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I like this question when contrasted with: why is it specialists who make the greatest intellectual & creative leaps? Historically, people like Einstein, Darwin, Newton, Picasso, etc. Still mostly true, though small teams are becoming more common in breakthrough conceptual work
A fair number of people are replying with the assertion that Einstein et al were really generalists. I doubt this is true in the way Erik originally meant his tweet. Darwin spent ~decade writing a treatise on snails. Such a person would not be considered a generalist in SV.
The key point: each knew far more about particular very narrow topics than anyone else in the world, and that was the source of their advantage. This seems relatively rarely true of SV generalists (except about their network; in some sense, that's their specialty).
A lot of people making the mistake in the tweet below: https://twitter.com/resolvingdust/status/1139687833835204608 … Einstein was a pretty good amateur musician, a pretty good mathematician, a largely ineffective activist... and one of the two greatest theoretical physicists in the history of the human species.
As a musician he seems to have been at the level of a good local tennis player; as a mathematician, at the level of a top local pro; as a theoretical physicist he was much better than a Roger Federer type. The gap is enormous.
He certainly did get a lot from his breadth of interests. Eg his strength as a mathematician helped in general relativity. But there's a letter somewhere where Hilbert laments that "every boy in Goettingen" (roughly) knew more about the mathematics than E, but E discovered GR
So, at least as I'd use the term, he was a mind-bogglingly talented specialist who benefited a lot from having other interests at which he was pretty darned good, but certainly not nearly the best in the world.
I like @TimHarford’s label of those experts being slow motion multitaskers over calling them generalists just because they studied more than one thing.
Interesting framing! I wonder how much they benefit from a core talent? Freeman Dyson has made the comment that what's made him such an effective "polymath" is his fundamental strength as a mathematician. E.g., it's a lever for "slow motion multitasking".
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