19 ms·

The last days of the polymath

85 points by wow_sig 16y ago

Who all do we have as living polymaths on our planet? Any ideas?

RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
Another old friend: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1038795 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1038795 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=861836 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=861836 <- Has comments http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=850301 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=850301 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=844229 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=844229 <- Has comments
- jokermatt999 16y ago
  I'd just like to say "Thanks" for keeping track of all these HN submissions. It seems like almost every time there's a duplicate post, you're there to provide links to the other instances and comments. It's especially nice when there's more discussion on the articles. Just figured I'd let you know I appreciate what you do.
  - RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
    Cheers!
pg 16y ago
Specialization doesn't mean you can't have polymaths. They just have to be sparser matrices.
- presidentender 16y ago
  Noam Chomsky, with his two-ish fields, springs to mind. Asimov and Bertrand Russel might qualify. It seems, though, that those sparse matrices are largely populated by creative efforts; we see many professors of hard science who are also philosophers, historians or writers, but we seem to have lost the biologist, engineer and composer of da Vinci's ilk.
- tel 16y ago
  I disagree with the metaphor. 'Sparser matrices' implies homogeneity of effort and accomplishment. It's closer to 'sparser trees' where genuinely regaled accomplishments happen in leafs quite far from the root. Polymaths may become something more of the lucky geniuses who have the adroitness to envision great trees, the tenacity to grow them, and the luck to not waste too much effort in directions they cannot see to fulfillment. They build branches wide and strong with the right root structure and a strong trunk. Other grow bushes or tall, skinny trees, perhaps easily blown down.
rorymarinich 16y ago
Very interesting article! Worthy of my upvote. But at the same time I don't at all buy into its premise. Literally every field I have even a passing interest in has got people at the top of it who express interest in multiple fields at once. In the web-related world there's Shaun Inman, who goes back and forth between music, web design, and creating video games. Or there's Ze Frank, who goes back and forth between writing and designing tools and music and video comedy and I don't know what else. In music there are a lot of people who specialize in many, many different things at once — either different types of music (multiple instruments, or multiple performance styles, or music production) — or actively in different fields at once. Peter Brotzmann, one of the best free jazz saxophonists, is also a graphic designer who's designed all of his albums to date. Tom Waits is a musician who acts and writes on the side. Auteur directors tend to be involved in five or six different fields at once: James Cameron is a masterful set/costume designer; David Lynch handles the audio production for his movies; and writes some of the music for it. Stand-up comic Louis CK writes, stars in, directs, and edits his show Louie, which is to some degree insane. The problem with looking at the Internet for polymaths of the same caliber of Carl Djerassi is that the Internet generation is too young right now. Ze Frank, who is in some ways the grandfather of the modern Internet creative movement, is only thirty-eight years old. The real Internet generation, of the people who literally never existed in a world where the World Wide Web didn't, was born in 1990. They're twenty years old. They're me. I can assure you as somebody who's closer to that generation than most of the users on that site: We're going to see an explosion of creativity the likes of which we haven't seen in decades, if ever. The kids I know in high school are busy writing, drawing, making music, arguing philosophy, arguing economics, doing pretty much everything and doing it all at once. Give it thirty years and I think you'll be flabbergasted at what we produce. When I was eighteen I'd already published a novel, directed a play, written and co-performed a song, co-created said song's music video, performed and co-wrote a Harry Potter dub, wrote multiple essays, and designed a number of web sites. A friend of mine who's a year younger was keeping a political/economic blog and engaging in discussions pretty much everywhere. Yet another friend is a hypnotist, writer, and web designer who I might be making a documentary about this coming summer. The guy I live with, twenty-one, is a talented actor who's also written for the Colbert Report, interviewed celebrities, and in his free time sells tickets. Is that polymath enough for you?
thebooktocome 16y ago
I hope to become a polymath, but the (graduate school) system really isn't set up to produce them as such.
Florin_Andrei 16y ago
I wonder if the definition of the polymath is changing as our accessable memory is moving outside of the brain. So, now it's not the person who knows a lot about a lot, but the person who can efficiently query the search engine in real time and has the ability to work with the information coming back from it. After all, rote memorization was not the polymath's main strength anyway. Now we're just unburdening them to an even higher degree.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
jjcm 16y ago
The last days? By whose definition? Not to discount Thomas Young at all, but I have no doubt that in the age of wikipedia you could find tens of thousands of people who could deliver that same address he did - myself included. I would argue heavily against the title of this article. These aren't the last days of the polymath, rather these are the days where we're so saturated with them that few stand out.
Rantenki 16y ago
I would speculate that the reason that the polymath seems less common is that: 1. Counter-intuitively, polymaths are now ubiquitous. The WWW as well as better information access in general has made it much easier to BECOME a polymath. Because of this, polymaths have to be so much more impressive. My local hackerspace contains several individuals who know/achieve SO MUCH in a variety of disciplines. We have baker, artist, roboticist, biohacker, hardware engineers and Dancer, juggler perl hacking political scientists. All of whom are making important contributions to their fields. However, they are lost in the noise because: 2. The pace of scientific discovery is growing at an exponential rate. This means that it is difficult to keep track of, or notice any particular discovery, regardless of who makes it. 3. And I admit, unlike the previous two, this is subjective. I think that we make more of a discovery at the edges of our knowledge than we do of a hybrid. We are all interested by a new type of particle being discovered, but when that happens, we pay more attention to the discoverers' titles as specialists, ignoring the likelihood that the particle physicist working at CERN could also be considered a solid materials/superconductors/computer engineer, as they would need to be in order to understand and utilize their test equipment.
- sciboy 16y ago
  1) I would disagree. The definition of polymath is someone who is an expert at orthogonal subjects. Your definition of expert seems to be slightly lower than mine. My definition would be someone who could give a lecture to other experts in the field with a days notice and be able to answer questions to the satisfaction of the audience. 2) If this were true it would be a short time until science itself crumbled. How then are people able to keep on top of their fields with finite time? The number of scientists isn't exponentially increasing, nor are the number of publications. It's growth, but it's not exponential as far as I can tell. 3) A polymath is someone who has knowledge in orthogonal knowledge spaces. If your field requires knowledge in other very related areas then I wouldn't consider that polymath-like activity.
  - Rantenki 16y ago
    1) That may be your definition, but it is not the dictionary one. Not that I don't wish that there were more people with leading edge expertise in independent fields, but the definition of polymath is merely great learning in diverse fields. 2) The population as a whole is increasing exponentially, as is the rate of discovery in a great many fields. While I doubt the situation is sustainable, the condition does exist at least in the short term. There is a degree of subjectivity here, but I stand by my statement. 3) Same as #1, worded differently a bit. I actually spent some time looking up different variations of the definition of polymath, and it turns out orthogonality (or independence, since orthogonality seems to be imply different things in compsci than for other disciplines) is not a requirement, just divergence seems sufficient. As an aside, I am not trying to redefine polymath for my own benefit, being a broad generalist in a lot of fields, but still too focused on some compsci stuff to be a true expert in any of the other ones.
dannyb 16y ago
It made for an interesting read, but I think there are too many generalizations in that type of writing. The truth is, we have just experienced and extraordinary explosion in the amount of valuable data and information that it available to almost everybody. I think that we have not yet come to grips with this and that it has caused some disciplinary boundaries to be rewritten. There will still be heroes after the revolution!
Mz 16y ago
The internal subjective experience or psychology of such people is something I find of a certain interest. Somewhat to my surprise, this article actually touches on that: Djerassi has also suffered in his own work because of monomaths’ hostility, especially as a playwright. “They always keep crying out ‘the co-inventor, father, the mother of the Pill’,” he growls. “Without having any knowledge about the play, they start with it. As if it’s got anything to do with it.” Djerassi thinks that this means he has to work harder to promote his work. “No agent has ever been interested in me. They want 29-year-old Irish playwrights, not 86-year-old expatriates.” A trace of bitterness creeps into his voice, but he concedes: “If I were an agent I’d feel the same way.” Overwhelmed by specialists and attacked by experts as dilettantes, it is amazing that there are any polymaths at all. How do they manage?

85 points by wow_sig 16y ago

Who all do we have as living polymaths on our planet? Any ideas?

Another old friend: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1038795 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1038795 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=861836 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=861836 <- Has comments http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=850301 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=850301 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=844229 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=844229 <- Has comments

jokermatt999 16y ago
I'd just like to say "Thanks" for keeping track of all these HN submissions. It seems like almost every time there's a duplicate post, you're there to provide links to the other instances and comments. It's especially nice when there's more discussion on the articles. Just figured I'd let you know I appreciate what you do.
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
  Cheers!

pg 16y ago

Specialization doesn't mean you can't have polymaths. They just have to be sparser matrices.

presidentender 16y ago
Noam Chomsky, with his two-ish fields, springs to mind. Asimov and Bertrand Russel might qualify. It seems, though, that those sparse matrices are largely populated by creative efforts; we see many professors of hard science who are also philosophers, historians or writers, but we seem to have lost the biologist, engineer and composer of da Vinci's ilk.
tel 16y ago
I disagree with the metaphor. 'Sparser matrices' implies homogeneity of effort and accomplishment. It's closer to 'sparser trees' where genuinely regaled accomplishments happen in leafs quite far from the root. Polymaths may become something more of the lucky geniuses who have the adroitness to envision great trees, the tenacity to grow them, and the luck to not waste too much effort in directions they cannot see to fulfillment. They build branches wide and strong with the right root structure and a strong trunk. Other grow bushes or tall, skinny trees, perhaps easily blown down.

rorymarinich 16y ago

Very interesting article! Worthy of my upvote. But at the same time I don't at all buy into its premise. Literally every field I have even a passing interest in has got people at the top of it who express interest in multiple fields at once. In the web-related world there's Shaun Inman, who goes back and forth between music, web design, and creating video games. Or there's Ze Frank, who goes back and forth between writing and designing tools and music and video comedy and I don't know what else. In music there are a lot of people who specialize in many, many different things at once — either different types of music (multiple instruments, or multiple performance styles, or music production) — or actively in different fields at once. Peter Brotzmann, one of the best free jazz saxophonists, is also a graphic designer who's designed all of his albums to date. Tom Waits is a musician who acts and writes on the side. Auteur directors tend to be involved in five or six different fields at once: James Cameron is a masterful set/costume designer; David Lynch handles the audio production for his movies; and writes some of the music for it. Stand-up comic Louis CK writes, stars in, directs, and edits his show Louie, which is to some degree insane. The problem with looking at the Internet for polymaths of the same caliber of Carl Djerassi is that the Internet generation is too young right now. Ze Frank, who is in some ways the grandfather of the modern Internet creative movement, is only thirty-eight years old. The real Internet generation, of the people who literally never existed in a world where the World Wide Web didn't, was born in 1990. They're twenty years old. They're me. I can assure you as somebody who's closer to that generation than most of the users on that site: We're going to see an explosion of creativity the likes of which we haven't seen in decades, if ever. The kids I know in high school are busy writing, drawing, making music, arguing philosophy, arguing economics, doing pretty much everything and doing it all at once. Give it thirty years and I think you'll be flabbergasted at what we produce. When I was eighteen I'd already published a novel, directed a play, written and co-performed a song, co-created said song's music video, performed and co-wrote a Harry Potter dub, wrote multiple essays, and designed a number of web sites. A friend of mine who's a year younger was keeping a political/economic blog and engaging in discussions pretty much everywhere. Yet another friend is a hypnotist, writer, and web designer who I might be making a documentary about this coming summer. The guy I live with, twenty-one, is a talented actor who's also written for the Colbert Report, interviewed celebrities, and in his free time sells tickets. Is that polymath enough for you?

thebooktocome 16y ago

I hope to become a polymath, but the (graduate school) system really isn't set up to produce them as such.

Florin_Andrei 16y ago

I wonder if the definition of the polymath is changing as our accessable memory is moving outside of the brain. So, now it's not the person who knows a lot about a lot, but the person who can efficiently query the search engine in real time and has the ability to work with the information coming back from it. After all, rote memorization was not the polymath's main strength anyway. Now we're just unburdening them to an even higher degree.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

jjcm 16y ago

The last days? By whose definition? Not to discount Thomas Young at all, but I have no doubt that in the age of wikipedia you could find tens of thousands of people who could deliver that same address he did - myself included. I would argue heavily against the title of this article. These aren't the last days of the polymath, rather these are the days where we're so saturated with them that few stand out.

Rantenki 16y ago

I would speculate that the reason that the polymath seems less common is that: 1. Counter-intuitively, polymaths are now ubiquitous. The WWW as well as better information access in general has made it much easier to BECOME a polymath. Because of this, polymaths have to be so much more impressive. My local hackerspace contains several individuals who know/achieve SO MUCH in a variety of disciplines. We have baker, artist, roboticist, biohacker, hardware engineers and Dancer, juggler perl hacking political scientists. All of whom are making important contributions to their fields. However, they are lost in the noise because: 2. The pace of scientific discovery is growing at an exponential rate. This means that it is difficult to keep track of, or notice any particular discovery, regardless of who makes it. 3. And I admit, unlike the previous two, this is subjective. I think that we make more of a discovery at the edges of our knowledge than we do of a hybrid. We are all interested by a new type of particle being discovered, but when that happens, we pay more attention to the discoverers' titles as specialists, ignoring the likelihood that the particle physicist working at CERN could also be considered a solid materials/superconductors/computer engineer, as they would need to be in order to understand and utilize their test equipment.

sciboy 16y ago
1) I would disagree. The definition of polymath is someone who is an expert at orthogonal subjects. Your definition of expert seems to be slightly lower than mine. My definition would be someone who could give a lecture to other experts in the field with a days notice and be able to answer questions to the satisfaction of the audience. 2) If this were true it would be a short time until science itself crumbled. How then are people able to keep on top of their fields with finite time? The number of scientists isn't exponentially increasing, nor are the number of publications. It's growth, but it's not exponential as far as I can tell. 3) A polymath is someone who has knowledge in orthogonal knowledge spaces. If your field requires knowledge in other very related areas then I wouldn't consider that polymath-like activity.
- Rantenki 16y ago
  1) That may be your definition, but it is not the dictionary one. Not that I don't wish that there were more people with leading edge expertise in independent fields, but the definition of polymath is merely great learning in diverse fields. 2) The population as a whole is increasing exponentially, as is the rate of discovery in a great many fields. While I doubt the situation is sustainable, the condition does exist at least in the short term. There is a degree of subjectivity here, but I stand by my statement. 3) Same as #1, worded differently a bit. I actually spent some time looking up different variations of the definition of polymath, and it turns out orthogonality (or independence, since orthogonality seems to be imply different things in compsci than for other disciplines) is not a requirement, just divergence seems sufficient. As an aside, I am not trying to redefine polymath for my own benefit, being a broad generalist in a lot of fields, but still too focused on some compsci stuff to be a true expert in any of the other ones.

dannyb 16y ago

It made for an interesting read, but I think there are too many generalizations in that type of writing. The truth is, we have just experienced and extraordinary explosion in the amount of valuable data and information that it available to almost everybody. I think that we have not yet come to grips with this and that it has caused some disciplinary boundaries to be rewritten. There will still be heroes after the revolution!

Mz 16y ago

The internal subjective experience or psychology of such people is something I find of a certain interest. Somewhat to my surprise, this article actually touches on that: Djerassi has also suffered in his own work because of monomaths’ hostility, especially as a playwright. “They always keep crying out ‘the co-inventor, father, the mother of the Pill’,” he growls. “Without having any knowledge about the play, they start with it. As if it’s got anything to do with it.” Djerassi thinks that this means he has to work harder to promote his work. “No agent has ever been interested in me. They want 29-year-old Irish playwrights, not 86-year-old expatriates.” A trace of bitterness creeps into his voice, but he concedes: “If I were an agent I’d feel the same way.” Overwhelmed by specialists and attacked by experts as dilettantes, it is amazing that there are any polymaths at all. How do they manage?