11 ms·

Does the world need polymaths?

142 points by gt2 9y ago

anotheryou 9y ago
The article doesn't go very deep in to the answer. Maybe they aro good managers, maybe communicatiors, but either way it's a bit of a specialization in itself that benefits greatly from broad knowledge. I don't see how exactly they could bring together different sciences directly.
meri_dian 9y ago
We are living in a 'cooperative/corporate' age, where the prime drivers of innovation are collections of humans rather than individuals. The problems we face are more complex than ever before and exceed the individual capabilities of even the brightest among us. Visionary thinkers still have their place. A Cooperative needs leaders to chart its course. In a complex world, people who can derive inspiration from multiple domains of knowledge will always be valuable.
- Retric 9y ago
  Groups of people have issues scaling. At the scale of the say the DoD you end up with a lot of inefficient redundancy which pushes organisations to specialize. Google for example does not actually do that many different things, it just has crazy amounts of leverage.
  - pureGuano 9y ago
    I think people are (slowly) re-learning the importance of redundancy. Having multiple, competing implementations makes you far less vulnerable to shocks.
    - posterboy 9y ago
      Using relational databases as a model for the structures in question, some form of redundancy (secondary and primary keys) is needed to avoid more redundancy (dublication). I actually don't know what I'm talking about, if it made sense to someone, please correct me where I'm wrong.
    - Retric 9y ago
      This is not really productive redundancy as for example the Navy and Air Force can't easily swap HR systems. This is mostly everyone being their own little snowflake.
  - dilemma 9y ago
    Individuals have even more trouble scaling.
syntheticnature 9y ago
I am reminded of a bit, possibly apocryphal, that when the first three-fin rocket (instead of four, as had been the case with the V-2 and successors) was proposed it was questioned whether or not it would be stable, up until someone pointed out that arrows with three fletching feathers had been flying straight for quite some time.
DataWorker 9y ago
I'm reminded of Nietzsche's Zarathrusta where there's an encounter with an expert on the brains of leeches. For me the question of whether we need polymaths is one about what sort of society we desire and it's a very easy question to answer. I wonder whether the much discussed decline in productivity, which can of course be debated, isn't largely the result of becoming a society of leech brain experts.
jowiar 9y ago
The biggest pressure against polymaths is the structure of the modern university. From department organization, mentoring, battles for funding, it is very difficult to find an encouraging environment if you don't stay within a narrow niche. As an aside, I feel like most interesting innovation in academic computer science happened before the field was full of computer scientists. In the early days, the field was a meeting point of trained mathematicians, physicists, economists, engineers, and linguists, and innovation flourished. To some extent, I credit people exploring and communicating about similar concepts from multiple perspectives. Now, everybody in academic CS has taken the same path in life, and it makes things quite boring.
- jackcosgrove 9y ago
  The decline in the pace of discovery, if it is real, could also be because the early researchers took the low hanging fruit.
HillRat 9y ago
The two species are complementary; hedgehogs have the knowledge and expertise necessary to develop fine-granularity models of their domains, whereas foxes find commonalities and connections between many coarse-grained models. Foxes rely on hedgehogs to form their knowledge base; hedgehogs can use foxes' insights for new directions of research and development. Innovation (as opposed to optimization) is the result of cooperation occurring across vertical and horizontal model boundaries.
- mk89 9y ago
  very nice comparisons!
- petra 9y ago
  All this discussion is with the implicit assumption that only humans can handle knowledge. But we have machines to help us. So today it's easily possibly to talk with people from diverse fields, to search for knowledge of specific characteristics in different fields, or to reuse knowledge using code or patterns from a far field. So it feels that with the right tools and technology and training, people could connect ideas from multiple fields, without deep investment, and being a polymath could be "democratized", similar to how many other complex tasks have been democratized. And this field seems somewhat under-invested, relative to the potential.
  - adrianN 9y ago
    Until computers get a lot smarter in understanding research papers, you'll always have the problem of unknown unknowns. How do you discover things in other fields if you don't even know the terminology? For example a medical researcher reinvented (or at least claims to have reinvented) some calculus: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9602/rediscovery-of-calculus-in-1994-what-should-have-happened-to-that-paper https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9602/rediscover... If you never heard of calculus, googling for solutions can be difficult.
    - petra 9y ago
      This is a paper from 1994, before the Internet etc we're popular. But let's try: 1. Google to find what the relevant fields are - you get math. Search a forum about math -> discover math.stackexchange.com -> ask for help or even just terminology regarding "area under my graph/curve"? Once you get that , you could follow on it(say ask for a library of the most accurate integration method we know of today). 2. Google that, find relevant results and dig for terminology, and follow on it. And sure , this isn't a bulletproof method, and you won't get 100% coverage. But it help find connections .
DrBazza 9y ago
Contrary to Betteridge's law, yes we need polymaths. Asimov wrote a story along these lines. Already there are cases of esoteric knowledge in one field being applicable to another. I recall, though cannot find the reference, of a pure maths technique being applied to quantum physics which only happened by the fortunate meeting of two researchers.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  Heck, it already happens entirely inside of a field: probably once a year and at least once a decade, there's a major paper in math or physics that is basically "applying standard technique in subfield A to subfield B".
  - housel 9y ago
    Indeed, one of my professors in grad school defined a research contribution as adding an edge in a metaphorical bipartite graph to link formerly disparate subfields.
- teddyh 9y ago
  For the curious, the Asimov story is called Sucker Bait, from 1954.
  - DrBazza 9y ago
    That's the one!
- happycube 9y ago
  Feynman did most of his physics using straight calculus. He hid his work to make it look like it was easy for him...
- ctchocula 9y ago
  The pure maths technique you are thinking about is the Monster group [1]. Sadly, I don't recall the names of the two researchers involved in the chance meeting. [1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-chase-moonshine-string-theory-connections-20150312/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-chase-moonshin...
SubiculumCode 9y ago
As a post-doc in developmental cog neuro I feel I have to be a 'poly math.' Cognitive theory, Developmental processes theory, Brain theory, developmental brain processes, structural and fMRI methods and software, multiple regression (including mixed models, structural equation modeling) intermediate programming, linux administration, technical writing, experimental design, administration of research activities, teaching (??), and recently throw in autism research. On top of that, I'm reasonably informed on current events, read HN daily, keep tabs on the outlines of advances in medicine and other sciences. I think I'll go back to sleep.
- SubiculumCode 9y ago
  I am curious why the parent is earning down votes. Is it the comment about teaching?
  - ptero 9y ago
    Not trying to be critical, but I suspect that the gist comes out as "I am SO smart". If you chose a third person account you might have avoided them. Not sure, but that's my guess.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - SubiculumCode 9y ago
      I was indicating that my field pulls me in so many directions that I am overwhelmed.. But I see now that I didn't articulate that well.
  - personlurking 9y ago
    I didn't downvote it but it's possibly the "r/iamverysmart" feeling of it. It exists between the aforementioned and adding value to the conversation (ie, that certain current fields require both depth and breadth).
    - 9y ago
4lch3m1st 9y ago
We should all be encouraged to be polymaths since school. But I believe the great challenge is not really to push such idea to students, but to actually make them find interest on what they're expected to learn, be it to become polymaths or leech brain experts. I'm saying that given the education background from my country, Brazil. I was surprised, back when I was teaching programming to kids, at how seem to care so less about the actual learning process, while still having a lot of learning potential.
calebm 9y ago
“The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.” (Nikola Tesla)
- observation 9y ago
  I feel that when I read old textbooks, even the children's ones. People have gotten less coherent, I don't know why, but I suspect it is so.
ericd 9y ago
Yes, because a lot of innovation comes from transferring knowledge between unrelated fields. There is a lot of benefit to cross disciplinary knowledge.
- personlurking 9y ago
  FWIW and/or for anyone interested, here's a related Wikipedia on the subject, talking about the different types of knowledge spillovers (MAR, Porter, Jacobs). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_spillover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_spillover
  - ericd 9y ago
    Sweet, I didn't realize there was a formal term for this concept, but it makes sense that economists would have tried to formalize this :-)
chaosbutters314 9y ago
I know a lot of companies in the engineering/science world that hire PhDs who are experts in very specific fields and others who have broad knowledge in a lot of fields. They try to balance these 2 types of people: broad versus specific and have them work together for synergy.
barkingcat 9y ago
Like this woman? http://slippedisc.com/2017/08/i-gave-up-a-career-in-the-defence-industry-to-be-an-opera-singer/ http://slippedisc.com/2017/08/i-gave-up-a-career-in-the-defe... She sounds like this: https://slippedisc.com/2017/08/last-night-the-aida-missed-her-entry-so-a-violinist-stood-up-and-sang/ https://slippedisc.com/2017/08/last-night-the-aida-missed-he...
Fede_V 9y ago
While we do need polymaths, the problem with a lot of self described polymaths is that they skip the hard part of different fields and only focus on a 'Gladwellesque' understanding. I think a better way to be a polymath is to be a real expert on a particular subject, and then augment that with ancilliary knowledge from other fields. If you claim to understand physics but don't know maths, or claim to be an expert on classical literature but don't know how to read greek/latin, then you aren't a polymath but a bullshit artist. The polymaths I respect are people like Peter Medawar, JD Bernal, etc.. My particular pet peeve lately is people (especially prevalent in the rationalist sphere) that talk about how Bayesian they are, but don't know what a conjugate prior is, or have no understanding of MCMC sampling. There is absolutely nothing wrong with not knowing either of those two things - but if you don't know either, then describing yourself as a Bayesian is just putting on airs.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- NHern031 9y ago
  I have no idea what you are talking, but I love it. There is nothing more satisfying than seeing a peraon be so passionate about something. Thank you for posting this, it made me happy.
- joe_the_user 9y ago
  Yeah, The article kind of got off on the wrong foot by talking about trivia masters. I wouldn't say that the people who make important contributions through being polymaths are those who bring the insights of several fields together. I think someone like Julian Jaynes, who brought together strands from a variety of disciplines to formulate his theory of Bicameralism is an example of such a wide-ranging thinker [1]. Reasonably respected Marxist economist David Laibman[2] is also a well-know blues singer and well-know mainstream economist Kenneth Rogoff is a chess grandmaster and something of fraud. But the extra expertise of these two experts doesn't seem to matter either in their performance. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Jaynes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Jaynes [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Laibman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Laibman [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Rogoff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Rogoff
denvercoder904 9y ago
Yes. The industry calls them system engineers.
saosebastiao 9y ago
Forgive the analogy, I know its leaky, but I believe it to be approximate. I liken the mindset that leads to advances to something similar to the Rete algorithm, with human knowledge representing the alpha nodes and with human intellect representing the beta nodes, and human memory and computation power encompassing the whole graph. Once you match knowledge with a potential use of that knowledge, you create innovation. This can happen forwards or backwards, driven by new knowledge matching with existing applications (the research lab model) or with new applications matching with existing knowledge (the startup model). The thing is, the rete graph requires enough working memory to store the graph. It really only works if knowledge and application can be co-located. And that means that polymaths have a huge advantage: their graphs are much bigger, so any new information has a much higher probability of matching up with something existing in their heads. This also explains why the greatest scientists and inventors tended to make their most significant discoveries later in life: their brain's graph had grown and become more useful and more connected. The thing is, by using IPC with distributed memory and computation abstractions, you can expand that graph to be represented across multiple humans. That works too. But we must remember that our abilities to innovate across a multi-human graph absolutely rely on our speed and quality of communication, and it must navigate past filters that represent our own philosophical world view. And while that really puts a damper on our collective innovation abilities, it doesn't impede it and we shouldn't be discouraged by it. TL;DR: The world doesn't need polymaths, per se. We can innovate by collective minds communicating with each other. But it's not as good, and so it's still really beneficial to have polymaths around.
- whatnotests 9y ago
  Came here to say this.
roceasta 9y ago
I'm grateful to share the world with anyone who is trying to think and is brave enough to communicate their ideas in the face of career stagnation. That said, I expect most geniuses are polymaths by conventional standards, whether we need them to be or not. Their intellectual development is neither a well-rounded curriculum nor a steady progression but marked by series of deep obsessions.
quickben 9y ago
We probably need polymaths more than people writing clickbait headlines for the BBC.
SandersAK 9y ago
Is this really an article about polymaths that doesn't mention a single Islamic polymath? The whole concept of polymath is not that you're a genius or even knowledgable about a bunch of stuff. In the Islamic tradition the concept insists that you can't understand math without knowing poetry. Can't understand medicine without understanding geometry etc. All elements of human interpretation and expression are linked and help you explore the other. Here's a list of polymaths that the article didn't mention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age
- criddell 9y ago
  > The whole concept of polymath is not that you're a genius or even knowledgable about a bunch of stuff. Actually, I think that's exactly what it means. The Wikipedia entry on Polymath[1] says basically the same thing as the article as does my dictionary. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath
  - gkya 9y ago
    > A polymath (Greek: πολυμαθής, polymathēs, "having learned much")[1] is a person whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas; such a person is known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems. The first paragraph from that article.
    - criddell 9y ago
      That's almost exactly what my dictionary says. I think you and I are in agreement. Pretty much by definition, a polymath is knowledgeable about a bunch of stuff.
      - gkya 9y ago
        > Pretty much by definition, a polymath is knowledgeable about a bunch of stuff. Certainly. I was (misunderstandingly I guess) getting at the genius part, as that's not really required. Also, I guess SandersAK was giving the islamic perspective on polymathness, not his.
randcraw 9y ago
Can a polymath not be a scientist by training? It seems like so many topics today require substantial grounding in quantitative skills that are almost impossible to gain outside grad-school-level studies in science and engineering. Can a polymath whose expertise spans the sciences truly come from elsewhere -- math, economics, philosophy, etc? In a similar vein, I have yet to read a popular science book written by a non-scientist that comes close to the incandescent prose of the best scientist authors -- all of whom seem to be professional scientists (Dyson, Sagan, Morrison, Wilson, Medawar, etc). Of course their skill came not only from academics, but from that rare mix of curiosity and rigorous inquiry essential to separate what we know from what we don't, and of course, the passion to push beyond into the unknown. So can such skills essential to a polymath also arise from outside science?
RivieraKid 9y ago
Even in this day and age, you can become a "quasi-polymath" if you like learning and are efficient at it. By that I mean, reach 80% understanding of a lot of fields with 20% the effort of becoming an expert. You can do that by choosing good learning resources and focusing on conceptual understanding and fundamentals. This is something I wish to do over time, learn about a bunch of fields to, say, about undergraduate level. Right now I'm reading Molecular biology of the Cell (best textbook I've ever come across by the way) and it's rewarding to be able to understand much more of biology research news for example. And when you want to learn about some specific sub-topic on Wikipedia, you have the fundamentals to do that without saying "I know some of these words".
leroy_masochist 9y ago
I thought a polymath was someone who had mastery of more than one very difficult / elusive / elite skillset. Someone like, say, Brian May (Queen guitarist and astrophysicist). The guys profiled know a lot of trivia, which is certainly impressive -- but does this really make them polymaths?
- shard 9y ago
  Reminds me of Dan Spitz, lead guitarist of Anthrax and master watchmaker, and John Urschel, Ravens offensive lineman and mathematician.
cableshaft 9y ago
While I'm not sure I'd say I'm qualified to be an expert on all of these subjects, and thus not a 'polymath', I've at least understood enough to teach software development, game design, and writing to others, and have worked professionally in each of those fields, and I've consumed a good amount of articles, podcasts, and books on each as well. I've actually found myself drawing from each of these fields as well as other subjects I have a cursory knowledge in (linguistics, philosophy, psychology, etc) to come up with new ideas for the other subjects, so I personally think having a decent amount of knowledge in multiple fields and cross-pollinating between them is very useful. Scott Adams even suggests becoming very good at two or more things in his blog about career advice. >Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more “pretty goods” until no one else has your mix. http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/career-advice.html http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/care...
mncharity 9y ago
Looking back at 2018, how is it possible that just before our flourishing age of polymaths, it was not uncommon to see nonsense written like "Two hundred years ago, it was still possible for one person to be a leader in several different fields of inquiry. Today that is no longer the case."? I suggest it was a lack of situational awareness, about several issues. About having time to excel. Artificial light capturing the night was a century past. Electrification and its labor saving was almost that. Few still farmed, and the cultural memory of the effort required had decayed. Commuting was common, and it was rare to be able to work during it. Consumer robotics and AI were still novelties. Major industries, both legal and illegal, were focused on encouraging people to squander their time. So there was no sense that people had more time available in the present than in the past, or might have more in the future. About education. Education was still a wretched disaster, largely unchanged for centuries. Science content was particularly abysmal. There was some professional recognition of this (for example, chemistry education research characterizing high-school chemistry content as incoherent), but it was not widely appreciated. Popular focus was on the relative gap between "well" performing and poorly performing students. With no thought that future primary school students might soon be outperforming their present undergraduates. An educator might speak of nanometers as being "unimaginably small", rather than something played with in pre-K. The Internet was just old enough to be taken for granted, so on the eve of AR/VR mass deployment, people were mumbling the same nonsense as in decades past "I can't imagine these computers/internet/AR will have any noticeable effect on people's lives". Past progress, such as mass education regardless of class, was taken for granted. Such progress as was happening, such as attending to misconception ecologies, was not widely appreciated. They knew in the abstract that civilization advances by a teacher being able to pass on knowledge more easily then they themselves learned it. But having no sense of existing change, or of the backed up logjam of potential change, they were blindsided by the rate of change once the jam broke. About science. Access to scientific knowledge was still highly circumscribed. Many journals were still not open access. Some research talks were on youtube, but it was still rare. Much insight into fields was still localized to conversations at conferences, and spread by word of mouth. Again, the world of paper journals and paper card catalogs was sufficiently past that there was no sense of the velocity of progress. "Non-scientists" contributing to science was seen as a novelty - the parents of a child with a rare disease becoming experts on it; or children with bees by chance asking an interesting question. Larger examples, such as community characterization of galaxies, were seen as isolated cases. Because hybrid AI-human systems, and computer supported cooperative work, were still in their infancy, and unappreciated. There was little sense that science had profoundly changed in the preceding half century, or would similarly change in the next. So I suggest their blindness was rooted in a failure to understand their present, and a neglect of looking beyond it. A neglect of looking at their past, and thus of appreciating the velocity of change marked by their present. A failure to understand their present, and its defining constraints. And a neglect of reflecting on how those constraints were about to change. They lived in a bubble of time, peering myopically at the world, and thought themselves unmoving.
MaysonL 9y ago
A friend of mine is a Ph.D. philosopher, playwright, director, actor, singer-songwriter, and retired [due to training injury] undefeated (3-0) professional boxer. Do they qualify?
gt_ 9y ago
I am not an expert in anything, but I am working on it. When I try to focus on studying one discipline consistently for a period of time, I get distracted (and excited!) when I notice patterns that could inform other disciplines. While it is distracting, the patterns are able to help me digest new concepts faster. I have noticed this connection-making inspires heaps of my creativity. Explaining computer science to otherwise non-technical philosophy grads is not only easy; it is what I would call a 'downhill process'. This probably depends on them being decent philosophy students, of course.
b34r 9y ago
Dot connectors are always welcome.

142 points by gt2 9y ago

The article doesn't go very deep in to the answer. Maybe they aro good managers, maybe communicatiors, but either way it's a bit of a specialization in itself that benefits greatly from broad knowledge. I don't see how exactly they could bring together different sciences directly.

meri_dian 9y ago

We are living in a 'cooperative/corporate' age, where the prime drivers of innovation are collections of humans rather than individuals. The problems we face are more complex than ever before and exceed the individual capabilities of even the brightest among us. Visionary thinkers still have their place. A Cooperative needs leaders to chart its course. In a complex world, people who can derive inspiration from multiple domains of knowledge will always be valuable.

Retric 9y ago
Groups of people have issues scaling. At the scale of the say the DoD you end up with a lot of inefficient redundancy which pushes organisations to specialize. Google for example does not actually do that many different things, it just has crazy amounts of leverage.
- pureGuano 9y ago
  I think people are (slowly) re-learning the importance of redundancy. Having multiple, competing implementations makes you far less vulnerable to shocks.
  - posterboy 9y ago
    Using relational databases as a model for the structures in question, some form of redundancy (secondary and primary keys) is needed to avoid more redundancy (dublication). I actually don't know what I'm talking about, if it made sense to someone, please correct me where I'm wrong.
  - Retric 9y ago
    This is not really productive redundancy as for example the Navy and Air Force can't easily swap HR systems. This is mostly everyone being their own little snowflake.
- dilemma 9y ago
  Individuals have even more trouble scaling.

syntheticnature 9y ago

I am reminded of a bit, possibly apocryphal, that when the first three-fin rocket (instead of four, as had been the case with the V-2 and successors) was proposed it was questioned whether or not it would be stable, up until someone pointed out that arrows with three fletching feathers had been flying straight for quite some time.

DataWorker 9y ago

I'm reminded of Nietzsche's Zarathrusta where there's an encounter with an expert on the brains of leeches. For me the question of whether we need polymaths is one about what sort of society we desire and it's a very easy question to answer. I wonder whether the much discussed decline in productivity, which can of course be debated, isn't largely the result of becoming a society of leech brain experts.

jowiar 9y ago

The biggest pressure against polymaths is the structure of the modern university. From department organization, mentoring, battles for funding, it is very difficult to find an encouraging environment if you don't stay within a narrow niche. As an aside, I feel like most interesting innovation in academic computer science happened before the field was full of computer scientists. In the early days, the field was a meeting point of trained mathematicians, physicists, economists, engineers, and linguists, and innovation flourished. To some extent, I credit people exploring and communicating about similar concepts from multiple perspectives. Now, everybody in academic CS has taken the same path in life, and it makes things quite boring.

jackcosgrove 9y ago
The decline in the pace of discovery, if it is real, could also be because the early researchers took the low hanging fruit.

HillRat 9y ago

The two species are complementary; hedgehogs have the knowledge and expertise necessary to develop fine-granularity models of their domains, whereas foxes find commonalities and connections between many coarse-grained models. Foxes rely on hedgehogs to form their knowledge base; hedgehogs can use foxes' insights for new directions of research and development. Innovation (as opposed to optimization) is the result of cooperation occurring across vertical and horizontal model boundaries.

mk89 9y ago
very nice comparisons!
petra 9y ago
All this discussion is with the implicit assumption that only humans can handle knowledge. But we have machines to help us. So today it's easily possibly to talk with people from diverse fields, to search for knowledge of specific characteristics in different fields, or to reuse knowledge using code or patterns from a far field. So it feels that with the right tools and technology and training, people could connect ideas from multiple fields, without deep investment, and being a polymath could be "democratized", similar to how many other complex tasks have been democratized. And this field seems somewhat under-invested, relative to the potential.
- adrianN 9y ago
  Until computers get a lot smarter in understanding research papers, you'll always have the problem of unknown unknowns. How do you discover things in other fields if you don't even know the terminology? For example a medical researcher reinvented (or at least claims to have reinvented) some calculus: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9602/rediscovery-of-calculus-in-1994-what-should-have-happened-to-that-paper https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9602/rediscover... If you never heard of calculus, googling for solutions can be difficult.
  - petra 9y ago
    This is a paper from 1994, before the Internet etc we're popular. But let's try: 1. Google to find what the relevant fields are - you get math. Search a forum about math -> discover math.stackexchange.com -> ask for help or even just terminology regarding "area under my graph/curve"? Once you get that , you could follow on it(say ask for a library of the most accurate integration method we know of today). 2. Google that, find relevant results and dig for terminology, and follow on it. And sure , this isn't a bulletproof method, and you won't get 100% coverage. But it help find connections .

DrBazza 9y ago

Contrary to Betteridge's law, yes we need polymaths. Asimov wrote a story along these lines. Already there are cases of esoteric knowledge in one field being applicable to another. I recall, though cannot find the reference, of a pure maths technique being applied to quantum physics which only happened by the fortunate meeting of two researchers.

SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
Heck, it already happens entirely inside of a field: probably once a year and at least once a decade, there's a major paper in math or physics that is basically "applying standard technique in subfield A to subfield B".
- housel 9y ago
  Indeed, one of my professors in grad school defined a research contribution as adding an edge in a metaphorical bipartite graph to link formerly disparate subfields.
teddyh 9y ago
For the curious, the Asimov story is called Sucker Bait, from 1954.
- DrBazza 9y ago
  That's the one!
happycube 9y ago
Feynman did most of his physics using straight calculus. He hid his work to make it look like it was easy for him...
ctchocula 9y ago
The pure maths technique you are thinking about is the Monster group [1]. Sadly, I don't recall the names of the two researchers involved in the chance meeting. [1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-chase-moonshine-string-theory-connections-20150312/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-chase-moonshin...

SubiculumCode 9y ago

As a post-doc in developmental cog neuro I feel I have to be a 'poly math.' Cognitive theory, Developmental processes theory, Brain theory, developmental brain processes, structural and fMRI methods and software, multiple regression (including mixed models, structural equation modeling) intermediate programming, linux administration, technical writing, experimental design, administration of research activities, teaching (??), and recently throw in autism research. On top of that, I'm reasonably informed on current events, read HN daily, keep tabs on the outlines of advances in medicine and other sciences. I think I'll go back to sleep.

SubiculumCode 9y ago
I am curious why the parent is earning down votes. Is it the comment about teaching?
- ptero 9y ago
  Not trying to be critical, but I suspect that the gist comes out as "I am SO smart". If you chose a third person account you might have avoided them. Not sure, but that's my guess.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - SubiculumCode 9y ago
    I was indicating that my field pulls me in so many directions that I am overwhelmed.. But I see now that I didn't articulate that well.
- personlurking 9y ago
  I didn't downvote it but it's possibly the "r/iamverysmart" feeling of it. It exists between the aforementioned and adding value to the conversation (ie, that certain current fields require both depth and breadth).
  - 9y ago

4lch3m1st 9y ago

We should all be encouraged to be polymaths since school. But I believe the great challenge is not really to push such idea to students, but to actually make them find interest on what they're expected to learn, be it to become polymaths or leech brain experts. I'm saying that given the education background from my country, Brazil. I was surprised, back when I was teaching programming to kids, at how seem to care so less about the actual learning process, while still having a lot of learning potential.

calebm 9y ago

“The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.” (Nikola Tesla)

observation 9y ago
I feel that when I read old textbooks, even the children's ones. People have gotten less coherent, I don't know why, but I suspect it is so.

ericd 9y ago

Yes, because a lot of innovation comes from transferring knowledge between unrelated fields. There is a lot of benefit to cross disciplinary knowledge.

personlurking 9y ago
FWIW and/or for anyone interested, here's a related Wikipedia on the subject, talking about the different types of knowledge spillovers (MAR, Porter, Jacobs). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_spillover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_spillover
- ericd 9y ago
  Sweet, I didn't realize there was a formal term for this concept, but it makes sense that economists would have tried to formalize this :-)

chaosbutters314 9y ago

I know a lot of companies in the engineering/science world that hire PhDs who are experts in very specific fields and others who have broad knowledge in a lot of fields. They try to balance these 2 types of people: broad versus specific and have them work together for synergy.

barkingcat 9y ago

Like this woman? http://slippedisc.com/2017/08/i-gave-up-a-career-in-the-defence-industry-to-be-an-opera-singer/ http://slippedisc.com/2017/08/i-gave-up-a-career-in-the-defe... She sounds like this: https://slippedisc.com/2017/08/last-night-the-aida-missed-her-entry-so-a-violinist-stood-up-and-sang/ https://slippedisc.com/2017/08/last-night-the-aida-missed-he...

Fede_V 9y ago

While we do need polymaths, the problem with a lot of self described polymaths is that they skip the hard part of different fields and only focus on a 'Gladwellesque' understanding. I think a better way to be a polymath is to be a real expert on a particular subject, and then augment that with ancilliary knowledge from other fields. If you claim to understand physics but don't know maths, or claim to be an expert on classical literature but don't know how to read greek/latin, then you aren't a polymath but a bullshit artist. The polymaths I respect are people like Peter Medawar, JD Bernal, etc.. My particular pet peeve lately is people (especially prevalent in the rationalist sphere) that talk about how Bayesian they are, but don't know what a conjugate prior is, or have no understanding of MCMC sampling. There is absolutely nothing wrong with not knowing either of those two things - but if you don't know either, then describing yourself as a Bayesian is just putting on airs.

deleted 9y ago
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NHern031 9y ago
I have no idea what you are talking, but I love it. There is nothing more satisfying than seeing a peraon be so passionate about something. Thank you for posting this, it made me happy.
joe_the_user 9y ago
Yeah, The article kind of got off on the wrong foot by talking about trivia masters. I wouldn't say that the people who make important contributions through being polymaths are those who bring the insights of several fields together. I think someone like Julian Jaynes, who brought together strands from a variety of disciplines to formulate his theory of Bicameralism is an example of such a wide-ranging thinker [1]. Reasonably respected Marxist economist David Laibman[2] is also a well-know blues singer and well-know mainstream economist Kenneth Rogoff is a chess grandmaster and something of fraud. But the extra expertise of these two experts doesn't seem to matter either in their performance. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Jaynes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Jaynes [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Laibman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Laibman [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Rogoff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Rogoff

denvercoder904 9y ago

Yes. The industry calls them system engineers.

saosebastiao 9y ago

Forgive the analogy, I know its leaky, but I believe it to be approximate. I liken the mindset that leads to advances to something similar to the Rete algorithm, with human knowledge representing the alpha nodes and with human intellect representing the beta nodes, and human memory and computation power encompassing the whole graph. Once you match knowledge with a potential use of that knowledge, you create innovation. This can happen forwards or backwards, driven by new knowledge matching with existing applications (the research lab model) or with new applications matching with existing knowledge (the startup model). The thing is, the rete graph requires enough working memory to store the graph. It really only works if knowledge and application can be co-located. And that means that polymaths have a huge advantage: their graphs are much bigger, so any new information has a much higher probability of matching up with something existing in their heads. This also explains why the greatest scientists and inventors tended to make their most significant discoveries later in life: their brain's graph had grown and become more useful and more connected. The thing is, by using IPC with distributed memory and computation abstractions, you can expand that graph to be represented across multiple humans. That works too. But we must remember that our abilities to innovate across a multi-human graph absolutely rely on our speed and quality of communication, and it must navigate past filters that represent our own philosophical world view. And while that really puts a damper on our collective innovation abilities, it doesn't impede it and we shouldn't be discouraged by it. TL;DR: The world doesn't need polymaths, per se. We can innovate by collective minds communicating with each other. But it's not as good, and so it's still really beneficial to have polymaths around.

whatnotests 9y ago
Came here to say this.

roceasta 9y ago

I'm grateful to share the world with anyone who is trying to think and is brave enough to communicate their ideas in the face of career stagnation. That said, I expect most geniuses are polymaths by conventional standards, whether we need them to be or not. Their intellectual development is neither a well-rounded curriculum nor a steady progression but marked by series of deep obsessions.

quickben 9y ago

We probably need polymaths more than people writing clickbait headlines for the BBC.

SandersAK 9y ago

Is this really an article about polymaths that doesn't mention a single Islamic polymath? The whole concept of polymath is not that you're a genius or even knowledgable about a bunch of stuff. In the Islamic tradition the concept insists that you can't understand math without knowing poetry. Can't understand medicine without understanding geometry etc. All elements of human interpretation and expression are linked and help you explore the other. Here's a list of polymaths that the article didn't mention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age

criddell 9y ago
> The whole concept of polymath is not that you're a genius or even knowledgable about a bunch of stuff. Actually, I think that's exactly what it means. The Wikipedia entry on Polymath[1] says basically the same thing as the article as does my dictionary. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath
- gkya 9y ago
  > A polymath (Greek: πολυμαθής, polymathēs, "having learned much")[1] is a person whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas; such a person is known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems. The first paragraph from that article.
  - criddell 9y ago
    That's almost exactly what my dictionary says. I think you and I are in agreement. Pretty much by definition, a polymath is knowledgeable about a bunch of stuff.
    - gkya 9y ago
      > Pretty much by definition, a polymath is knowledgeable about a bunch of stuff. Certainly. I was (misunderstandingly I guess) getting at the genius part, as that's not really required. Also, I guess SandersAK was giving the islamic perspective on polymathness, not his.

randcraw 9y ago

Can a polymath not be a scientist by training? It seems like so many topics today require substantial grounding in quantitative skills that are almost impossible to gain outside grad-school-level studies in science and engineering. Can a polymath whose expertise spans the sciences truly come from elsewhere -- math, economics, philosophy, etc? In a similar vein, I have yet to read a popular science book written by a non-scientist that comes close to the incandescent prose of the best scientist authors -- all of whom seem to be professional scientists (Dyson, Sagan, Morrison, Wilson, Medawar, etc). Of course their skill came not only from academics, but from that rare mix of curiosity and rigorous inquiry essential to separate what we know from what we don't, and of course, the passion to push beyond into the unknown. So can such skills essential to a polymath also arise from outside science?

RivieraKid 9y ago

Even in this day and age, you can become a "quasi-polymath" if you like learning and are efficient at it. By that I mean, reach 80% understanding of a lot of fields with 20% the effort of becoming an expert. You can do that by choosing good learning resources and focusing on conceptual understanding and fundamentals. This is something I wish to do over time, learn about a bunch of fields to, say, about undergraduate level. Right now I'm reading Molecular biology of the Cell (best textbook I've ever come across by the way) and it's rewarding to be able to understand much more of biology research news for example. And when you want to learn about some specific sub-topic on Wikipedia, you have the fundamentals to do that without saying "I know some of these words".

leroy_masochist 9y ago

I thought a polymath was someone who had mastery of more than one very difficult / elusive / elite skillset. Someone like, say, Brian May (Queen guitarist and astrophysicist). The guys profiled know a lot of trivia, which is certainly impressive -- but does this really make them polymaths?

shard 9y ago
Reminds me of Dan Spitz, lead guitarist of Anthrax and master watchmaker, and John Urschel, Ravens offensive lineman and mathematician.

cableshaft 9y ago

While I'm not sure I'd say I'm qualified to be an expert on all of these subjects, and thus not a 'polymath', I've at least understood enough to teach software development, game design, and writing to others, and have worked professionally in each of those fields, and I've consumed a good amount of articles, podcasts, and books on each as well. I've actually found myself drawing from each of these fields as well as other subjects I have a cursory knowledge in (linguistics, philosophy, psychology, etc) to come up with new ideas for the other subjects, so I personally think having a decent amount of knowledge in multiple fields and cross-pollinating between them is very useful. Scott Adams even suggests becoming very good at two or more things in his blog about career advice. >Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more “pretty goods” until no one else has your mix. http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/career-advice.html http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/care...

mncharity 9y ago

Looking back at 2018, how is it possible that just before our flourishing age of polymaths, it was not uncommon to see nonsense written like "Two hundred years ago, it was still possible for one person to be a leader in several different fields of inquiry. Today that is no longer the case."? I suggest it was a lack of situational awareness, about several issues. About having time to excel. Artificial light capturing the night was a century past. Electrification and its labor saving was almost that. Few still farmed, and the cultural memory of the effort required had decayed. Commuting was common, and it was rare to be able to work during it. Consumer robotics and AI were still novelties. Major industries, both legal and illegal, were focused on encouraging people to squander their time. So there was no sense that people had more time available in the present than in the past, or might have more in the future. About education. Education was still a wretched disaster, largely unchanged for centuries. Science content was particularly abysmal. There was some professional recognition of this (for example, chemistry education research characterizing high-school chemistry content as incoherent), but it was not widely appreciated. Popular focus was on the relative gap between "well" performing and poorly performing students. With no thought that future primary school students might soon be outperforming their present undergraduates. An educator might speak of nanometers as being "unimaginably small", rather than something played with in pre-K. The Internet was just old enough to be taken for granted, so on the eve of AR/VR mass deployment, people were mumbling the same nonsense as in decades past "I can't imagine these computers/internet/AR will have any noticeable effect on people's lives". Past progress, such as mass education regardless of class, was taken for granted. Such progress as was happening, such as attending to misconception ecologies, was not widely appreciated. They knew in the abstract that civilization advances by a teacher being able to pass on knowledge more easily then they themselves learned it. But having no sense of existing change, or of the backed up logjam of potential change, they were blindsided by the rate of change once the jam broke. About science. Access to scientific knowledge was still highly circumscribed. Many journals were still not open access. Some research talks were on youtube, but it was still rare. Much insight into fields was still localized to conversations at conferences, and spread by word of mouth. Again, the world of paper journals and paper card catalogs was sufficiently past that there was no sense of the velocity of progress. "Non-scientists" contributing to science was seen as a novelty - the parents of a child with a rare disease becoming experts on it; or children with bees by chance asking an interesting question. Larger examples, such as community characterization of galaxies, were seen as isolated cases. Because hybrid AI-human systems, and computer supported cooperative work, were still in their infancy, and unappreciated. There was little sense that science had profoundly changed in the preceding half century, or would similarly change in the next. So I suggest their blindness was rooted in a failure to understand their present, and a neglect of looking beyond it. A neglect of looking at their past, and thus of appreciating the velocity of change marked by their present. A failure to understand their present, and its defining constraints. And a neglect of reflecting on how those constraints were about to change. They lived in a bubble of time, peering myopically at the world, and thought themselves unmoving.

MaysonL 9y ago

A friend of mine is a Ph.D. philosopher, playwright, director, actor, singer-songwriter, and retired [due to training injury] undefeated (3-0) professional boxer. Do they qualify?

gt_ 9y ago

I am not an expert in anything, but I am working on it. When I try to focus on studying one discipline consistently for a period of time, I get distracted (and excited!) when I notice patterns that could inform other disciplines. While it is distracting, the patterns are able to help me digest new concepts faster. I have noticed this connection-making inspires heaps of my creativity. Explaining computer science to otherwise non-technical philosophy grads is not only easy; it is what I would call a 'downhill process'. This probably depends on them being decent philosophy students, of course.

b34r 9y ago

Dot connectors are always welcome.