ISMAIL LAGARDIEN: Imagination is the difference between the fox and the hedgehog
Specialists and experts tend to worship a narrow range of details useful only in bureaucracies
One of my many failings as a journalist, as a photojournalist, in global and national public policymaking, in academia, and now in my dream job as a struggling writer, is that by accident or design I never quite made it as a “specialist” or an “expert”. The experts and specialists carry inordinate cachet...
Notwithstanding the urgency of putting food on the table and paying medical bills it remains better, surely, much like the fox in Archilochus’s poetic fragments, to expand your knowledge over and again and find new ways to tackle recurrent problems. This is in contrast, of course, to the Greek poet’s hedgehog which, much like market fundamentalists or revolutionaries, knows only a single cause of all problems and posits a single solution. ..
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