An Unfinished Synthesist

I am a synthesist. An issue or idea that I feel strongly about rarely arises from exhaustive research into some esoteric field. Rather, I hear something, or read something, and a connection is made. Snick, snap, ker-chunk. A bit of information fits into place along with some other bit of information, and another, and another, and hopefully, with a bunch more. The little components come from widely varying sources. My education is sadly incomplete with regard to the Academy, but like Lincoln, I have spent countless hours voraciously reading everything that I can get my hands on. Unlike Lincoln, I never walk in the snow to return a book, in fact, you would be fortunate if I returned a book at all.

Where does this leave me? Hmm, good question.

It leaves me with a unique set of qualities.

I am free to think and conjecture with nothing constraining me. Not only am I not dogmatic, I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be dogmatic about. Nor am I confined to a particular discipline; I know a little something about damn near everything. My natural curiosity takes care of that very nicely. Where specialization creates people who know more and more about less and less, I am a generalist who doesn’t pretend to have depth of knowledge, but rather, breadth of knowledge.

Unfortunately, I also occasionally end up dancing on the high steel of a forming skyscraper of logic without benefit of and understanding of the basic structure. Some of my friends are able to blow me off the building with a mighty wind of statistics, which, though I am smart enough to usually grasp what they represent, I don’t have enough facility with to point out the flaws that I intuitively feel are there.

My feeling is that myself and others like me are an underappreciated commodity. Our worth is that when one pokes around indiscriminately, one may discover something that would be missed by more structured research. It would also follow naturally, that while able to make great leaps, we might be prone to great falls due to our lack of specific knowledge.

By and large, I think this situation suits me.

While I hope to continue my education in a formal sense, I imagine that I probably won’t pursue some narrow discipline. I guess I’d rather be a gadfly, than an iron clad guy…in the intellectual sense.