I'm sympathetic towards the idea that pursuing all the knowledge we can get our hands on is a good thing. It is a tempting idea for me to believe in, because it offers a justification that is satisfying to values I hold like curiosity and respect for information. However, this means I might be biased. And I don't want to believe this idea if it isn't true.

When I think critically about this, I'm inclined to think that seeking so much knowledge across so many subjects is a suboptimal use of time, even for the prodigiously talented. My view is that details are important insofar as learning them helps us to learn broad patterns, and some types of details predictably are unlikely to lead to such insights and so can be safely ignored. For non-biologists, I don't think there is much value in knowing all the names and types of the plants. For non-astronomers, I don't think that the stars and planets are worth studying.

I acknowledge that there sometimes are cross-applicable ideas or universal patterns which can be discovered by studying obscure fields. For example, Newton's laws of motion or his law of gravity are useful to almost all of science, not just to astronomers. However, even acknowledging this, it's unclear to me whether the probability of discovering such patterns is high enough that it's worth the opportunity cost. Maybe if people before Newton had been more inclined towards specialized knowledge, some astronomer would have discovered the equation for gravitational attraction even sooner. Perhaps we'd also have some additional knowledge besides.

Is there any actual evidence for the idea that unfiltered pursuit of knowledge is superior to the filtered pursuit of knowledge? The only other argument for it that I can advance is that a lot of famous intelligent people have believed so, but I find this argument pretty unpersuasive. Thoughts?

Partly, I may simply be taking reliable access to high quality detailed information for granted, since I'm used to living with internet access and Wikipedia.