20 ms·
> No-one, not even the smartest human, can dwell in more than a few places at once because to dwell in a place is as much about the people and emergent social s
by MichaelZuo 4y ago
> No-one, not even the smartest human, can dwell in more than a few places at once because to dwell in a place is as much about the people and emergent social structures there as it is about the tech.
John von Neummann was fine 'dwelling' in several dozen places. I get why it's hard to admit that outliers several standard deviations above exist.
- svnt 4y agoWhile there are certainly outliers, the OP is making a different point, and I’ll see if I can align it with yours. von Neumann was primarily active in mathematics and physics. He published 150 papers. He moved subfields but he did so on timescales of years. He too could only dwell in a place or two at a time; he was skilled and fortunate to be able to move between dwelling places over a career that spanned decades. Polymaths are primarily declared polymaths only at the end of a career with the benefit of hindsight. At any given moment they are temporary specialists.
- MichaelZuo 4y agoYour extrapolating your own experiences to someone much more intelligent, hence why it's so difficult to believe. There's plenty of evidence to suggest the limit for him was not 1 or 2.
- svnt 4y agoAnd I could say you are overassigning individual agency to someone whose output is mostly a consequence of their environment, and how would we ever know who was correct?