
Is it possible to be a polymath these days? - JayNeely
http://ask.metafilter.com/107554/Is-it-possible-to-be-a-polymath-these-days
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jonmc12
Once a polymath is discovered to be highly capable they are quickly seduced
down a narrower path that generates the most revenue.

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TrevorJ
My father was an architect and he once challenged me to find an area of study
that he didn't need to know anything about, and as of yet I haven't. Designing
a church? You better know something of the religion. An arena? You should
understand the sport, otherwise how do you optimize the sight lines? A
pharmaceutical factory? You need a good grasp of chemistry to design a safe
environment. And then there are the studies of human psychology and
interaction that should help inform the design of any structure as well as
your requisite art, history, design, math and engineering knowledge.

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kqr2
Hasn't the amount of knowledge in math, science, and engineering been growing
exponentially whereas our capability to learn and teach is still mostly
linear?

Edit: Should also mention Malcolm Gladwell's recent book which posits that it
takes on the order of 10000 hours to become an "expert" at something.

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/nov/15/malcolm-
gladwell...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/nov/15/malcolm-gladwell-
outliers-extract)

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whacked_new
Argh... it's not Gladwell's book that posits the 10000 hours bit -- it's from
Ericsson's research!

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mhartl
Gladwell is so popular now that we'd better get used to this. Gladwell himself
has lamented the phenomenon, but there's no stopping it, I fear.

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Tichy
Thanks to the internet you can become an expert on any topic within a week or
so.

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mattmaroon
You have a liberal definition of expert.

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Tichy
True - I was only half joking, though. With the internet we really can browse
through new topics outside of our field very quickly. Not to become experts,
but to find specific aspects of other areas of research that might apply to
our problem.

Who knows what Leonardo would have done with the internet...

~~~
mattmaroon
I definitely do know a lot about a lot of things now. I do often fear becoming
a jack of all trades, master of none though.

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pg
You probably can't know everything, but you can work in several separate and
not very closely related fields.

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unalone
It depends on what you mean by "polymath" specifically, but I always think of
the multi-talent programmers and artists. PG designed Viaweb and also is an
essayist and breakthrough investor, for instance. One of my favorite authors,
Daniel Handler, played accordion with the Magnetic Fields and he's a pretty
excellent singer as well.

~~~
bmj
When I think polymath, Ludwig Wittgenstein comes to mind. He was a successful
mechanical engineer, received his PhD in philosophy based on the notebook he
kept during World War I, taught philosophy, taught grammar school (though,
admittedly, that didn't work out so well), and designed a house for his
sister.

I'm not trying to belittle others, like PG, who clearly are knowledgeable (and
skilled) at many things, but given the genesis of the term, I think the entry
bar is pretty high.

~~~
unalone
PG was the first example I could think of that seemed to fit. I agree: there
are people who are certainly more renaissance than him. That was just the
first name that came to mind.

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time_management
Yes, but it's very, very hard. It always was.

In da Vinci's time, how many people could imagine a flying machine in a time
when machines of any type were extraordinarily rare and expensive?

In 2008, most people in the developed world have the opportunities to excel
that were almost unattainable 500 years ago, so the standards of nominal
accomplishment are higher. Developing blueprints for a new style of flying
machine is now an amateur's task; to be a world-changer, you have to build and
market one. Or for another example, to work at the cutting edge of physics,
you'll probably need access to expensive resources so you can test and refine
your theories. This means that a lot more time and energy are sucked up by
unglamorous tasks (e.g. raising money, or proving yourself in order to secure
access to the choice labs).

In the Renaissance, few had any opportunities to excel, but those who did
could get started right away. In modern times, there are a lot more brilliant
contenders, but it takes longer to acquire the material and social resources
necessary in order to get to work on the front lines.

However, the standards of creativity and aesthetic genius have not gone up
nearly as fast. Shakespeare would still be considered a great writer today;
and da Vinci, a great painter.

