For years now, I’ve been saving my favorite synthesis quotes as I’ve been learning about my own synthesizing mind. These 25 quotes on synthesis illustrate why we need synthesizers more than ever.
“May synthesizing minds thrive.” — Howard Gardner
Premium members also have access to the full companion post: đź”’ Meta-Synthesis: 100+ Quotes on Synthesis, Synthesizers, & Synthesizing Minds
🧠UPDATE: The new Synthesizer course is now live!
Post Contents:
- Information Overload & Knowledge Economy
- Specialization & Fragmentation
- Training & Cultivation
- Polarization & Unity
- The Future
25 Synthesis Quotes to inspire the Aspiring Synthesizers
Synthesis quotes on information overload & knowledge economy:
1. “We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.” — E. O. Wilson
2. “Valuable in the past, the capacity to synthesize becomes ever more crucial as information continues to mount at dizzying rates.” — Howard Gardner
3. “In an age of information overload, information discovery—the service of bringing to the public’s attention that which is interesting, meaningful, important, and otherwise worthy of our time and thought—is a form of creative and intellectual labor, and one of increasing importance and urgency.” — Maria Popova
4. “The ability to foster, nurture, and synthesize the impacts of varying views of information is critical to knowledge economy survival.” — George Siemens
5. “Sources of information are vast and disparate and individuals crave coherence and integration.” — Howard Gardner
Synthesis quotes on specialization & fragmentation:
6. “The modern mind divides, specializes, thinks in categories: the Greek instinct was the opposite, to take the widest view, to see things as an organic whole.” — H.D.F. Kitto
7. “In an increasingly complex world, the fragmented state of knowledge can be seen as one of the most pressing social problems of our time.” — via Gregg Henriques
8. “We live in a time where our most talented minds know more and more about increasingly narrow spheres. The division of labour has swept the marketplace of ideas as well and there is no reason to expect the drive toward specialisation will be stemmed. Therefore, we need to make a concerted effort to develop this important mental capacity (of synthesizing) in society.” — Howard Gardner
9. “As the world has grown increasingly complex, a new phenomenon has emerged. The social, technical, scientific, educational, cultural, and political problems which are arising for modern man in the midst of this increasing complexity, are problems which the specialist is literally unable to solve. There are few problems any more which can be said to be berthed safely within the confines of a single, traditional discipline. The problems of modern man are interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary, that is to say, a proper solution of these problems requires information and methods which stem from many disciplines.” — Henry Winthrop
10. “The world badly needs international and interdisciplinary travelers to carry new knowledge from one enclave to another.” — Herbert Simon
Synthesis quotes on lack of training & cultivation:
11. “People take four courses in economics, go to business school, have all these I.Q. points, and write all these essays, but they can’t synthesize worth a damn.” — Charlie Munger
12. “You have people walking around with all the knowledge of humanity on their phone, but they have no idea how to integrate it. We don’t train people in thinking or reasoning.” — Arturo Casadevall
13. “Very few people have the training and information access needed to adequately understand critical and complex issues independently.” — The Consilience Project
14. “Though there are certainly exceptions, by and large, synthesizing capacities are neither systematically trained nor regularly and reliably assessed. Either one does or does not have such an inclination; and if one is inclined to be a synthesizer, one is consigned (for the most part) to being an autodidact. This need not be the case. Particularly in the 21st century, when so much information is available at our fingertips (so to speak), it’s high time to direct our attention to the cultivation of the capacity to synthesize.” — Howard Gardner
15. “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” — Steve Jobs
Synthesis quotes on polarization & unity:
16. “In this time of divisive tendencies within and between the nations, races, religions, sciences and humanities, synthesis must become the great magnet which orients us all.” — Oliver Reiser
17. “Our main hope of survival in this highly polarized world lies in a prodigious effort at synthesis of the two cultures while there is still time … One must see from this that, slowly but surely, both civilizations, East and West, are converging toward a higher synthesis of views about man and the ideal society for man’s further development.” — Oliver Reiser
18. “The major thesis of this ‘search for synthesis’ is that the world requires a vast ‘integration of knowledge’ program to unify the globe spiritually and socially and give meaning and purpose to human existence.” — Oliver Reiser
19. “All of this is resulting in an increased recognition of the need to restore unity to learning. The recognition of the degree to which intellectual integration and scholarly synthesis are imperative.” — Henry Winthrop
20. “The wisdom needed must be the creative synthesis of the best in past human effort, in contemporary proposals, and in the modes of action that are foreseen as humanity’s choices for its own future.” — Henry Winthrop (quoting Oliver Reiser)
Synthesis quotes on the future:
21. “In the twenty-first century, the most important kind of mind will be the synthesizing mind.” — Murray Gell-Mann (Nobel Laureate in Physics in 1969, founder of the interdisciplinary Santa Fe Institute, and coiner of the term ‘synthesizing mind’)
22. “We are approaching a new age of synthesis. Knowledge cannot be merely a degree or a skill; it demands a broader vision, capabilities in critical thinking and logical deduction without which we cannot have constructive progress.” — Li Ka-shing
23. “In the era of technological convergence, well-educated generalists will be those who are the most valuable. It is time for a renaissance of the ‘Renaissance Man.'” —  Jake Chapman
24. “Over the next century, scholars and fans, aided by computational algorithms, will knit together the books of the world into a single networked literature. A reader will be able to generate a social graph of an idea, or a timeline of a concept, or a networked map of influence for any notion in the library. We’ll come to understand that no work, no idea, stands alone, but that all good, true and beautiful things are networks, ecosystems of intertwingled parts, related entities and similar works.” — Kevin Kelly
25. “Here’s what’s important: as scholars, we assembled these data and synthesized our impressions and our numbers, in as powerful a way as we could. And over and above the data that we arrayed, we hoped that our writings, individually or collectively, could change the conversation about human beings at a particular time in a particular social and cultural context.” — Howard Gardner
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