Generalists are actually specialists
The word generalist is often frowned upon as some kind of forbidden word. It tends to suggest someone who skims the surface: curious but undisciplined, busy but never quite arriving anywhere. By contrast, a specialist is usually imagined as ‘serious’ and ‘solid’, as someone who plants their flag on a small island of knowledge and learns every inch of it. From that angle, polymaths can look like dilettantes—people who know a bit about many things and nothing particularly well.
I think that this stereotype rests on a misconception. We all agree on the importance of learning a subject deeply and becoming an expert in it. We all agree that expertise matters. The mistake lies in assuming that generalists don’t learn deeply, or that they are not experts in anything. Here’s the thing: they are. They may not be experts in whatever field happens to be demanded by the job market at a given moment, but true generalists are experts in an extremely hard field: building bridges between other fields. Expert generalists, aka ‘polymaths’, are people who specialise in synthesising disparate sources of knowledge. Generalists are specialists.
A useful way to think about it is this: what we usually call specialists are ‘islet’ specialists, while polymaths are ‘bridge’ specialists.
Tutti Frutti
To make this more concrete, imagine a small archipelago country called ‘Tutti Frutti’. Each islet is very good at growing one kind of tropical fruit. One produces excellent mangoes, another bananas, another pineapples. Over time, the islanders become extremely skilled at their own crop. They know their soil, their seasons, their pests. Yields improve. Techniques get refined. Each islet becomes a model of local expertise.
But there is a problem. Tutti Frutti’s economy depends on exporting fruit salad, not individual fruits.
Because the islets are isolated, no one gets to taste fruit other than their own. There are no bridges between the islets. Everyone is busy becoming a better mango farmer or a better banana farmer and bridge-building is nobody’s speciality. Ask a mango farmer to build a bridge to the neighbouring island and they will be at a loss.
Islet specialists, in this story, are the people who go deep into a clearly marked territory. They push local boundaries, sharpen tools, and squeeze as much understanding as possible out of a specific set of problems. This kind of specialisation is essential. Without it, there is nothing firm to build on.
Bridge specialists, by contrast, are the ones who notice that mangoes and bananas do not make a great fruit salad on their own. They learn the ins and outs of bridge-making, from design to brick-laying, becoming genuine experts in the craft. They know how to build good, sturdy bridges between the islands.
Connecting disparate fields requires expertise; it is a learned skill, it is a craft that requires practice, time and dedication, as any other. The polymath’s skill lies in transfer: spotting patterns that recur in more than one place, and translating ideas between communities that do not naturally talk to each other. Because their expertise is in bridge-making, they can build a bridge between almost any pair of islands: between the mango and the coconut island, or between the guava and the watermelon island. Most polymaths are willing to tackle challenges involving almost any combination of disciplines, including ones they have never encountered before. If you hire them to grow bananas, they will be of no use. Hire them to build bridges. That is their specialty.
As fields become more specialised, they also tend to drift apart. Assumptions quietly change, tools get reinvented under new names, and incompatible frameworks stack up. Bridge specialists act as a kind of epistemic infrastructure: lining things up, pointing out when two ideas are really the same thing in different dress, and reducing wasted effort. In other words, island specialists maximise depth. Bridge specialists maximise coherence.
Seen this way, polymathy is not diluted specialisation. It is a different kind of specialisation, operating one level up.
Dilettantes and polymaths
The distinction between a polymath and a dilettante is simple. A polymath is an expert—a true specialist in bridge-making—while a dilettante is an amateur. Both share an inclination for big-picture thinking and a love of learning across many subjects. The difference is that the dilettante has not perfected the craft; they have not yet become a specialist. The polymath has.
A real bridge specialist has to take islands seriously. Not complete mastery—no one has the time for that—but enough depth to understand what counts as a good argument, where the sharp edges are, and how things typically fail in each field. Bridges need solid foundations; they are not willed into existence. In the same way, a polymath must be willing to learn enough of the relevant disciplines to bring them together, while taking care to avoid getting bogged down in the details that specialists relish.
Under this framing, polymathy is not about knowing lots of things. It is about knowing how knowledge moves. It is specialisation in transfer, translation, and synthesis.