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The genuine polymath is still one in a million
- bluquark 6y agoLooks like a case of an attention-grabbing headline not written by the article author. The book review itself seems to argue that the idea of polymathy can no longer be applied at all today.
- ginko 6y agoI was about to say that. If a genuine polymath were 1 in a million we should have 7000 von Neumanns right now.
- danharaj 6y agoMaybe they're all working in sweatshops or mining cobalt.
- tomrod 6y agoFor the past few decades, we've absorbed them into adtech.
- cambalache 6y agoOnly in HN is the notion that the "geniuses" of this generation are working for the FAANGs, sure, some may be, but I am willing to bet 99% of them are not.
- monkeydreams 6y agoI think it might be an allusion to the Jeff Hammerbacher quote "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads".
- segfaultbuserr 6y agoOr optimizing microseconds out of high-frequency trading algorithms. Quote James Tobin (1984), > I [suspect] that we are throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services, into activities that generate high private rewards disproportionate to their social productivity. I suspect that the immense power of the computer is being harnessed to this 'paper economy', not to do the same transactions more economically but to balloon the quantity and variety of financial exchanges.
- sunstone 6y agoIn my twenty five years of browsing the web I've clicked on two ads. The second one very recently. I guess it's a tough job.
- derefr 6y agoHow do you figure? Intelligence / multi-talented-ness, and interest in changing the world, aren't necessarily correlated. Most "geniuses" still probably just want to get reasonable wealthy and retire to pursue their hobbies. (They just have more interesting hobbies than the average person.) And, for people who weren't born to wealth, the FAANGs are a good place to get one's f-you money from, without necessarily needing to dedicate the entirety of one's motivational resources to solving work-related problems.
- solresol 6y agoBecause "geniuses" may well want to get reasonably wealthy and retire, but might be fundamentally unable to adapt to working for a large corporation.
- cambalache 6y agoCorrect, on top of that it is a highly presumptuous and naive take. I originally wrote 99% of "geniuses" will never work for a FAANG (I was being generous). First of all there are dozens upon dozens of academic fields besides CS. Most of the people in the top of those fields (think people in medicine,chemistry, math, economics, history, finance and a long etc) will work with Ads. Then you have plenty of geniuses in non-academic fields (guys like Magnus Carlsen or Caruana), poets, writers, musicians, sportsmen, again none of them thinking about how making you click an add. Then you have lots of smart people in CS, but not in the US/Canada etc, plenty of smart Chinese/Indians/Russians and on and on etc who for many reasons wont work for a western company. Then you have also plenty of smart american CS graduates who dont want to work for a FAANG, or will work for a very short time and leave for greener pastures from their POV. All in all, assuming 1% of this generation "geniuses" work in SV is an extremely generous supposition.
- derefr 6y agoNot going to rebut your entire comment—some of the assumptions are just that, assumptions about what the word “geniuses” would be implicitly taken to mean in context—but some specific points: > people in the top of those fields ... math ... history I don’t know any way for a “genius” mathematician or historian to get rich pursuing their own career. Some of the other examples, sure, but not these ones. It can actually make more sense for people in certain academic disciplines to take the underlying g factor that allowed them to become so good at their discipline, port it over to becoming good at programming, and then make the most money they can doing programming. (It’d be even better to port their intelligence over to an attempt at being an investment banker; but that field has far higher barriers to entry.) > plenty of smart Chinese/Indians/Russians ... wont work for a western company I think the presumption is that they’d work for China’s/India’s/Russia’s equivalent of FAANG. I.e., take the highest-paying “cog in the machine” programming jobs they could in their own markets. > poets, writers, musicians Many of the “geniuses” of these fields certainly do end up making their money in advertising, if not “ad tech” precisely. If a songwriter/musician gets wealthy-enough to retire, most of the time, it isn’t usually from royalties from a hit single, or even from royalties from creating the soundtrack to a popular movie. It’s almost always from big-contract (but work-for-hire) advertising jingles. Artists (or, moreover, illustrators and visual designers)? Again, usually the biggest contracts are with advertisers—or with product-design consultancies who get paid to increase products’ marketability through a visual refresh.
- jimbob45 6y agoI think his comment was implying that such individuals would have naturally gravitated toward the highest-paying jobs and thus adtech. The subtext being that we waste the brightest minds of our generation on trivial and useless jobs.
- cambalache 6y agoBut we dont that is my point. HN wants to believe that. It is not true.
- huonpine 6y agoOr they just don't want to be Oppenheimer
- glitchc 6y agoYou know we might just have 7000 von Neumanns among us, but may be unable to recognize them. The vast majority of 7+ billion people on the planet are unknown to everyone some except family and a couple of friends. The adage "Popular does not equal good" has never been more relevant.
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- papeda 6y ago> The adage "Popular does not equal good" has never been more relevant. Eh, it depends. It's not true that popular ==> good, but I think there are plenty of areas where it's more true than it used to be that good ==> popular. For example, many more people now have a much better chance to get an education and demonstrate aptitude in some area. And better communication means talent is better matched to opportunity. That's not to say we're really optimizing human potential. That doesn't even seem close to true. But I think we're doing a lot better than we were even 50 years ago.
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- toohotatopic 6y ago>In fact these days we are all that man or woman; you only need to resort to Wikipedia to realise how outdated the idea of knowing everything — or indeed anything — has become. The word is polymath, like polyglot. We don't expect a polyglot to speak all languages. Leonardo won't have known everything either.
- lostinroutine 6y ago> the idea of knowing everything I don't think that's what defines a polymath, for if it does, then none existed. My view of what makes one a polymath is deep --likely cutting-edge-- expertise in several disciplines. That being said, I agree with the general sentiment that it is increasingly harder to become a polymath these days, especially in the disciplines with lots of active research. To have an expertise in just one discipline it takes years of education (to catch up with progress) and then a considerable recurrent investment of time to stay up-to-date. If one is to be a polymath in a varied set of disciplines where overlap is minimal (see Leonardo), one would have to go through the mentioned process of acquiring and maintaining expertise for each discipline. This is different for a polymath in a set of closely-related disciplines, because there's only so much more (compared to being expert in one discipline) one needs to do to be a polymath because there's a lot of overlap. But it is debatable whether that even counts as a polymath, a point raised in: > Is Judith Butler’s supposed eminence in ‘philosophy, linguistics and politics’ enough to qualify her?
- 0d9eooo 6y agoI agree with your point re: the depth of information in a field making it difficult to maintain competence in multiple fields. On the other hand, I think society increasingly projects an expectation of this, that someone cannot possess skills in multiple areas, where areas are increasingly narrowly defined. I think in part this plays a role in stress over higher education, in that a degree is seen as a skill certificate (that is, a statement about what someone can do) rather than an opportunity to learn (that is, a statement about what someone has done).
- friendlybus 6y agoThe same Judith Butler that came up with 'performativity'? Good luck with that spectator! I dont understand the polymath moniker, it seems to be a British definition that elucidates a role in life that requires multiple high level skills without describing where that applies in modern life. As if it were a position one could attain rather than a useful, purposeful skill. Tech leads like Jobs described art and science at the highest level as the same thing. He demonstrated in production, high level knowledge in both distinct categories, but would likely never be discussed by the Brits. Its strange to see someone like Stephen Fry being described as a polymath, when he works as a quiz show host and author. He is paid to learn and recite that learning independent of its application in society. I prefer the older British term 'expert generalist' as it seems more accurate and discusses people who applied their learning more frequently.
- 0d9eooo 6y agoOne thing that struck me at an exhibit of Leonardo's notebooks is how totally wrong he was about so many things. It wasn't mentioned in the exhibit but for every one thing he was correct about, it seemed like there were many many, dozens perhaps, that he was completely incorrect about. Some of the ideas seem preposterous now, although it's difficult to view them appropriately as they would have been at the time. This could be seen positively or negatively. One way of spinning it is that he was persistent in exploring ideas. Another way, though, is that something -- mythmaking, hype, his art, whatever it is -- has allowed history to ignore the fact that he seemed to have been wrong more often than he was right, along the lines of a broken clock being right twice a day. In either case, I think there's something to be said for some kind of cultural and social context playing a strong role in how all of this is interpreted. A different person in the wrong place or wrong time might have been interpreted as a crackpot.
- darkteflon 6y agoYou’re saying the issue is more nuanced than it appears at first blush, requiring careful consideration taking into account cultural context then and now?! That’s preposterous, give us your 140 character hot take instead. :)
- psychomugs 6y agoOf course he was wrong more often than he was right, he was a human being.
- analog31 6y agoI noticed the same thing in one of Aristotle's books, where he tries to catalog his encyclopedic knowledge of natural phenomena. It might just be a sign of an earlier intellectual era.
- ColanR 6y agoI was told by a doctor that in his 1980s biology class, the professor opened by saying, "half of what I'm going to teach you is wrong - we just don't know which half". I imagine it's similar with Leonardo, and likely with our own state-of-the-art knowledge. We are all broken clocks, and the trick is to figure out which part of our knowledge is wrong.
- JacobAldridge 6y agoThis is the focus of my main keynote presentation topic, On Being a Deep Generalist. Specialisation came to the fore during the Industrial Revolution and achieved a form of preeminence in the 20th Century that hadn’t existed elsewhere in human history when knowing, at depth, a wide variety of skills and disciplines was either essential for survival or in order to be considered a well-rounded individual. The internet, not without ongoing battles against vested interests, has solved the discoverability challenge faced with approaching the wealth of knowledge created in the past few centuries. For many of us aspiring polymaths (and I agree with the other comments here that a polymath isn’t someone who knows “everything about everything“, but rather knows “a lot about a lot” or “enough about enough”) the challenge is mental and societal. We convince ourselves that we must specialize to succeed; most schools and many workplaces promote the same. Yet creativity and insight so often depends on interdisciplinary knowledge and the ability to use our brains to connect novel ideas. It’s not the right choice for everyone. If you want to be the best in the world (or the top 1%) at something, then specialize. But most of us are more varied than that, which has benefits for us as business owners, or employees, and as humans.
- alok-g 6y agoWhat's the definition of Deep Generalist that you have in mind?
- smiley1437 6y ago“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” ― Robert A. Heinlein
- n4r9 6y agoTechnically the quote belongs to a character in one of Heinlein's novels. He did love writing hyper-competent men though, so chances are he believed it himself at some point. It's a decent description of a hyper competent person, but I wouldn't say a "deep generalist" in the sense of someone who has prolific knowledge of many different fields of human knowledge.
- m12k 6y agoWe're standing on the shoulders of giants - so many giants in fact, that it's quite possible to spend a lifetime just climbing upward these days. By comparison, in Leonardo's time, a curious mind would almost certainly have to jump laterally to find something to hold its attention.
- brenden2 6y agoNot so much "genuine", but rather celebrity polymath. There are plenty of polymaths who have no interest in fame and fortune, and simply keep to themselves.
- onemoresoop 6y agoThis is so true and so overlooked. I think there are a lot more intelligent people, in general, who have absolutely no desire and need to advertise it
- brenden2 6y agoYou might argue that very intelligent people actively avoid celebrity status.
- mLuby 6y agoThe "problem" is how long it takes to get up to speed in various fields, now that most have decades or centuries of depth. Accelerated learning tech will open the polymath doors again.
- yoricm 6y agoExactly this. This is the future. Accelerated learning is fascinating because learning today is so inefficient. Combine that with the massive knowledge that accumulates over the years. Elon Musks said it himself. Along with Solar Energy, Mars colonization, AI, knowledge acquisition needs to be disrupted. Something like bio-technology with transplanted chips. Reading books is a very old way, and it doesn't scale well. Listening to podcast isn't very efficient either. Gamification has not been effective enough so far. You can also see it in "Matrix", when training in a virtual world with a karate-training program that interacts directly with the brain. As you do when dreaming, but in an interactive way. In the "Fifth Element", there's also a scene where Milla Jovovich (an advanced being) learn all Human History in a matter of hours/minutes with accelerated reading/watching the Internet. I'm sure there are many other examples of people putting "accelerated learning" as one feature of the future. (And I'm already excited to be there.)
- CPLX 6y agoIf that’s the case there’s about eight of them in New York City.
- daviddaviddavid 6y agoWhen it comes to modern/living polymaths, it's worth mentioning Noam Chomsky. He did groundbreaking work in formal language theory that is fundamental to lots of theory of computation. He basically (re)invented modern linguistics. Then there's the media analysis work of Manufacturing Consent. Then there's the unending political criticism. It's pretty staggering.
- lend000 6y agoWhile the definition of polymath is somewhat contested and arbitrary, my opinion is that the defining trait of polymathy is insatiable curiosity and a desire to invent things and solve problems, real or imaginary. I do not know how common this base set of traits is, and how variable it is in magnitude, but I suspect it is higher than 1 in 100. When you add in some combination of raw IQ, financial circumstance, educational circumstance, ambition, work ethic, and leadership skills, then you end up a more impactful polymath ranging from the software engineer who builds interesting things and blogs/researches various topics in her spare time to Elon Musk to Von Neumann. I see many smart naysayer's on HN who argue "this would never work" or "this is considered bad practice" without offering some alternative idea. In fact, this is probably the most common type of comment. While they are usually correct, this is the exact opposite of how a polymath thinks. Polymaths have a confidence in their own ideas and a desire to explore and build a mental model for themselves before taking the tribal wisdom at face value. Thinking via first principles comes innately to these types.