

The last days of the polymath - wow_sig
http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/edward-carr/last-days-polymath
Who all do we have as living polymaths on our planet? Any ideas?
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RiderOfGiraffes
Another old friend:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1038795>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=861836> <\- Has comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=850301>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=844229> <\- Has comments

~~~
jokermatt999
I'd just like to say "Thanks" for keeping track of all these HN submissions.
It seems like almost every time there's a duplicate post, you're there to
provide links to the other instances and comments. It's especially nice when
there's more discussion on the articles. Just figured I'd let you know I
appreciate what you do.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
Cheers!

------
pg
Specialization doesn't mean you can't have polymaths. They just have to be
sparser matrices.

~~~
presidentender
Noam Chomsky, with his two-ish fields, springs to mind. Asimov and Bertrand
Russel might qualify.

It seems, though, that those sparse matrices are largely populated by creative
efforts; we see many professors of hard science who are also philosophers,
historians or writers, but we seem to have lost the biologist, engineer and
composer of da Vinci's ilk.

------
rorymarinich
Very interesting article! Worthy of my upvote. But at the same time I don't at
all buy into its premise.

Literally every field I have even a passing interest in has got people at the
top of it who express interest in multiple fields at once. In the web-related
world there's Shaun Inman, who goes back and forth between music, web design,
and creating video games. Or there's Ze Frank, who goes back and forth between
writing and designing tools and music and video comedy and I don't know what
else. In music there are a _lot_ of people who specialize in many, many
different things at once — either different types of music (multiple
instruments, or multiple performance styles, or music production) — or
actively in different fields at once. Peter Brotzmann, one of the best free
jazz saxophonists, is also a graphic designer who's designed all of his albums
to date. Tom Waits is a musician who acts and writes on the side. Auteur
directors tend to be involved in five or six different fields at once: James
Cameron is a masterful set/costume designer; David Lynch handles the audio
production for his movies; and writes some of the music for it. Stand-up comic
Louis CK writes, stars in, directs, _and_ edits his show Louie, which is to
some degree _insane_.

The problem with looking at the Internet for polymaths of the same caliber of
Carl Djerassi is that the Internet generation is too young right now. Ze
Frank, who is in some ways the grandfather of the modern Internet creative
movement, is only thirty-eight years old. The _real_ Internet generation, of
the people who literally never existed in a world where the World Wide Web
didn't, was born in 1990. They're twenty years old. They're me.

I can assure you as somebody who's closer to that generation than most of the
users on that site: We're going to see an explosion of creativity the likes of
which we haven't seen in decades, if ever. The kids I know in high school are
busy writing, drawing, making music, arguing philosophy, arguing economics,
doing pretty much everything and doing it all at once. Give it thirty years
and I think you'll be flabbergasted at what we produce.

When I was eighteen I'd already published a novel, directed a play, written
and co-performed a song, co-created said song's music video, performed and co-
wrote a Harry Potter dub, wrote multiple essays, and designed a number of web
sites. A friend of mine who's a year younger was keeping a political/economic
blog and engaging in discussions pretty much everywhere. Yet another friend is
a hypnotist, writer, and web designer who I might be making a documentary
about this coming summer. The guy I live with, twenty-one, is a talented actor
who's also written for the Colbert Report, interviewed celebrities, and in his
free time sells tickets. Is that polymath enough for you?

~~~
noname123
No. It's not polymath enough because you haven't acquired the subtle art of
impressing other people without coming off like someone who needs to brag
about themselves or making already insecure people feel more insecure about
themselves.

Without proper social-skills you are just a douche in lab coat/pocket-
protector/drama club/hipster enclave. The true modern polymath, IMO are Frank
Abagnale, Larry Ellison and Craig Ventor.

~~~
rorymarinich
I wasn't aware that listing a set of things I've done counts as impressing
people. It's not like I go around just announcing accomplishments to crowds
hoping they'll cheer me or toast me or blow me.

We're discussing an article that opens up by mentioning one man's prowess in
multiple areas. The article uses this man as a springboard to ask if there are
similarly talented people today. My response was that I think there _are_ ,
and that while the current generation of Internet People is still young,
there's a hell of a lot of promise there, pretty much wherever you look.

I'm sorry if you're insecure about yourself; I didn't mean to shove a list in
your face in an attempt to make you feel unhappy. I know firsthand the shallow
satisfaction that comes from doing things just to fill out a resume; happiness
comes from friendship and personal curiosities. When I was 17 I thought
writing a novel would make me happy; it didn't.

I don't know much about Ellison and Ventor. Would you really call Abagnale a
polymath? He's a fascinating man, but I don't know him well enough to say that
his activities are diverse enough to be called polymath. He was a con man; now
he works in security. What else has he done?

~~~
noname123
Don't feel defensive. I think it's great that you are putting yourself in
public and getting feedback. The truth is most people think that they are the
shit but yet they are so insecure to express so in public. So they feel like
Unibomber on the inside but are too chicken-shit to do actually like the
Unibomber.

But it's important to take criticism well. Like playing music, it's jarring to
hear your own voice or playing on records but it's the only way to get
feedback and improve. What you are doing is to turn my criticism of you
against me and it doesn't reflect poorly on me but shows off your bruised ego.
You are free to think for yourself and then dismiss my criticism but don't
turn it into the "idealistic you" vs. the materialistic world; that's
descending into the Unibomber rabbit-hole.

And by the way, this is coming from someone who went through a phase of
attempting to write the Great American Novel, exploring the liberal
arts/music/philosophy/bohemian living, whatever you want to call it. Yeah, it
was a very educational experience.

~~~
rorymarinich
Oops! No! I'm sorry if it sounded like I was suggesting you were insecure. I
think I misinterpreted when you said "making already insecure people feel more
insecure about themselves". I worried you were referring to yourself.

If I could go back and edit my original post, I would, but the edit window
closed. I legitimately didn't mean that to be dickwaving. And I tried to say
that I _don't_ think I'm a polymath. I'm too young and too stupid. Maybe one
day. Anyway, I didn't write it that well and it came off as me trying to look
like an Internet Superhero. My apologies.

I go to an art school right now and boy oh boy does the cockiness and one-man-
against-the-universe-ing get old. I agree; the only way to really do
interesting things is to constantly self-doubt and push to expand. My favorite
artists/people in general are the ones who to this day insist on trying to be
better than they are.

------
jjcm
The last days? By whose definition? Not to discount Thomas Young at all, but I
have no doubt that in the age of wikipedia you could find tens of thousands of
people who could deliver that same address he did - myself included. I would
argue heavily against the title of this article. These aren't the last days of
the polymath, rather these are the days where we're so saturated with them
that few stand out.

------
Florin_Andrei
I wonder if the definition of the polymath is changing as our accessable
memory is moving outside of the brain. So, now it's not the person who knows a
lot about a lot, but the person who can efficiently query the search engine in
real time and has the ability to work with the information coming back from
it.

After all, rote memorization was not the polymath's main strength anyway. Now
we're just unburdening them to an even higher degree.

------
Rantenki
I would speculate that the reason that the polymath seems less common is that:

1\. Counter-intuitively, polymaths are now ubiquitous. The WWW as well as
better information access in general has made it much easier to BECOME a
polymath. Because of this, polymaths have to be so much more impressive. My
local hackerspace contains several individuals who know/achieve SO MUCH in a
variety of disciplines. We have baker, artist, roboticist, biohacker, hardware
engineers and Dancer, juggler perl hacking political scientists. All of whom
are making important contributions to their fields. However, they are lost in
the noise because:

2\. The pace of scientific discovery is growing at an exponential rate. This
means that it is difficult to keep track of, or notice any particular
discovery, regardless of who makes it.

3\. And I admit, unlike the previous two, this is subjective. I think that we
make more of a discovery at the edges of our knowledge than we do of a hybrid.
We are all interested by a new type of particle being discovered, but when
that happens, we pay more attention to the discoverers' titles as specialists,
ignoring the likelihood that the particle physicist working at CERN could also
be considered a solid materials/superconductors/computer engineer, as they
would need to be in order to understand and utilize their test equipment.

~~~
sciboy
1) I would disagree. The definition of polymath is someone who is an expert at
orthogonal subjects. Your definition of expert seems to be slightly lower than
mine. My definition would be someone who could give a lecture to other experts
in the field with a days notice and be able to answer questions to the
satisfaction of the audience.

2) If this were true it would be a short time until science itself crumbled.
How then are people able to keep on top of their fields with finite time? The
number of scientists isn't exponentially increasing, nor are the number of
publications. It's growth, but it's not exponential as far as I can tell.

3) A polymath is someone who has knowledge in orthogonal knowledge spaces. If
your field requires knowledge in other very related areas then I wouldn't
consider that polymath-like activity.

~~~
Rantenki
1) That may be your definition, but it is not the dictionary one. Not that I
don't wish that there were more people with leading edge expertise in
independent fields, but the definition of polymath is merely great learning in
diverse fields.

2) The population as a whole is increasing exponentially, as is the rate of
discovery in a great many fields. While I doubt the situation is sustainable,
the condition does exist at least in the short term. There is a degree of
subjectivity here, but I stand by my statement.

3) Same as #1, worded differently a bit. I actually spent some time looking up
different variations of the definition of polymath, and it turns out
orthogonality (or independence, since orthogonality seems to be imply
different things in compsci than for other disciplines) is not a requirement,
just divergence seems sufficient.

As an aside, I am not trying to redefine polymath for my own benefit, being a
broad generalist in a lot of fields, but still too focused on some compsci
stuff to be a true expert in any of the other ones.

------
Mz
The internal subjective experience or psychology of such people is something I
find of a certain interest. Somewhat to my surprise, this article actually
touches on that:

 _Djerassi has also suffered in his own work because of monomaths’ hostility,
especially as a playwright. “They always keep crying out ‘the co-inventor,
father, the mother of the Pill’,” he growls. “Without having any knowledge
about the play, they start with it. As if it’s got anything to do with it.”
Djerassi thinks that this means he has to work harder to promote his work. “No
agent has ever been interested in me. They want 29-year-old Irish playwrights,
not 86-year-old expatriates.” A trace of bitterness creeps into his voice, but
he concedes: “If I were an agent I’d feel the same way.”

Overwhelmed by specialists and attacked by experts as dilettantes, it is
amazing that there are any polymaths at all. How do they manage?_

------
dannyb
It made for an interesting read, but I think there are too many
generalizations in that type of writing. The truth is, we have just
experienced and extraordinary explosion in the amount of valuable data and
information that it available to almost everybody. I think that we have not
yet come to grips with this and that it has caused some disciplinary
boundaries to be rewritten. There will still be heroes after the revolution!

------
thebooktocome
I hope to become a polymath, but the (graduate school) system really isn't set
up to produce them as such.

