Gongol.com Archives: March 2025
March 13, 2025
Sometimes it's easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of sharing this little planet of ours with 8 billion other people. We aren't naturally wired to think in quantities like billions, and that's just so very, very many other people on the same pale blue dot. ■ But at other times, it's a stark reality check to realize that for any particular skill, there exists a finite number of real experts who know how to do things well. Just as there are celebrity "A-listers", so too are there "A-lists" for every conceivable occupation, trade, craft, subject matter, and hobby on the planet. A great share of the time, the A-listers know one another (or at least know of one another), and they are recognizable to a degree of some celebrity-like status within their fields. ■ Events like mass layoffs and government shutdowns tend to put this into relief from what might be thought of as the supply side: We start to see how many people are (or are not) enough to get certain jobs done. ■ On the other hand, events like an anticipated major storm outbreak put a spotlight on it from what might be described as the demand side: Mass numbers of people will be hoping for expertise to be available on seemingly short notice. ■ Expertise can be a very fragile thing: It's almost never held entirely in isolation by individual geniuses, but rather depends upon collaboration, interaction, teamwork, and access to concentrated resources. We are fortunate to live in a time when most forms of expertise are at their historical best. ■ But we should carry always the humility to realize that it gets that way usually through patient, incremental, evolutionary progress -- rarely through big breakthroughs carried out by lone geniuses. Careless damage done to the environments that produce those desirable results can't easily be repaired. If the Mayo Clinic were disbanded, it's unlikely that it could ever be reassembled. And it isn't always evident that pulling an individual thread can cause an entire garment to unravel.
