5 ms·

We Are in Need of Renaissance People

19 points by wyclif 2y ago

OutOfHere 2y ago
There are plenty of people with the potential to be renaissance persons, but they crushed by the need to earn money as a specialist. They can hardly quit their day job and go a renaissance excursion.
coding123 2y ago
We do need people to be excited about life again.
- kazinator 2y ago
  ... and if for some that means being enthusiastic about X and craving bromance with Musk, then so be it. Who are we to judge this blogger.
  - AstralStorm 2y ago
    We can judge them by the consequences of their actions.
- ndndjdjdn 2y ago
  They are.
  - from-nibly 2y ago
    Who is?
    - ndndjdjdn 2y ago
      Various average joes. I see lots of polymathism at work. Extreme sports, art, music to go along with coding or whatever. It it is just not to the genius level that is required to get HN excited. Many switch to coding from another profession. Examples: real engineers, army, accountants.
kazinator 2y ago
> America is increasingly becoming a bifurcated, two-tiered society of a specialized government-corporate-media-political-credentialed class of degreed overseers and managers who attempt to micromanage an increasingly less well-educated, dependent underclass. Fact: people are better educated today. It's more common to have a university degree than half a century ago (yet unlike decades ago, not to have it count for much). Speaking of which, being Renaissance is a nice hobby, but it doesn't pay. That's why most people specialize. Some people like specializing. Spheres of human activity and interest are like fractals. When you specialize and zoom in, you see rich details. Look how diverse computing is. If you are in computing, to an outsider you seem like a "computer specialist", but within that sphere, you could be a generalist with diverse areas of interest. Probably the best way to explain that to people might be by analogy to doctors. Imagine someone being a brain surgeon also interested in the heart, kidneys and urinary tract, nose-throat-ears, ... that's a Renaissance Doc. Some people have one hobby different from their job, maybe two. They specialize off duty, so to speak. They pursue that hobby or two and are good at then, and don't want to take on more at the expense of neglecting what they are good at. > America is increasingly becoming a bifurcated, two-tiered society of a specialized government-corporate-media-political-credentialed class of degreed overseers and managers who attempt to micromanage an increasingly less well-educated, dependent underclass. This Musk adulation really takes away from the article. Musk took over Twitter so that he could control tweets that were critical of him, and amplify his own tweets. He knew he would lose billions of dollars in doing so by devaluing the platform, but it was worth it in his eyes.
- hzay 2y ago
  > Imagine someone being a brain surgeon also interested in the heart, kidneys and urinary tract, nose-throat-ears, ... that's a Renaissance Doc. Do you mean that such a Renaissance doc this is not a good thing? I think this is exactly the sort of doctors we need. Right now, my father has diabetes t2, high bp, a slightly enlarged prostrate gland, a series of UTIs, hernia, skin rashes and probably a few other things. He's fairly rigorous in researching & learning about his conditions. But no doc he consults takes an overall picture of his health. You have nephrologist, urologist, cardiologist and so on. They tend to miss things among themselves until he reminds them. Yes medicine has advanced greatly but a renaissance doc would be transformative for people like him.
megamike 2y ago
Many men seem to be in agreement: college is stupid and unnecessary https://www.metafilter.com/205867/Many-men-seem-to-be-in-agreement-college-is-stupid-and-unnecessary https://www.metafilter.com/205867/Many-men-seem-to-be-in-agr...
CuriouslyC 2y ago
We are, but we have incentives against it. Your career as a self-educated generalist is going to be significantly worse than as a credentialed specialist. You're going to get weeded out by HR drones for good positions and the positions that you do get an interview for, they're going to try and put you in a box like a specialist and make you a cog in a machine, so you won't get to even use your full skillset.
- butterfly42069 2y ago
  Yup, as someone in this position HR want nothing to do with me. My only options have been to make companies or freelance. I do think the world needs more "generalists" though as we're often the only ones placed to even half understand, combine and fully utilise different specialists.
- jltsiren 2y ago
  A "Renaissance person" is not a self-educated generalist but an old person who has had diverse interests and the motivation and the opportunities to pursue them. If you work on something full time for five years, deliberately challenging yourself and striving to improve your skills, you will probably become pretty good at the thing. But because a full-time job is only 1/3 of your waking hours, you'll have time for other pursuits. If there are 50 productive years in a human live, you can probably become pretty good at 20 different things. From this perspective, a college degree is not specialization, but the first few percent of the work of becoming a Renaissance person.
  - from-nibly 2y ago
    > A "Renaissance person" is not a self-educated generalist > an old person who has had diverse interests and the motivation and the opportunities to pursue them. How is that not the same thing? The only difference is that you added that they had to be old.
    - jltsiren 2y ago
      First, because the "self-educated" part is irrelevant here. But more importantly, the difference is in the degree. Generalism is a matter of interests and focus. A Renaissance person is an ideal and an outcome. The Renaissance ideal was that elite men should strive to be good at everything they do. In the recent history, the people who have been called Renaissance men were typically at the top of their fields, with significant accomplishments in other fields. And those accomplishments take time.
aaronbrethorst 2y ago
I wonder if the author of this post—and the linked book in the sidebar, "The Case for Trump (2024 Edition)" would consider Trump a renaissance man.
- dyauspitr 2y ago
  Isn’t a Renaissance man someone skilled in multiple fields and pretty much a generalist at anything to throw at him?
- saulpw 2y ago
  Elon Musk is his example, including: > His new X replacement is an unfettered platform for free expression. And the more the left abhors their loss of the monopolistic old Twitter’s ideological clearing house, and vows to flee X and start their own new left-wing, censorious Twitters, the more they stay on X. So, yeah. (also, hey!)
  - aaronbrethorst 2y ago
    hi Saul!
  - drewcoo 2y ago
    Elon Musk seems to have two skills: being rich and naming things X. https://qz.com/1026167/elon-musk-just-bought-x-com-the-domain-he-once-owned-from-paypal https://qz.com/1026167/elon-musk-just-bought-x-com-the-domai... I don't expect much of this renaissance.
- MaxfordAndSons 2y ago
  Trump seems much more like a specialist to me.
jgoewert 2y ago
[flagged]
- from-nibly 2y ago
  I closed as soon as I saw the picture putting elon as a Renaissance man. There are no great men only great con artists
  - wyclif 2y ago
    Of course you did—you proved to yourself that you have a closed, small mind that gets brainworms because you want to make everything a matter of politics. Every time I've posted a story that included any mention of Musk it guarantees it will get flagged on HN. It doesn't even matter if the story doesn't have anything directly to do with Musk or how tangential the connection is—the haters just instinctively flag it, like a Pavlovian response. How utterly surprising.
- jakubmazanec 2y ago
  Exactly, seeing Musk besides Franklin is a joke. The world could perhaps use more renaissance people, but Musk, Jobs and others are not them.
LarsDu88 2y ago
"We need more Renaissance people" Me: Ok great "Like Elon Musk" Me: Sure. He makes rockets and cars, I guess... "His new X replacement is an unfettered platform for free expression" Me: HAHAHAHAHAHHA. No. Furiously Google's author's name to confirm this is indeed yet another partisan shill
LarsDu88 2y ago
This made me think of Charlie Munger. As he was getting into old age, he told an audience that "to get ahead in life, you should specialize in one thing and get really good at it" Mr. Munger was really good at stock picking. As he neared his twilight years, he tried to dabble in architecture. To show that he was more than just a rich guy who was good/lucky with picking stocks. He made big donation to UC Santa Barbara conditioned on one clause... that he be allowed to design a dorm. The dorm he designed was utilitarian to the extreme, maximizing the internal volume of the building. Dorms on the interior received no air, no light... There was so little ventilation that critics accused the building of being "worse than a prison". College administrators worried that the building would increase the suicide rate of this beach side perpetually sunny college campus, by making the students go insane. So at the very end, Munger was forced to concede he was right... So how's Elon's takeover of Twitter going right now?
- kiba 2y ago
  Munger is just one man. His experience isn't everything. Ditto for Musk. I think of Musk as a specialist. He has glaring weakness in the social realm that he never really done much to resolve. That's why he flailing around with Twitter. It's also holding him back at other companies. If your to-go tool is to yell at subordinates to do nearly impossible or impossible things, that's pretty inefficient. At least that is my impression of Musk's management style. I don't know about Mr. Munger, but if I were to study architecture, I would maybe consider taking classes, maybe go on trips to see buildings and develop my own taste to augment my own architectural education. Design a few buildings, get some feedback.
Have7878forever 2y ago
There are millions worldwide. You can see advancement in technologies and thinkings exceed what we read during Renaissance time. Dont believe me, search for shenzhen 30 years ago vs today? Even the last 10 years Shanghai and Moscow prosper and developed incredibly than any 10-years periods in Florence. Elon is a bit overhype at this point. His cybertruck set that category of tech years backward. RoboTaxi? My goodness like Waymo never existed. Hyperloop? Yeah ot is called bullet train, Chinese (beating Germans and Japanese) now perfected the development of tracks construction even though not yet with superconductivity.

19 points by wyclif 2y ago

There are plenty of people with the potential to be renaissance persons, but they crushed by the need to earn money as a specialist. They can hardly quit their day job and go a renaissance excursion.

coding123 2y ago

We do need people to be excited about life again.

kazinator 2y ago
... and if for some that means being enthusiastic about X and craving bromance with Musk, then so be it. Who are we to judge this blogger.
- AstralStorm 2y ago
  We can judge them by the consequences of their actions.
ndndjdjdn 2y ago
They are.
- from-nibly 2y ago
  Who is?
  - ndndjdjdn 2y ago
    Various average joes. I see lots of polymathism at work. Extreme sports, art, music to go along with coding or whatever. It it is just not to the genius level that is required to get HN excited. Many switch to coding from another profession. Examples: real engineers, army, accountants.

kazinator 2y ago

> America is increasingly becoming a bifurcated, two-tiered society of a specialized government-corporate-media-political-credentialed class of degreed overseers and managers who attempt to micromanage an increasingly less well-educated, dependent underclass. Fact: people are better educated today. It's more common to have a university degree than half a century ago (yet unlike decades ago, not to have it count for much). Speaking of which, being Renaissance is a nice hobby, but it doesn't pay. That's why most people specialize. Some people like specializing. Spheres of human activity and interest are like fractals. When you specialize and zoom in, you see rich details. Look how diverse computing is. If you are in computing, to an outsider you seem like a "computer specialist", but within that sphere, you could be a generalist with diverse areas of interest. Probably the best way to explain that to people might be by analogy to doctors. Imagine someone being a brain surgeon also interested in the heart, kidneys and urinary tract, nose-throat-ears, ... that's a Renaissance Doc. Some people have one hobby different from their job, maybe two. They specialize off duty, so to speak. They pursue that hobby or two and are good at then, and don't want to take on more at the expense of neglecting what they are good at. > America is increasingly becoming a bifurcated, two-tiered society of a specialized government-corporate-media-political-credentialed class of degreed overseers and managers who attempt to micromanage an increasingly less well-educated, dependent underclass. This Musk adulation really takes away from the article. Musk took over Twitter so that he could control tweets that were critical of him, and amplify his own tweets. He knew he would lose billions of dollars in doing so by devaluing the platform, but it was worth it in his eyes.

hzay 2y ago
> Imagine someone being a brain surgeon also interested in the heart, kidneys and urinary tract, nose-throat-ears, ... that's a Renaissance Doc. Do you mean that such a Renaissance doc this is not a good thing? I think this is exactly the sort of doctors we need. Right now, my father has diabetes t2, high bp, a slightly enlarged prostrate gland, a series of UTIs, hernia, skin rashes and probably a few other things. He's fairly rigorous in researching & learning about his conditions. But no doc he consults takes an overall picture of his health. You have nephrologist, urologist, cardiologist and so on. They tend to miss things among themselves until he reminds them. Yes medicine has advanced greatly but a renaissance doc would be transformative for people like him.

megamike 2y ago

Many men seem to be in agreement: college is stupid and unnecessary https://www.metafilter.com/205867/Many-men-seem-to-be-in-agreement-college-is-stupid-and-unnecessary https://www.metafilter.com/205867/Many-men-seem-to-be-in-agr...

CuriouslyC 2y ago

We are, but we have incentives against it. Your career as a self-educated generalist is going to be significantly worse than as a credentialed specialist. You're going to get weeded out by HR drones for good positions and the positions that you do get an interview for, they're going to try and put you in a box like a specialist and make you a cog in a machine, so you won't get to even use your full skillset.

butterfly42069 2y ago
Yup, as someone in this position HR want nothing to do with me. My only options have been to make companies or freelance. I do think the world needs more "generalists" though as we're often the only ones placed to even half understand, combine and fully utilise different specialists.
jltsiren 2y ago
A "Renaissance person" is not a self-educated generalist but an old person who has had diverse interests and the motivation and the opportunities to pursue them. If you work on something full time for five years, deliberately challenging yourself and striving to improve your skills, you will probably become pretty good at the thing. But because a full-time job is only 1/3 of your waking hours, you'll have time for other pursuits. If there are 50 productive years in a human live, you can probably become pretty good at 20 different things. From this perspective, a college degree is not specialization, but the first few percent of the work of becoming a Renaissance person.
- from-nibly 2y ago
  > A "Renaissance person" is not a self-educated generalist > an old person who has had diverse interests and the motivation and the opportunities to pursue them. How is that not the same thing? The only difference is that you added that they had to be old.
  - jltsiren 2y ago
    First, because the "self-educated" part is irrelevant here. But more importantly, the difference is in the degree. Generalism is a matter of interests and focus. A Renaissance person is an ideal and an outcome. The Renaissance ideal was that elite men should strive to be good at everything they do. In the recent history, the people who have been called Renaissance men were typically at the top of their fields, with significant accomplishments in other fields. And those accomplishments take time.

aaronbrethorst 2y ago

I wonder if the author of this post—and the linked book in the sidebar, "The Case for Trump (2024 Edition)" would consider Trump a renaissance man.

dyauspitr 2y ago
Isn’t a Renaissance man someone skilled in multiple fields and pretty much a generalist at anything to throw at him?
saulpw 2y ago
Elon Musk is his example, including: > His new X replacement is an unfettered platform for free expression. And the more the left abhors their loss of the monopolistic old Twitter’s ideological clearing house, and vows to flee X and start their own new left-wing, censorious Twitters, the more they stay on X. So, yeah. (also, hey!)
- aaronbrethorst 2y ago
  hi Saul!
- drewcoo 2y ago
  Elon Musk seems to have two skills: being rich and naming things X. https://qz.com/1026167/elon-musk-just-bought-x-com-the-domain-he-once-owned-from-paypal https://qz.com/1026167/elon-musk-just-bought-x-com-the-domai... I don't expect much of this renaissance.
MaxfordAndSons 2y ago
Trump seems much more like a specialist to me.

jgoewert 2y ago

[flagged]

from-nibly 2y ago
I closed as soon as I saw the picture putting elon as a Renaissance man. There are no great men only great con artists
- wyclif 2y ago
  Of course you did—you proved to yourself that you have a closed, small mind that gets brainworms because you want to make everything a matter of politics. Every time I've posted a story that included any mention of Musk it guarantees it will get flagged on HN. It doesn't even matter if the story doesn't have anything directly to do with Musk or how tangential the connection is—the haters just instinctively flag it, like a Pavlovian response. How utterly surprising.
jakubmazanec 2y ago
Exactly, seeing Musk besides Franklin is a joke. The world could perhaps use more renaissance people, but Musk, Jobs and others are not them.

LarsDu88 2y ago

"We need more Renaissance people" Me: Ok great "Like Elon Musk" Me: Sure. He makes rockets and cars, I guess... "His new X replacement is an unfettered platform for free expression" Me: HAHAHAHAHAHHA. No. Furiously Google's author's name to confirm this is indeed yet another partisan shill

LarsDu88 2y ago

This made me think of Charlie Munger. As he was getting into old age, he told an audience that "to get ahead in life, you should specialize in one thing and get really good at it" Mr. Munger was really good at stock picking. As he neared his twilight years, he tried to dabble in architecture. To show that he was more than just a rich guy who was good/lucky with picking stocks. He made big donation to UC Santa Barbara conditioned on one clause... that he be allowed to design a dorm. The dorm he designed was utilitarian to the extreme, maximizing the internal volume of the building. Dorms on the interior received no air, no light... There was so little ventilation that critics accused the building of being "worse than a prison". College administrators worried that the building would increase the suicide rate of this beach side perpetually sunny college campus, by making the students go insane. So at the very end, Munger was forced to concede he was right... So how's Elon's takeover of Twitter going right now?

kiba 2y ago
Munger is just one man. His experience isn't everything. Ditto for Musk. I think of Musk as a specialist. He has glaring weakness in the social realm that he never really done much to resolve. That's why he flailing around with Twitter. It's also holding him back at other companies. If your to-go tool is to yell at subordinates to do nearly impossible or impossible things, that's pretty inefficient. At least that is my impression of Musk's management style. I don't know about Mr. Munger, but if I were to study architecture, I would maybe consider taking classes, maybe go on trips to see buildings and develop my own taste to augment my own architectural education. Design a few buildings, get some feedback.

Have7878forever 2y ago

There are millions worldwide. You can see advancement in technologies and thinkings exceed what we read during Renaissance time. Dont believe me, search for shenzhen 30 years ago vs today? Even the last 10 years Shanghai and Moscow prosper and developed incredibly than any 10-years periods in Florence. Elon is a bit overhype at this point. His cybertruck set that category of tech years backward. RoboTaxi? My goodness like Waymo never existed. Hyperloop? Yeah ot is called bullet train, Chinese (beating Germans and Japanese) now perfected the development of tracks construction even though not yet with superconductivity.