is not compressible–I cannot gain 20 years of experience in a field without actually spending 20 years doing it–I must learn from other people's experience. Reading and writing are my greatest tools for this. Writing makes my abstract ideas concrete so I can evaluate and manipulate them. As Ted Chiang says in Exhalation "When you wrote them down, you could grasp your thoughts like bricks in your hands and push them into different arrangements....Writing let you look at your thoughts in a way you couldn't if you were just talking, and having seen them, you could improve them, make them stronger and more elaborate." Reading is the inverse: it is an incredibly powerful way to inhabit those carefully arranged bricks. By reading and writing widely, I am trying to avoid the Spacing Guild's trap of hyper-specialization. I might never be an expert in everything, but by borrowing from others, I can stay adaptable, keep my perspective wide, and avoid getting stuck.