This seems much less about being casual or being a polymath and more about those who overestimate the value of their own input
I’m leaving this comment only because I most often do not overestimate the value of my input and therefor don’t leave comments, but this seems the perfect place to deviate
Which may mean you underestimate the value of your input and, in some sense, leech off the contributions of others...leaving a vacuum that gets filled by shills and hacks. Why would you do that? A little preparation and basic work-study and critical thinking skills is all a post needs, along with something you really want to say and is actually worth saying, of course. Maybe once a day, maybe once a week or once a month. Internet posting practices and moderation have matured enough to make posting on sites like HN useful without an inevitable devolution into rantfests or infomercials. (Although it can still happen.)
Silence, digital or otherwise, is a fine spiritual practice. It’s not necessary for some...probably sorely needed by others...
I work in an academic field and took a strong and useful interest in another field. I really don't think I overestimate my abilities, I say things like I a jack of all trades and 'x think I'm great at y and y think I'm great at x'. But still people think especially talented. I even see quiet disagreement from experts in x or y who are maybe not so keen to criticise me publicly. I feel the issue is that others over estimate my abilities. Maybe a case of conflating value (which is real) with ability?
Unfortunately this article seems to be written in the same casual polymath style it claims to warn of, with people making broad generalizations without any deep knowledge of what they are talking about.
I stopped reading at the point where JFK’s 1947 election was claimed to be purely due to wealth. Although JFK is today remembered much more for other historical events--
He was already a nationally known war hero before 1947. See, for example, this 1944 article in the New Yorker:
But why was this article in the New Yorker in 1944? There were thousands of war stories as thrilling or more as the story of the PT 109. The second sentence gives a clue: "Lieutenant John F. Kennedy, the ex-Ambassador’s son and lately a PT skipper in the Solomons...". His story was told because he was the son of Joseph Kennedy, who had been the US ambassador to the UK. And then as now, ambassadorships (at least to pleasant developed countries) were generally gifts to wealthy people like Joseph Kennedy who had helped the current president (FDR in his case) to get elected.
I think the author/post neglects the most important reason for valuing generalists and learning from them. (Hyper)specialists have a hard time understanding context outside their narrow domains, and filtering the relevance of their own specialization to a situation. Having access to a highly sophisticated hammer, everything looks like a nail through their lens. Consequently, there have a hard time communicating with those not well-versed in their field. Eg, while being taught in grad school by a world renowned expert, I realized that he’d been teaching the subject longer than any of the students had been alive!
Generalists are typically far better at motivating the relevance of a problem/situation and filtering out the important details from the unimportant. That clarity serves as a great platform on which to then incorporate the inputs of specialists from different fields relevant to the situation.
Of course, none of this is meant to defend or elevate people participation in random internet discussions, or generating “content marketing”, to “generalists”.
> Generalists are typically far better at motivating the relevance of a problem/situation and filtering out the important details from the unimportant.
Couldn't agree more.
John von Neumann is a perfect example. His colleagues would often lament his unwillingness to adopt a narrow specialty, but I think it was his wide range that allowed him to maintain the passion that made him so effective. [1]
The specialists that I've met have never been any less capable of understanding context outside their domains, or motivating problems, filtering out details than similarly intelligent people who don't have any specialist domain knowledge. I think we're talking about several separate characteristics:
1. General intelligence and articulateness
2. Deep knowledge of and skill in a specific domain
3. Willingness to bullshit
A "specialist" is somebody who has 2, a "generalist" is somebody who has 3
I think Erdős said of his own mathematical ability (no doubt with some humility) that it was very much a 'bag of tricks' he would apply to the problems his multitudinous collaborators were working on. I think a lot of philosophers use this approach too.
I think the value of polymaths is more 'synthetic', not necessarily 'analytic'. Many useful discoveries or insights are the result of an almost magical use of what C.S. Peirce called abduction: the process of generating hypotheses.
Knowledge in many domains, connected to the right problem, can lead to profoundly effective abduction. Sometimes this transfer can take the form of a persistent metaphor, or maybe an experience that makes itself known to you while you're thinking about something else, or simply your attention is guided to look at something in a particular light.
I feel like the post does a great job critiquing those high-status polymaths who emit an irresponsible amount of certainty. But there are plenty who use their wide learnings in a less concrete way, looking to add to their bag of tricks, and to put things together in interesting ways.
There is a lot of well-aimed critique in this comment section and the piece could benefit from rigorous editing and scrapping of the examples which are very unfortunately chosen. I think the steel man for this piece is:
1.) Qualified generalists and charlatan generalists look the same if you aren't an expert in the fields in which they opine.
2.) Experts in one field using their native lens to make conclusions about another field is not a polymath practice but something closer to a hammer that sees only nails.
I think we, as software people, are susceptible to 2—software is successful in some cases because of this kind of cross contamination where it replaces the tools and methods of a separate field with its own, sometimes with great success (art, finance).
Yes, yes - I would add - many 'software' people have to become successful in their own disciplines - and then also develop insights into the domains relevant to the problems they solve. For example, I'll bet HFT finance devs. know quite a lot about that kind of trading, probably more than most people with financial backgrounds who are not involved in trading at all.
This article seems to define a polymath as someone who is an expert in one domain and has opinions in other domains - those opinions being given greater value because of their other expertise. However - I'd argue that a polymath is someone with expertise in multiple domains. And the real value of the generalist is the ability to join the dots between specialties. We can argue if polymaths exist - or who might be one - but I think the definition stands. My background is medicine and I've seen first and the different contributions that generalists make vs specialists.
I think casual polymath seems like the wrong descriptor to use - as they're not experts in other fields.
They're experts in one field, and (most probably) dilettantes in other fields.
The trick however, is that they use their expert status from one field, to reach their audience. And then their followers will take that as domain authority, because they're perceived as authority in some other field.
I'm not going to name names, but this certainly fits the pattern of a lot of people in the VC-industry. Not that they brand themselves as experts (sometimes they'll explicitly state that they're not experts) - but their followers will assume that it's expert knowledge.
I come from a science background and have similar experience. It really reminds me of the adage "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".
One thing I have found is that while not all generalist suggestions are good, they can at least provoke the specialists to think about the problem differently.
The article is interesting, and probably right -- albeit maybe slightly unfair to da Vinci -- but I don't really buy this premise:
> We live in times of great disaggregation, and yet, seem to learn increasingly from generalists.
Most teaching is done by non-generalists -- be it in schools, on TV, in documentaries, in courtrooms, or basically anywhere of any import. There's quite a bit of irony in the author quoting Wikipedia though. On first reading, I thought that was some sort of punch-line.
> Having a variety of interests is no more a sign of generalized intelligence than being able to walk and chew gum.
This is a reductive oversimplification, and I really wish the author were more fair. There's something pretty incredible about someone contributing to multiple fields of study. It's rare, but it happens. The fact that some Twitter personality has surface knowledge about X and Y doesn't imply that there aren't people out there with actual deep knowledge about both X and Y.
The point about Leonardo da Vinci makes sense, but is definitely unfair. Of course, an art historian might assume Leonardo's mathematics was as great as his artistic ability.
In practice, no one has the time or the ability to be equally great in all fields of knowledge.
> . The equation a^n + b^n = c^n does not have a solution in integers for
n > 2 . But this theorem had yet to be demonstrated. It was not before 1753 that Leonhard
Euler demonstrated that the equation a^3 + b^3 = c^3 does not have a solution. And the final
demonstration of the so-called “Fermat’s third theorem”, which is that the general equation does not have a solution for n > 2 , was given by Andrew Weil in 1993.
So its fairly impressive that Leonardo was on a path that leads to Euler and then to Weil. Of course, Euler himself was a 'mathematical polymath' as it were, with a wide range of proofs across a number of fields.
To critise Leonardo da Vinci for not being good enough at mathematics is a little like complaining about Euler's drawing skills.
> Most teaching is done by non-generalists -- be it in schools, on TV, in documentaries, in courtrooms.
So you believe K-8 teaching, the greatest amount of teaching by far globally in the modern era, is done by non-generalists? Who specializes in arithmetic (number theorists and spreadsheet wizards aside)? If you define “pedagogy” as a specialty, perhaps, but that’s not the generalist/specialist discussion here. Even high school teachers generally only require a Bachelor’s degree...two years of content study (Junior-Senior...first two years is general education) out of an adult lifetime of, say, 50 years. Any “working professional” in a discipline wouldn’t count that for much. The media and courtroom teaching...you’d have to expand that discussion a bit for me to believe it. Law school, media studies...well, that’s another matter.
It’s not that rare to contribute across multiple disciplines...the entire discipline of systems engineering is predicated on it.
BTW: Can anyone summarize the thesis? This isn’t a tl;dr situation. I’m too old to read articles that look like the argument, if any, hinges on semantics with evidence that is, at best, anecdotal. (Frankly, we all are.) And so I don’t.
PS: I really like the “>” indent style for quotations for block text in this UI.
In life everyone is pushed to have an opinion on everything. On the internet any casual comment about anything is up for the attack “oh so now you claim to be an expert on X do you, well let me put you in your place...”.
> “The Twitter account you followed to understand politics now seems more focused on their mindfulness practice.”
What a "hellscape" it is when you’re reminded that other people are people and not service-providing objects that exist for your one-sided extraction of value. Just because you pigeonhole someone as “the politics person” doesn’t mean they do that to themselves, and just because they tweet about mindfulness doesn’t mean any claim to being a polymath, and just because you want to "learn about politics" doesn't oblige someone to "know their place" in your life and stick to it.
I'm sure there's something more interesting and deeper to be brought up about how it fundamentally doesn't seem to matter if you know a lot or a little, outside the lense of maximising capitalist money acquisition, but it's too hard to get past the rest of it and get to it.
You can just say "no, I don't have enough information to form an opinion on the matter" and leave it at that. Or maybe "I'm not convinced…" There's people who might attack you as ignoring a major issue, or being a lame duck, but you can remind them that it's certainly better than rushing into an opinion and choosing something you don't believe in.
That's a good point. If you follow a twitter account dedicated to political news and they start talking about meditation, thats different than following a person who likes to talk politics and dives into other subjects
> The incentive is to ramp up variance, make bold claims in a variety of areas, and hope you’re right some of the time.
Well said.
However, is a casual polymath any different than a blowhard with a bit of knowledge or a poser? It seems to me a true polymath, casual or otherwise, would value knowledge enough he would be careful not to make claims he was unsure of.
Assuming this isn’t some GPT-3 garbage, why does any of this matter? I can’t discern why I should care whether the author is right or wrong - the implications of the argument seem to be centered entirely around whether Twitter popularity is deserved or not, or just semantics about the definition of “polymath”.
Yes, fake experts are everywhere and draw from the Well without peeling back the layers of abstraction or demonstrating knowledge by putting something back in the Well. This writing seems to me to be an elaborate way of saying this, and it makes me wonder if he has been professionally or personally jilted by such personalities in his knowledge domain(s). The article oozes with insecurity.
We are told to be wary of who is speaking, what their qualifications are, if they are only casually opining on something, they may be wrong, we may not know any better.
We are told in the form of a long, wordy blogpost on a blog that is called "Applied Divinity Studies", there is no author named, there is no "about" for the page at all.
Although at the bottom of the page is a link to another article that seems to be about free market capitalism and a previous one that's about the politics of secession.
What was that it just said about blogs that have lots of wordy, generalist opining from non-specialists ?
What's equally hilarious to me is that this self-descriptive article, is being argued over by folks on this website, which was started by a man who also engaged in this style of writing.
> We already understand this intuitively, but only in a limited set of cases. If a pop star becomes an actor, we are not impressed by their wide range of talents. Instead, we understand that popularity is a semi-fungible good.
Yes. But where we got wrong is when the currency of celebrity is used as justification for worshipping their thoughts and ideas in other areas unrelated to their expertise/fame.
I suppose this simply human nature on our part. None the like, like other biases, we should be mindful of it siren-like power. We should guard against the influence of false gods.
Quick reminder-- this concept is an off-hand blurb from a sci-fi writer. It's no more based in research than the inkling that nation states should tighten their belts when the economy gets rough because after all, that's what a sensible hard-working family does. Or the notion that it's "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve."
Those last two are usually uttered by people who have an agenda and are not interested in doing serious, open-minded research into those topics.
If you're the kind of person who does enjoy learning from research papers, you might reflect in your free time on why you're repeating the inkling of a sci-fi writer, and perhaps even whose agenda that could be serving.
Taking this back to the startup world, I find that the enjoyable wicked problem of cross-disciplinary engineering in a startup environment is that you get to build things in areas in which you have only generalist knowledge. The task of the founding team is to optimize not only the process of discovery within those specific domains but also to ensure the development and management the team, providing a correct degree of emphasis on tangible outputs with respect to commercialization and available resources, with an eye on the future developments and business and research landscape. It's damn hard, it's fun, it's addictive, it's unlike anything else.
More briefly, the venture notion might be re-construed as the belief that generalists who reliably and tirelessly execute win large returns because they have their eye on the big picture and can deliver aggregate value beyond component achievements. The patent world has long recognized this notion as something like a 'novel arrangement' of pre-existing components.
Another idea is that specialists, by virtue of the well defined discipline in which they hold expertise, are easily located and hired/consulted. Arguably rarer competent generalists therefore become the de-facto 'glue' to link the requisite fruit of those specialist domains.
Da Vinci himself was apparently against overt formalization of learning and rigid professional hierarchies: They will say that because of my lack of book learning, I cannot properly express what I desire to treat of. Do they not know that my subjects require for their exposition experience rather than the words of others? And since experience has been the mistress, and to her in all points make my appeal. - Leonardo Da Vinci ... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
I am reminded of this lecture by Hamming entitled you and your research where he basically says you will fail at research because you're lazy and/or will lose time reading useless stuff.
Could all of the "claims" or "awards" better be seen if the person (doing the awarding or admiration) were only to ask - the critical question:
"How likely is this data (purposed solution) ?"
Not to side track the post, but I've seen time and time again in my daily life, how valuable this question is, even if you know nothing about the domain.
Example:
S.O buying an android phone for the first time and trying to move her "contacts and Apple life" to Android device.
The "only solution" she found was some "app for $50".
I simply stated (long time android user) , I can't believe that over the years that an APP of $50 is the only way to move from Phone-System1(Apple) to Phone-System2(Android)
Turns it it's not, there are many "free" ways todo it.
[+] [-] flipactual|5 years ago|reply
I’m leaving this comment only because I most often do not overestimate the value of my input and therefor don’t leave comments, but this seems the perfect place to deviate
[+] [-] onecommentman|5 years ago|reply
Silence, digital or otherwise, is a fine spiritual practice. It’s not necessary for some...probably sorely needed by others...
[+] [-] alexfromapex|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dm319|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gerdesj|5 years ago|reply
Think about what you have recently read and dump it!
[+] [-] barry27|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gerdesj|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gerdesj|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] alynn|5 years ago|reply
I stopped reading at the point where JFK’s 1947 election was claimed to be purely due to wealth. Although JFK is today remembered much more for other historical events--
He was already a nationally known war hero before 1947. See, for example, this 1944 article in the New Yorker:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1944/06/17/survival
[+] [-] jhbadger|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Igelau|5 years ago|reply
Can we even call this an article? It makes no sense. What is Applied Divinity Studies anyway?
[+] [-] ssivark|5 years ago|reply
Generalists are typically far better at motivating the relevance of a problem/situation and filtering out the important details from the unimportant. That clarity serves as a great platform on which to then incorporate the inputs of specialists from different fields relevant to the situation.
Of course, none of this is meant to defend or elevate people participation in random internet discussions, or generating “content marketing”, to “generalists”.
[+] [-] rmrfstar|5 years ago|reply
Couldn't agree more.
John von Neumann is a perfect example. His colleagues would often lament his unwillingness to adopt a narrow specialty, but I think it was his wide range that allowed him to maintain the passion that made him so effective. [1]
[1] http://paulgraham.com/genius.html
[+] [-] s17n|5 years ago|reply
A "specialist" is somebody who has 2, a "generalist" is somebody who has 3
[+] [-] rwnspace|5 years ago|reply
I think the value of polymaths is more 'synthetic', not necessarily 'analytic'. Many useful discoveries or insights are the result of an almost magical use of what C.S. Peirce called abduction: the process of generating hypotheses.
Knowledge in many domains, connected to the right problem, can lead to profoundly effective abduction. Sometimes this transfer can take the form of a persistent metaphor, or maybe an experience that makes itself known to you while you're thinking about something else, or simply your attention is guided to look at something in a particular light.
I feel like the post does a great job critiquing those high-status polymaths who emit an irresponsible amount of certainty. But there are plenty who use their wide learnings in a less concrete way, looking to add to their bag of tricks, and to put things together in interesting ways.
[+] [-] arcsincosin|5 years ago|reply
I think we, as software people, are susceptible to 2—software is successful in some cases because of this kind of cross contamination where it replaces the tools and methods of a separate field with its own, sometimes with great success (art, finance).
[+] [-] jariel|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gerdesj|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] MrDrDr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TrackerFF|5 years ago|reply
They're experts in one field, and (most probably) dilettantes in other fields.
The trick however, is that they use their expert status from one field, to reach their audience. And then their followers will take that as domain authority, because they're perceived as authority in some other field.
I'm not going to name names, but this certainly fits the pattern of a lot of people in the VC-industry. Not that they brand themselves as experts (sometimes they'll explicitly state that they're not experts) - but their followers will assume that it's expert knowledge.
[+] [-] el_oni|5 years ago|reply
One thing I have found is that while not all generalist suggestions are good, they can at least provoke the specialists to think about the problem differently.
[+] [-] dvt|5 years ago|reply
> We live in times of great disaggregation, and yet, seem to learn increasingly from generalists.
Most teaching is done by non-generalists -- be it in schools, on TV, in documentaries, in courtrooms, or basically anywhere of any import. There's quite a bit of irony in the author quoting Wikipedia though. On first reading, I thought that was some sort of punch-line.
> Having a variety of interests is no more a sign of generalized intelligence than being able to walk and chew gum.
This is a reductive oversimplification, and I really wish the author were more fair. There's something pretty incredible about someone contributing to multiple fields of study. It's rare, but it happens. The fact that some Twitter personality has surface knowledge about X and Y doesn't imply that there aren't people out there with actual deep knowledge about both X and Y.
[+] [-] gilleain|5 years ago|reply
In practice, no one has the time or the ability to be equally great in all fields of knowledge.
This paper : https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00004-007-005... talks about what mathematics he did
> . The equation a^n + b^n = c^n does not have a solution in integers for n > 2 . But this theorem had yet to be demonstrated. It was not before 1753 that Leonhard Euler demonstrated that the equation a^3 + b^3 = c^3 does not have a solution. And the final demonstration of the so-called “Fermat’s third theorem”, which is that the general equation does not have a solution for n > 2 , was given by Andrew Weil in 1993.
So its fairly impressive that Leonardo was on a path that leads to Euler and then to Weil. Of course, Euler himself was a 'mathematical polymath' as it were, with a wide range of proofs across a number of fields.
To critise Leonardo da Vinci for not being good enough at mathematics is a little like complaining about Euler's drawing skills.
[+] [-] onecommentman|5 years ago|reply
So you believe K-8 teaching, the greatest amount of teaching by far globally in the modern era, is done by non-generalists? Who specializes in arithmetic (number theorists and spreadsheet wizards aside)? If you define “pedagogy” as a specialty, perhaps, but that’s not the generalist/specialist discussion here. Even high school teachers generally only require a Bachelor’s degree...two years of content study (Junior-Senior...first two years is general education) out of an adult lifetime of, say, 50 years. Any “working professional” in a discipline wouldn’t count that for much. The media and courtroom teaching...you’d have to expand that discussion a bit for me to believe it. Law school, media studies...well, that’s another matter.
It’s not that rare to contribute across multiple disciplines...the entire discipline of systems engineering is predicated on it.
BTW: Can anyone summarize the thesis? This isn’t a tl;dr situation. I’m too old to read articles that look like the argument, if any, hinges on semantics with evidence that is, at best, anecdotal. (Frankly, we all are.) And so I don’t.
PS: I really like the “>” indent style for quotations for block text in this UI.
[+] [-] paultopia|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jodrellblank|5 years ago|reply
> “The Twitter account you followed to understand politics now seems more focused on their mindfulness practice.”
What a "hellscape" it is when you’re reminded that other people are people and not service-providing objects that exist for your one-sided extraction of value. Just because you pigeonhole someone as “the politics person” doesn’t mean they do that to themselves, and just because they tweet about mindfulness doesn’t mean any claim to being a polymath, and just because you want to "learn about politics" doesn't oblige someone to "know their place" in your life and stick to it.
I'm sure there's something more interesting and deeper to be brought up about how it fundamentally doesn't seem to matter if you know a lot or a little, outside the lense of maximising capitalist money acquisition, but it's too hard to get past the rest of it and get to it.
[+] [-] saagarjha|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] animal_spirits|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gerdesj|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] taxcoder|5 years ago|reply
Well said.
However, is a casual polymath any different than a blowhard with a bit of knowledge or a poser? It seems to me a true polymath, casual or otherwise, would value knowledge enough he would be careful not to make claims he was unsure of.
[+] [-] plaidfuji|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gerdesj|5 years ago|reply
"We live in times of great disaggregation, and yet, seem to learn increasingly from generalists."
This is an experiment. The whole thing was probably written by kittens.
[+] [-] awill88|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zzzeek|5 years ago|reply
We are told in the form of a long, wordy blogpost on a blog that is called "Applied Divinity Studies", there is no author named, there is no "about" for the page at all.
Although at the bottom of the page is a link to another article that seems to be about free market capitalism and a previous one that's about the politics of secession.
What was that it just said about blogs that have lots of wordy, generalist opining from non-specialists ?
[+] [-] moron4hire|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chiefalchemist|5 years ago|reply
Yes. But where we got wrong is when the currency of celebrity is used as justification for worshipping their thoughts and ideas in other areas unrelated to their expertise/fame.
I suppose this simply human nature on our part. None the like, like other biases, we should be mindful of it siren-like power. We should guard against the influence of false gods.
[+] [-] jancsika|5 years ago|reply
Quick reminder-- this concept is an off-hand blurb from a sci-fi writer. It's no more based in research than the inkling that nation states should tighten their belts when the economy gets rough because after all, that's what a sensible hard-working family does. Or the notion that it's "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve."
Those last two are usually uttered by people who have an agenda and are not interested in doing serious, open-minded research into those topics.
If you're the kind of person who does enjoy learning from research papers, you might reflect in your free time on why you're repeating the inkling of a sci-fi writer, and perhaps even whose agenda that could be serving.
[+] [-] bonestormii_|5 years ago|reply
The author severely underestimates the universal genius of diCaprio.
[+] [-] contingencies|5 years ago|reply
More briefly, the venture notion might be re-construed as the belief that generalists who reliably and tirelessly execute win large returns because they have their eye on the big picture and can deliver aggregate value beyond component achievements. The patent world has long recognized this notion as something like a 'novel arrangement' of pre-existing components.
Another idea is that specialists, by virtue of the well defined discipline in which they hold expertise, are easily located and hired/consulted. Arguably rarer competent generalists therefore become the de-facto 'glue' to link the requisite fruit of those specialist domains.
Da Vinci himself was apparently against overt formalization of learning and rigid professional hierarchies: They will say that because of my lack of book learning, I cannot properly express what I desire to treat of. Do they not know that my subjects require for their exposition experience rather than the words of others? And since experience has been the mistress, and to her in all points make my appeal. - Leonardo Da Vinci ... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
[+] [-] gerdesj|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] macromagnon|5 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/a1zDuOPkMSw
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rawoke083600|5 years ago|reply
Could all of the "claims" or "awards" better be seen if the person (doing the awarding or admiration) were only to ask - the critical question:
"How likely is this data (purposed solution) ?"
Not to side track the post, but I've seen time and time again in my daily life, how valuable this question is, even if you know nothing about the domain.
Example: S.O buying an android phone for the first time and trying to move her "contacts and Apple life" to Android device.
The "only solution" she found was some "app for $50". I simply stated (long time android user) , I can't believe that over the years that an APP of $50 is the only way to move from Phone-System1(Apple) to Phone-System2(Android)
Turns it it's not, there are many "free" ways todo it.