Academia doesn't really do synthesis.

It rewards adding yet another jenga block to the tower of peer-reviewed knowledge.

And as we get deeper into the details as society, the jenga blocks keep on getting smaller and smaller.

More intricate.

Larger amounts of net new surface area to ever smaller amounts of net new volume.

Synthesis takes a step back, considers all of the facts and knowledge spread across various domains, and asks, "what are we to make of this?"

It identifies the human-understandable throughlines across various domains.

Cross-domain synthesis is basically not done in academia.

It can sometimes be done in industry, but only if it's got some plausible application (or at a place that is so resource-rich that it can tolerate employees pulling on random threads).

Other than that, it falls largely to hobbyists or authors of mainstream science books.

Which is why I'm so grateful for people like Alicia Juarrero and her book Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence.

I mean, right there in the title is a mindblowing distillation: "constraints create coherence".

What an intriguing inversion, a figure-ground shift!

A distillation from a riff on the book, Apocalypse as Design Constraint:

"We think of constraints as limitations. We focus on the possibilities they bias against because these can be known in advance. What constraints bias a system towards is not always easy to see—and everything hinges on this fact."