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Look, this essay is ridiculous. It starts by citing Aristotle, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Benjamin Franklin, and then delivers silly things like this definition of

Look, this essay is ridiculous. It starts by citing Aristotle, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Benjamin Franklin, and then delivers silly things like this definition of a "generalist": > Someone who becomes competent in at least three diverse domains and integrates them into a top 1-percent skill set. Then proceeds with: > Despite the world’s immense need for polymaths, these individuals seem to be quite rare. That’s because society promotes specialization over generalization No, it's because the thing you're talking about is a "genius" not a "generalist." I agree that the world would benefit from more legendary geniuses like Aristotle, Leonardo Da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Francis Crick, or Richard Feynman! I do not agree that this opinion is novel, insightful, useful, or worth an essay.

Madmallard 8y ago
We could use more unicorns. Unicorns for everyone. They are more common than ever!
- andyidsinga 8y ago
  looking at population increase - if unicorns exist at all - big if :) - then there should be more in absolute terms.
  - Madmallard 8y ago
    it's true and with the increasing connectness then that means they can contribute more readily as well! Gotta get all those unicorns hiding in east asia to save the planet!
dancek 8y ago
I do think there's still the point that we're wasting our geniuses by making them specialists.
Barrin92 8y ago
that aside I think the question whether we need more generalists (of the non-genius sort) or specialists is a very important one. And I would say that this is probably a good idea because it seems like most valuable knowledge (and with the most benefit) is increasingly found between disciplines rather than in any single given discipline. There is huge potential in bioinformatics, applying quantitative methods to urban planning, technology assisted design and so forth, all of which requires combination of very different sets of traits.
crispinb 8y ago
Indeed. There is a fair bit of incoherent conflation going on in this article. I'm definitely a generalist, yet somehow this has, to my dismay, failed to result in me being hailed as either polymath or genius.
jarfil 8y ago
Also nowadays all domains have advanced so much that it's far more difficult to become highly proficient in more than a portion of a single one of them. Still, generalist-like integrators are needed, but not at the cost of specialists.
nordsieck 8y ago
> Look, this essay is ridiculous. It starts by citing Aristotle, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Benjamin Franklin, and then delivers silly things like this definition of a "generalist": >> Someone who becomes competent in at least three diverse domains and integrates them into a top 1-percent skill set. If you take this advice and tone it down a lot, it becomes both reasonable and good. From Scott Adam's Career Advice [0]: > But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths: > 1. Become the best at one specific thing. > 2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things. > The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don’t recommend anyone even try. > The second strategy is fairly easy. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it. ___ 0. https://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/career-advice.html https://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/car...
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  Thing is, it doesn't seem to pay, at least in the employment market. Employers want specialists, and pay for them. If your CV is two or three distinct things (I don't mean a selection of languages, or front and back end dev here, I mean distinct skills like say programming and accountancy) it's very unlikely to get you a better salary. In fact if you've diverged from a straight specialism throughout your career it's probable you'll be punished with a lower salary, and problems getting hired in the first place. Expect a lot of challenging interview questions as to why you haven't followed a straight line from junior, through senior into project management (which of course is a different skill, making this even more inconsistent). I'm sure those same disparate skills could be hugely useful if you're starting a business or startup, but for employment it's likely to make life harder, even though many employers would benefit just as much from your increased breadth of perspective. So outside a few rare employers, and a few lucky applicants, I don't think there's much out there for generalists, sadly.
madhadron 8y ago
I don't know why you have Francis Crick on that list. Franklin being on the same list as the others is also pretty weird.
- Godel_unicode 8y ago
  You don't think that Franklin was a polymath? That's a pretty jarring take, can you expand on it?
  - madhadron 8y ago
    The list in the parent comment was "legendary geniuses." Crick was certainly not that. He did a physics degree then did a bunch of half-assed work in biology. He stole some data, confounded the idea of gene and open reading frame so thoroughly that we're still trying to undo the damage decades later, and summarized a lot of early molecular biology results in an oversimplified way (the "central dogma") that we're still trying to teach people the real nuances of. On the whole he and Watson were probably a net negative for science. As for polymath, he certainly wasn't that. I've done physics, biology, statistics, software engineering, violinist, composer, dance historian, learned a bunch of languages, and written a novel. I'm a pretty pedestrian level polymath, and Crick was nowhere near me.
    - Godel_unicode 8y ago
      Which has what to do with Franklin, exactly?
      - madhadron 8y ago
        Oh, sorry. I misread. Franklin was certainly a polymath. But putting him in as a legendary genius next to da Vinci seems off.
overgard 8y ago
Feynman is kinda the counter argument though — I think his IQ was 120ish. Obviously very smart, but his unique insights seem to have come more from a broad base of knowledge and an intensely curious personality vs raw brain power. I don’t think you need to be a genius to make an impact in a lot of fields.
- sultanofswing 8y ago
  Usage of Feynman's official IQ score as some sort of 'proof' of anything is often overused. I don't have the exact citation but it is fairly well documented that he scored well on other very challenging tests that correlate strongly with IQ (not to mention his actual career accomplishments). Needless to say, people bandying around his score on this one test as evidence that he was 'bright but not in a high IQ' way is disingenuous or ill-informed, to say the least. I could be wrong but I believe the common consensus is that his 120ish score on that test was not representative of his actual IQ, and was maybe the result of some other circumstance.
  - overgard 8y ago
    I don't think it's disingenuous or ill-informed at all. Maybe people get sensitive when it comes to intelligence, but say I said something like "Drew Brees is one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time despite being short for the position". It doesn't mean that height doesn't matter for the position (short stature is a disadvantage as a quarterback), it just means that he found other ways to succeed. I think you could make the same argument with intelligence: once you reach a baseline of "good enough", what you do with that intelligence is more important than just having a lot of it. Obviously Feynman applied his intelligence really well. I think the argument of "so and so was a genius so don't bother you can't do what they did" is a really defeatist attitude.
  - tptacek 8y ago
    I like how when Richard Feynman's IQ test score doesn't conform to some narrative, HN is in contortions with excuses why the test doesn't matter, but when we come around to the topic of white IQ supremacy, suddenly HN is armed to the teeth with factoids about how g-loaded and circumstantially neutral the mainstream IQ tests are.
cosmie 8y ago
> then delivers silly things like this definition of a "generalist": > No, it's because the thing you're talking about is a "genius" not a "generalist." I think you may be misunderstanding that definition. It's not saying that you have to be the top 1% of practitioners of those domains. It's saying that by gaining general competence in at least three disparate domains and identifying ways to integrate those into each other, you inherently create a top 1% skillset for that amalgamation of skills. You might only have an average level of competence in each one individually, but drop into a situation that involves more than one of your competencies, and you've suddenly become far more valuable in that environment than more competent specialists that don't have the cross-domain knowledge that you do. I have the type of "deep generalist" skillset that the article references. I'm competent enough to get by in about a half dozen competencies and a career that has hopped between technical, business, and consultancy roles in a variety of functional disciplines and industries. If I tried to pivot to a role focused on any one of those skillsets, I'd be hard-pressed to pass an interview for a role at the appropriate seniority level to be commensurate with my current salary. But in the right environment and right organizational structure, I'm incredibly effective. I currently work for a consulting agency, and in the past year I've mainly worked on four different accounts. For two of those accounts, their needs were such that I was able to leverage a combination of my skillsets for them. The results were uniquely impactful enough that the client teams for both know me by name and both have tried to poach me from my agency, along with one vendor I worked with (on a client's behalf). For the other two accounts, I was brought in to fill a singular need that happened to be one of my competencies. While I filled that need adequately, the results weren't noteworthy enough to warrant me even having any direct contact with the clients beyond being one of the disembodied voices that pipe up sometimes on a conference call.
mygo 8y ago
> No, it's because the thing you're talking about is a "genius" not a "generalist." I would disagree. A polymath is an expert / master of multiple fields (let’s say 3 or more). A genius does not necessarily excel in multiple fields, but he will certainly produce novel, groundbreaking contributions to a specific field. A genius tends to be a specialist — at least where his major contributions and legacy lies. A generalist is not necessarily an expert or master of any field. He could just know enough in each field to be competent. So I think we’re talking about 3 different people: geniuses, generalists, and polymaths. Anyone with a liberal arts degree can operate as a generalist. Leonardo Da Vinci and Ben Franklin were polymaths. Einstein and Feynman had genius.
ryanmercer 8y ago
I'd argue none of these individual were geniuses though. By all means they were men that made considerable contributions to society but I think they were simply men that had opportunity and means to pursue their passions. Aristotle almost certainly never worked a day in his life. He likely benefited from patroi-cliens arrangements. His job was to think, to learn, to observe the world around him. We don't really have anything like what he and his contemporaries had today, the closest we have is career academics. Leonardo (his name is NOT Leonardo da Vinci, that would be like calling me Ryan Speedway) was again someone who mostly lived off of patrons/benefactors after his youth, which we know virtually nothing of, and had a lot of free time. He went into an apprenticeship at 14 and by 28 he was working for, arguably, the richest family in the world as an artist. Again, he simply had a lot of free time to contemplate the world around him and tinker. Benjamin Franklin read. A lot. Like really a LOT. By 21 he was hardcore networking by creating Junto and later as a Mason. Combine his reading with his mechanical knowledge by working with printing presses and being generally successful financially again gave him a lot of free time for the era, time to spend contemplating existence, observing the world around him, talking to experts in other fields, sitting around Lodge discussing various topics. I wouldn't say they were geniuses, I would say they were fortunate. They mad means of support and had free time. They had the freedom to pursue things that interested them and support systems in place to allow them to worry little about surviving and focus more on tinkering.
- mygo 8y ago
  There’s probably been hundreds of thousands if not millions of people who had free time since Leonardo. Leisure time is a necessity, but it’s not the difference maker.
  - ryanmercer 8y ago
    >There’s probably been hundreds of thousands if not millions of people who had free time since Leonardo. But did they have wealthy benefactors underwriting their life? Aristotle thought for a living. He almost certainly never had to worry about money, ever. Leonardo had to churn out works of art occasionally to keep money coming in. In the case of Leonardo he could pursue an odd project and in some cases get someone wealthy to finance it and as a student of art he studied human form, studied the mechanical nature of living creatures. He naturally applied that artist's eye to form and function to doodling inventions, some of which he made and some of which stayed on paper. I wouldn't be surprised if there have been hundreds of thousands of people that have doodled such machines and contraptions and simply not had the wealthiest family in the world to pay them to make some of them as novelties for court. Franklin learned about printing, ran away, hustled and started his own printing operation becoming quite a name in the printing industry then used that success to throw money at many other industries. When he died his estate was worth tens of millions of inflation-adjusted dollars. It's a hell of a lot easier to be successful at a myriad of things when you actually have the funds to tinker. Look at Silicon Valley, you see founders with multiple successful exits. It's a lot easier to get funding after you've already had a success, it's a lot easier to get press after you've already had success, it's a lot easier to get customers and attract good talent when you've already had success.

Madmallard 8y ago

We could use more unicorns. Unicorns for everyone. They are more common than ever!

andyidsinga 8y ago
looking at population increase - if unicorns exist at all - big if :) - then there should be more in absolute terms.
- Madmallard 8y ago
  it's true and with the increasing connectness then that means they can contribute more readily as well! Gotta get all those unicorns hiding in east asia to save the planet!

dancek 8y ago

I do think there's still the point that we're wasting our geniuses by making them specialists.

Barrin92 8y ago

that aside I think the question whether we need more generalists (of the non-genius sort) or specialists is a very important one. And I would say that this is probably a good idea because it seems like most valuable knowledge (and with the most benefit) is increasingly found between disciplines rather than in any single given discipline. There is huge potential in bioinformatics, applying quantitative methods to urban planning, technology assisted design and so forth, all of which requires combination of very different sets of traits.

crispinb 8y ago

Indeed. There is a fair bit of incoherent conflation going on in this article. I'm definitely a generalist, yet somehow this has, to my dismay, failed to result in me being hailed as either polymath or genius.

jarfil 8y ago

Also nowadays all domains have advanced so much that it's far more difficult to become highly proficient in more than a portion of a single one of them. Still, generalist-like integrators are needed, but not at the cost of specialists.

nordsieck 8y ago

> Look, this essay is ridiculous. It starts by citing Aristotle, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Benjamin Franklin, and then delivers silly things like this definition of a "generalist": >> Someone who becomes competent in at least three diverse domains and integrates them into a top 1-percent skill set. If you take this advice and tone it down a lot, it becomes both reasonable and good. From Scott Adam's Career Advice [0]: > But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths: > 1. Become the best at one specific thing. > 2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things. > The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don’t recommend anyone even try. > The second strategy is fairly easy. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it. ___ 0. https://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/career-advice.html https://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/car...

NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Thing is, it doesn't seem to pay, at least in the employment market. Employers want specialists, and pay for them. If your CV is two or three distinct things (I don't mean a selection of languages, or front and back end dev here, I mean distinct skills like say programming and accountancy) it's very unlikely to get you a better salary. In fact if you've diverged from a straight specialism throughout your career it's probable you'll be punished with a lower salary, and problems getting hired in the first place. Expect a lot of challenging interview questions as to why you haven't followed a straight line from junior, through senior into project management (which of course is a different skill, making this even more inconsistent). I'm sure those same disparate skills could be hugely useful if you're starting a business or startup, but for employment it's likely to make life harder, even though many employers would benefit just as much from your increased breadth of perspective. So outside a few rare employers, and a few lucky applicants, I don't think there's much out there for generalists, sadly.

madhadron 8y ago

I don't know why you have Francis Crick on that list. Franklin being on the same list as the others is also pretty weird.

Godel_unicode 8y ago
You don't think that Franklin was a polymath? That's a pretty jarring take, can you expand on it?
- madhadron 8y ago
  The list in the parent comment was "legendary geniuses." Crick was certainly not that. He did a physics degree then did a bunch of half-assed work in biology. He stole some data, confounded the idea of gene and open reading frame so thoroughly that we're still trying to undo the damage decades later, and summarized a lot of early molecular biology results in an oversimplified way (the "central dogma") that we're still trying to teach people the real nuances of. On the whole he and Watson were probably a net negative for science. As for polymath, he certainly wasn't that. I've done physics, biology, statistics, software engineering, violinist, composer, dance historian, learned a bunch of languages, and written a novel. I'm a pretty pedestrian level polymath, and Crick was nowhere near me.
  - Godel_unicode 8y ago
    Which has what to do with Franklin, exactly?
    - madhadron 8y ago
      Oh, sorry. I misread. Franklin was certainly a polymath. But putting him in as a legendary genius next to da Vinci seems off.

overgard 8y ago

Feynman is kinda the counter argument though — I think his IQ was 120ish. Obviously very smart, but his unique insights seem to have come more from a broad base of knowledge and an intensely curious personality vs raw brain power. I don’t think you need to be a genius to make an impact in a lot of fields.

sultanofswing 8y ago
Usage of Feynman's official IQ score as some sort of 'proof' of anything is often overused. I don't have the exact citation but it is fairly well documented that he scored well on other very challenging tests that correlate strongly with IQ (not to mention his actual career accomplishments). Needless to say, people bandying around his score on this one test as evidence that he was 'bright but not in a high IQ' way is disingenuous or ill-informed, to say the least. I could be wrong but I believe the common consensus is that his 120ish score on that test was not representative of his actual IQ, and was maybe the result of some other circumstance.
- overgard 8y ago
  I don't think it's disingenuous or ill-informed at all. Maybe people get sensitive when it comes to intelligence, but say I said something like "Drew Brees is one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time despite being short for the position". It doesn't mean that height doesn't matter for the position (short stature is a disadvantage as a quarterback), it just means that he found other ways to succeed. I think you could make the same argument with intelligence: once you reach a baseline of "good enough", what you do with that intelligence is more important than just having a lot of it. Obviously Feynman applied his intelligence really well. I think the argument of "so and so was a genius so don't bother you can't do what they did" is a really defeatist attitude.
- tptacek 8y ago
  I like how when Richard Feynman's IQ test score doesn't conform to some narrative, HN is in contortions with excuses why the test doesn't matter, but when we come around to the topic of white IQ supremacy, suddenly HN is armed to the teeth with factoids about how g-loaded and circumstantially neutral the mainstream IQ tests are.

cosmie 8y ago

> then delivers silly things like this definition of a "generalist": > No, it's because the thing you're talking about is a "genius" not a "generalist." I think you may be misunderstanding that definition. It's not saying that you have to be the top 1% of practitioners of those domains. It's saying that by gaining general competence in at least three disparate domains and identifying ways to integrate those into each other, you inherently create a top 1% skillset for that amalgamation of skills. You might only have an average level of competence in each one individually, but drop into a situation that involves more than one of your competencies, and you've suddenly become far more valuable in that environment than more competent specialists that don't have the cross-domain knowledge that you do. I have the type of "deep generalist" skillset that the article references. I'm competent enough to get by in about a half dozen competencies and a career that has hopped between technical, business, and consultancy roles in a variety of functional disciplines and industries. If I tried to pivot to a role focused on any one of those skillsets, I'd be hard-pressed to pass an interview for a role at the appropriate seniority level to be commensurate with my current salary. But in the right environment and right organizational structure, I'm incredibly effective. I currently work for a consulting agency, and in the past year I've mainly worked on four different accounts. For two of those accounts, their needs were such that I was able to leverage a combination of my skillsets for them. The results were uniquely impactful enough that the client teams for both know me by name and both have tried to poach me from my agency, along with one vendor I worked with (on a client's behalf). For the other two accounts, I was brought in to fill a singular need that happened to be one of my competencies. While I filled that need adequately, the results weren't noteworthy enough to warrant me even having any direct contact with the clients beyond being one of the disembodied voices that pipe up sometimes on a conference call.

mygo 8y ago

> No, it's because the thing you're talking about is a "genius" not a "generalist." I would disagree. A polymath is an expert / master of multiple fields (let’s say 3 or more). A genius does not necessarily excel in multiple fields, but he will certainly produce novel, groundbreaking contributions to a specific field. A genius tends to be a specialist — at least where his major contributions and legacy lies. A generalist is not necessarily an expert or master of any field. He could just know enough in each field to be competent. So I think we’re talking about 3 different people: geniuses, generalists, and polymaths. Anyone with a liberal arts degree can operate as a generalist. Leonardo Da Vinci and Ben Franklin were polymaths. Einstein and Feynman had genius.

ryanmercer 8y ago

I'd argue none of these individual were geniuses though. By all means they were men that made considerable contributions to society but I think they were simply men that had opportunity and means to pursue their passions. Aristotle almost certainly never worked a day in his life. He likely benefited from patroi-cliens arrangements. His job was to think, to learn, to observe the world around him. We don't really have anything like what he and his contemporaries had today, the closest we have is career academics. Leonardo (his name is NOT Leonardo da Vinci, that would be like calling me Ryan Speedway) was again someone who mostly lived off of patrons/benefactors after his youth, which we know virtually nothing of, and had a lot of free time. He went into an apprenticeship at 14 and by 28 he was working for, arguably, the richest family in the world as an artist. Again, he simply had a lot of free time to contemplate the world around him and tinker. Benjamin Franklin read. A lot. Like really a LOT. By 21 he was hardcore networking by creating Junto and later as a Mason. Combine his reading with his mechanical knowledge by working with printing presses and being generally successful financially again gave him a lot of free time for the era, time to spend contemplating existence, observing the world around him, talking to experts in other fields, sitting around Lodge discussing various topics. I wouldn't say they were geniuses, I would say they were fortunate. They mad means of support and had free time. They had the freedom to pursue things that interested them and support systems in place to allow them to worry little about surviving and focus more on tinkering.

mygo 8y ago
There’s probably been hundreds of thousands if not millions of people who had free time since Leonardo. Leisure time is a necessity, but it’s not the difference maker.
- ryanmercer 8y ago
  >There’s probably been hundreds of thousands if not millions of people who had free time since Leonardo. But did they have wealthy benefactors underwriting their life? Aristotle thought for a living. He almost certainly never had to worry about money, ever. Leonardo had to churn out works of art occasionally to keep money coming in. In the case of Leonardo he could pursue an odd project and in some cases get someone wealthy to finance it and as a student of art he studied human form, studied the mechanical nature of living creatures. He naturally applied that artist's eye to form and function to doodling inventions, some of which he made and some of which stayed on paper. I wouldn't be surprised if there have been hundreds of thousands of people that have doodled such machines and contraptions and simply not had the wealthiest family in the world to pay them to make some of them as novelties for court. Franklin learned about printing, ran away, hustled and started his own printing operation becoming quite a name in the printing industry then used that success to throw money at many other industries. When he died his estate was worth tens of millions of inflation-adjusted dollars. It's a hell of a lot easier to be successful at a myriad of things when you actually have the funds to tinker. Look at Silicon Valley, you see founders with multiple successful exits. It's a lot easier to get funding after you've already had a success, it's a lot easier to get press after you've already had success, it's a lot easier to get customers and attract good talent when you've already had success.