on paper my projects look like someone who cannot hold a topic. quantum key networks. the genetics of a lung tumour. reading attention off where someone's eyes go. a live map of conflict events. the microstructure of a market. there is no honest way to make that list look like a plan, and for a while it embarrassed me, because the advice is always to pick a lane.
but the list is misleading, because it sorts by subject, and subject was never the thing i was chasing. underneath, it is almost always the same problem wearing different clothes. somewhere there is more data than anyone can hold in their head at once, and buried in it is a faint structure that matters, and the work is to pull the structure out without fooling yourself. that problem belongs to no field. it just keeps turning up inside them.
once you start seeing it that way it stops mattering whether the data is photons or cells or sentences. a quantum network is a graph, links and nodes whose behaviour depends on their neighbours. a tumour is the same problem from another direction, signals and interactions you have to read together because no single marker means anything on its own. a stretch of language is structure laid over a sequence. cancer and a key-distribution network and a paragraph have no business being related, and underneath they are asking you the same thing. find the shape in the mess. and something that learns the shape in one of them usually has something to say about the others.
that is the part i did not expect when i started, and the part i would not give back now. the most interesting ideas i have had did not come from going deeper into a single field. they came from carrying something across a border it was not built for. a way of thinking about structure that belongs to one world, walked into another that had never used it, where it looks out of place and then it works. the fields guard their borders. the problems walk straight through them.
there is a cost to this. you give up the comfort of being the person who knows one small thing better than anyone, and you are always a little bit the outsider, the one who has to learn the local language before he is allowed to say anything. for a while i thought that was a weakness to apologise for. i stopped. the specialist sees one field in enormous depth. the other kind notices that two fields are secretly the same, and that noticing is its own skill, and it is the one that has handed me just about everything surprising i have found.
so i have made my peace with the messy list. it is not someone who could not commit. it is someone who committed to the one thing underneath all of them and followed it wherever it went, and it went everywhere. if you are looking for the strange ideas, that is where they are. not at the bottom of a single field, dug deeper than the next person. at the seams between fields, where hardly anyone is looking, because everybody is busy guarding their own.