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Polymaths Are Late Bloomers
- throwaway98797 3y agothe difference between quitters and polymaths is outcomes the weirdo learning weird stuff becomes eccentric and interesting the moment they make it the only advice there is, is most will judge you by results success earned or unearned can change the loser into a late bloomer
- interstice 3y agoTo some degree, however there is a difference between specialising in weird stuff and being generally curious about all stuff. The part about connections resonates, increasingly it feels like everything is facets of a whole rather than completely disparate subjects. I feel there is something to be gained from being able to view things in that way.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoAgreed and it goes the other way too though You will lose your vaunted place as “successful” if your great results were done through inequity
- justinclift 3y ago> done through inequity What's an example of that? Am trying to picture what you're meaning, and it's not clear (to me).
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoLike when Bill Cosby rightfully lost his place in society Looks like people are really triggered by the idea of equity
- justinclift 3y agoIs Bill Cosby an example of inequity? I don't personally know much about the guy, but wasn't his problem the drugging of people and then taking advantage of them? If that's correct, then that doesn't seem like a behaviour pattern that contributed to his success somehow. (?)
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoIf the structures and systems that you put into place are used for inequitable purposes, then the entire system is inequitable as it does not compensate the victims at the benefit of the existing beneficiaries For example the Catholic Church and everyone associated with it is complicit and benefits from child sex abuse. Sex abuse benefits priests, and the staff and congregation support the priests. So the existence of the Catholic church, so long as they are passively or ignorantly complicit in victimizing congregants is inequitable and therefore everything that they do inherits the complicity Same with Cosby, he built a structure of abuse that allowed him to continue his rise to fame. Anything he did concurrently should be rightly torched and destroyed as it was misappropriated - the viewers etc did not know about that and would not have supported it had they known it
- justinclift 3y ago> Same with Cosby, he built a structure of abuse that allowed him to continue his rise to fame. That doesn't really seem to make sense. Wasn't he just an actor? The abuse stuff seems incidental (or enabled) by that.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoNo, Bill Cosby was the executive producer, and leader for the entirety of all of his properties so any structures that set up would be implicated any of it. This is one of those cases where it maps directly one to one because personality was the marketing factor, much like with other name brand celebrities. If the benefits that you have received monetarily are a function of a personality portrayal and expectation of behavioral coherence from the audience then this is misappropriated value. The only argument you can make is one that is cynical, and assumes that we shouldn’t trust anybody for anything ever, and therefore all externalities have been priced into the exchange between the consumer and the producer.
- spacebacon 3y ago0o
- hresvelgr 3y agoIn tech there is a bias towards the newcomer's perspective due to being less encumbered by convention. I feel the perspective of the generalist or the polymath is even more valuable as their alternative perspectives and innovations are grounded in experience, not intuition.
- neilv 3y ago> In tech there is a bias towards the newcomer's perspective due to being less encumbered by convention. Where does this bias occur?
- hinkley 3y agoI think the main skill of the polymath is skating into journeyman knowledge while avoiding the Expert Beginner trap. Learning to learn sounds more accurate in theory, but I doubt it is sufficient in practice.
- wslh 3y agoI don't know where to start criticizing this article. Robin Hanson is [1]. He has 64 years old, is an economist with degrees in top universities yet he writes: "While my stamina and raw speed or intensity of thought is probably declining with age", probably? I can support this error from a random article but not from a polymath and scientist. It continues with simple proofreading errors (I am not an English native speaker!) such as "Furthermore, I better know roughly want to expect re what sorts of connections won’t yet have been found, which are how valuable, and what it would take to test them or get folks to listen about them". Then, his core assumption that "... polymaths peak later in life might be a bit discouraging news to young polymaths". Are polymath a homogeneus group? Has he done his research? Just going to the Wikipedia page about polymaths [2] falsifies his claim. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hanson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hanson [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath
- jollyoldpirate 3y ago[flagged]
- throwitaway222 3y ago> It continue with simple proofreading errors
- wslh 3y agoQuote precisely, because it continues with ... (I am not an English native speaker!)
- zone411 3y agoYou can support this error? What? If you're criticizing someone for errors or lack of research, you should strive for more authoritative references than Wikipedia pages.
- wslh 3y agoIt's not the kind of errors I tolerate from an academic with those degrees. It sounds more like a rant of a young someone without experience writing.
- d--b 3y ago> Being a polymath Rather presumptuous > And while I haven’t seen data to confirm it, my personal experience suggests Ugh
- crtified 3y agoWide knowledge and learning takes time.
- johnsillings 3y agoI like Robin Hanson, but does he actually publish work in different domains? I've only seen his economics-related papers. Edit: And when I spot check, that looks to be pretty much everything (though I skimmed): https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=PjIP_WcAAAAJ&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=PjIP_WcAAAAJ&hl=en
- zone411 3y agoHe co-authored the "Grabby Aliens" paper that made multiple rounds around HN among other things.
- hmcq6 3y ago> “If Loud Aliens Explain Human Earliness, Quiet Aliens Are Also Rare” by Robin Hanson, Daniel Martin, Calvin McCarter, and Jonathan Paulson, September 7th, 2021. Does he write anything not in the format of "If x early then y late"?
- lkdfjlkdfjlg 3y ago> Being a polymath, I’ve (...) I don't know, at this stage calling yourself polymath is a big red flag for me. Like calling yourself an "intellectual" or "thought leader".
- SantalBlush 3y agoI'd personally add "autodidact" to that list as well.
- whimsicalism 3y agoI disagree - polymath to me implies Newton or Euler, autodidact just implies that you are good at learning on your own.
- SantalBlush 3y agoAgreed, but whether or not someone is capable of accurately self-assessing how well they've learned a topic depends on how well they've actually learned the topic. This means someone can do a bad job of learning a topic on their own, but still believe they're an autodidact. I think that happens a lot.
- conductr 3y agoThese days it comes off very much as “I have liked and subscribed to multiple varied topics/channels on YouTube making me quite knowledgeable and naturally that makes me special/intellectual in a world where everyone else are ASMR seeking simpletons”
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- reducesuffering 3y agoI think in these intellectual bubbles, people wildly overestimate how much the average person has any interest or knowledge in the kind of breadth things like HN and OvercomingBias offer. Polymaths are highly over-represented here. There are 18m people in Greater Los Angeles. How many are involved in anything close to the variety of topics HN and OvercomingBias ponder?
- yedava 3y agoI find the term "Polymath" useless when it comes to the times we live in. Today's high school students would have ranked as a polymaths a few centuries ago. And today, someone who spends their entire time in one field - say software engineering - can be rightly called a polymath. Gone are the days when one person can gain insights by digging deep into one specific subject. Knowledge of multiple areas is a given. Even more importantly, the days of a lone wolf discovering something new are even more dead. Today's discoveries can only happen collaboratively. Groups of people working hard, with each group egging on the other to push themselves farther (Think AI. We can no longer worship one guy as having advanced the field. There are no Newtons or Einsteins). Instead of patting our backs for being polymaths, lets figure out how best to propel our collaborative capabilities.
- wut_wut_wut 3y ago[dead]
- jeremyjh 3y agoSP is talking about people who publish papers in scholarly journals, not people who score well at Trivial Pursuit. This is intensely specialized today; much more specialized than it was "a few century's ago". There are not many people publishing in widely separated fields.
- __rito__ 3y agoThe idea of a Polymath is actually more relevant today than earlier years. Each field has grown into a silo with "experts" in one field barely knowing about the cutting edge of another field. Before what was the cutting edge was knowable to anyone who really tried. Because the total body of human knowledge was extremely limited. And that's why we see so many "gentleman scientists". They were people with passive income from property and enough time to tinker where they liked. Robert Brown of Brownian motion wasn’t exactly a genius. Yet you find his name in multiple areas of Science. Nowaday, the edge of human knowledge is far more spread out, and it is harder to be a polymath. Polymath aren’t people who can "talk about" and "hold intelligence conversations" about different fields of Science/Social Science, they are the people that do multiple areas of academic study/engineering. EDIT: And knowledge gained in HS is extremely shallow. They don't know even one field enough, let alone multiple fields. And High Schoolers of earlier years actually knew stuff more in-depth, because stuff weren’t diluted for "inclusive" education. I have seen the Curriculum of British Indian HS, and it was much tougher than today's curriculum. 200 marks paper of two, as opposed to one of 70, more advanced topics each year as opposed to easier topics to bump scores up and make the provincial government look good. Not exactly relevant to Polymaths, but everyone here knows that one who was educated in 1850-1970 years, knows much more than one educated in later years (as chosen randomly among those who have a degree). I believe education dilution has happened everywhere. Even today HS Physics, Math, Chemistry in India is much harder than US. I have seen curricula and books from both.
- whimsicalism 3y ago> There is a big literature on the ages at which intellectuals peak in life .. Physical sciences peak earlier than social sciences. I suspect what we are really measuring is the degree to which different fields are rewarding exceptional performance vs political connection and seniority. The latter is much more common in the social sciences than in the physical sciences ime.
- jltsiren 3y agoIt's more about talent vs. experience. In some fields, you need more time to study the prior art and hone your skills before you are ready to contribute.
- whimsicalism 3y agoI'm skeptical that economics has so much more prior art than say physics.
- jltsiren 3y agoPhysics prefers studying simple systems in isolation. Economics studies certain aspects of human societies. Because human societies are complex and pretty much anything can affect the behavior you are studying, you can't be good at economics without understanding every aspect of the society. Actual economists usually don't, because human lives are short.
- pama 3y agoPhysics is very broad and encompasses concepts at all scales (from subatomic to cosmological scales) and all levels of complexity——“Complex systems” is a branch of physics. Economics is a form of applied philosophy that is not yet mature enough when compared to most branches of physics and is significantly smaller in total volume of published literature when compared with all branches of physics put together. Economics does however affect policy and politics directly in the last hundred years or so, whereas physics ends up guiding the technology, which eventually feeds back to society in multiple indirect ways. Physics did have a lot of early bloomers in its young branches eg, quantum mechanics, semiconductors, lasers, computational physics, but it also tends to split up and create a new branch whenever there is a new part of the world that needs some explaining. I’d expect that with economics increasingly becoming a data-driven science, including what used to be macro economics, there will be new crowds of young people blooming until the computational simulation models become much better and practical compared to any simplified high level models we’ve had in the past. A similar transformation is already well underway in physics, where computational physics and simulation have altered the course of the study of complex systems in all branches of physics from condensed to soft matter, astronomy to particle physics, polymer, and biophysics.
- fuzzfactor 3y agoI think a real polymath would be an early bloomer and a late bloomer. Wouldn't that be what makes them the most poly? Why settle for less ;)