David Foster Wallace on the increasing specialization of knowledge, or what I call the acronym boom:

Things are vastly more compartmentalized now than they were up through, say, the Renaissance. And more specialized, and more freighted with all kinds of special context. There's no way we'd expect a world-class, cutting-edge mathematician now also to be doing world-class, cutting-edge philosophy, theology, etc. Not so for the Greeks--if only because math, philosophy, and...