bloop

I agree with many of the premises here, and I like this as a way of conceptualising skillsets, but I'm not sure I find it all that useful.

The main omission in this essay, to my mind, is any mention of skill interdependence. If you're one of the first people to discover the fertile gerontology/statistics niche, then you might get your 15 minutes of fame, and your early adopter status might give you a comparative advantage. But as soon as it becomes commonly recognised how fertile the ground is in this niche, there'll be tons of people right behind you chasing the low-hanging fruit.

Because of this, training programmes in gerontology start making statistics... (read more)

I hope you don't mind me leaving a second comment, because it's kind of orthogonal to the first.

It’s no secret that an academic can easily find fertile fields by working with someone in a different department.

(Emphasis mine.) Speaking as an academic, I think this is far from true. Interdisciplinarity is a very popular buzzword, and we're all told to strive for it, but the vast majority of us don't find fertile grounds for cross-curricular collaboration when we try. It's possible on the overlap of mathematics and physics, or computer science and statistics, or literature and history, or geography and sociology, granted. But that doesn't mean that any mathematician can work... (read more)