Not only is it rare but there seems to be a surprisingly large gap between my intuitions and the next closest person’s.
This is a natural consequence of having many interests and switching fields many times; you bring a unique set of factual knowledge, concepts, heuristics, theoretical frameworks or insights to the problem at hand. You pay the cost of not likely being the most-expert or most-competent in most or all the fields you care about, but you reap the benefit of having uncommon insights, which tend to be orthogonal to the rest of the field (and perhaps for this reason incomprehensible to them).
Weak analogy: If reality could be mapped to one orthogonal basis set, it’s as if each specialization only has a few basis functions; the good fields have at least one basis function that explains a large fraction of the power in at least the signal set [dimension of reality] they study. But other parts of reality that don’t happen to project onto their set are entirely invisible to them. Interdisciplinary field-switchers get to accumulate basis functions as they go; so they always have some at their disposal that are orthogonal to the set in use within the current discipline. The more disparate two disciplines, the less overlap in their endogenous basis sets (but perhaps that is a tautological statement, a definition of ‘disparate’).
This is a natural consequence of having many interests and switching fields many times; you bring a unique set of factual knowledge, concepts, heuristics, theoretical frameworks or insights to the problem at hand. You pay the cost of not likely being the most-expert or most-competent in most or all the fields you care about, but you reap the benefit of having uncommon insights, which tend to be orthogonal to the rest of the field (and perhaps for this reason incomprehensible to them).
Weak analogy: If reality could be mapped to one orthogonal basis set, it’s as if each specialization only has a few basis functions; the good fields have at least one basis function that explains a large fraction of the power in at least the signal set [dimension of reality] they study. But other parts of reality that don’t happen to project onto their set are entirely invisible to them. Interdisciplinary field-switchers get to accumulate basis functions as they go; so they always have some at their disposal that are orthogonal to the set in use within the current discipline. The more disparate two disciplines, the less overlap in their endogenous basis sets (but perhaps that is a tautological statement, a definition of ‘disparate’).