
The impossibly wide learning of Sabine Baring-Gould - Petiver
http://theweek.com/articles/763465/last-man-who-knew-everything
======
vinceguidry
The scope of one person's life is almost unimaginable. For every one thing we
know about a prominent person's life, there's a thousand more we can never
know and only guess about.

As a result, we generally _severely_ underestimate historical peoples, because
there's just too much stuff there to get to know it all. We're constantly
reifying facts and narrative to fit extremely complex events. We have to do it
to our own lives, and the lives of the people around us, yet even the people
we know the most intimately have vast swaths of their inner lives that you
will _never_ be able to fathom.

~~~
danharaj
> As a result, we generally severely underestimate historical peoples, because
> there's just too much stuff there to get to know it all. We're constantly
> reifying facts and narrative to fit extremely complex events. We have to do
> it to our own lives, and the lives of the people around us, yet even the
> people we know the most intimately have vast swaths of their inner lives
> that you will never be able to fathom.

One of the most difficult tasks of a historian is to recover the possibilities
latent in the past. This is perhaps even more difficult than ascertaining what
_did_ occur.

------
syntheticnature
Interestingly, his compulsion to write puts me in mind of Isaac Asimov, who
also dashed off works at a similar pace (much confusing would-be writers who
thought it best to try to imitate him).

~~~
leephillips
“Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of
us who do.” \-- Isaac Asimov

------
dang
All: since the overblown title was sucking oxygen out of this discussion, we
changed it to use a different phrase from the article. Can we let go of the
title now please?

(Yes, the word 'impossibly' in the new title is self-contradictory if taken
literally, so don't take it literally.)

~~~
paulmd
HackerNews: threads may contain up to 25% "posts whining about titles" by
weight.

(I've seriously never seen a forum that spergs out about titles as much as
this one does, it's quite excessive.)

------
trefn
Sabine Baring-Gould is a character in a non-canon Sherlock Holmes novel by
Laurie R. King called `The Moor`. If you enjoy fictional accounts of widely
knowledgeable characters, I recommend it :)

------
trisimix
Or if you don't value the source of information over the ability to interpret
it ala cognitive collaboration. Everyone knows everything. Basically.

------
klhugo
I swear I read "the TEST man who knew everything". That would make quite a
novel.

------
nkoren
Sounds like an interesting enough bloke, but I find the article's framing of
him to be exasperating.

Knew everything? Truly? So he could hold forth at length on the philosophy of
Zhuang Zhou or Nagarjuna, or the history of the Mayan Empires or the Tokugawa
shogunate? Somehow I very much doubt it. Doubtless he was a considerable
polymath within the confines of one particular cultural frame of reference --
but by that standard, there are people living in uncontacted tribes in the
Amazon who "know everything" today.

~~~
komali2
I mean, haven't read the biography, but the first thing I thought of was the
trades.

Does he know how to forge an iron sword? A steel one? Can he build a table?
What about a boat? Does he know how to sail? Does he know how to turn wheat
and yeast into bread? Does he know _every recipe, ever_? Does he know how to
fertilize a field?

Even then there were highly specialized "careers," to the point that you had
the title in your surname.

------
leephillips
This interesting story of a man who was rapaciously knowledgeable and wrote an
apparently superhuman number of works is made distracting by the "knew
everything" claim. It's distracting because the mind inevitably searches out
things that he probably didn't know: was he familiar with the General Theory
of Relativity? did he read Sanskrit and Mandarin? what were his views on the
recent progress in the theory of fields and rings? Really, no one can know
everything -- but that doesn't make his life any less remarkable.

~~~
Xeoncross
Yes, even in that day and time I am sure he would not have made this claim
about himself. There were tens of thousands of specialty fields for everything
from glass blowing to animal husbandry to machine design and explosives.

He was amazing, but the amount of knowledge at this time is far greater than
this article makes it out to be.

~~~
leephillips
Especially as he knew so much, and the more you know, the more you know that
you know so little. Only the deeply ignorant feel that they know everything
(there was a poor fellow arguing here recently that he knew everything that
was worth knowing about philosophy. His responses to challenges revealed that
he knew nothing about it at all).

------
bookofjoe
"The Last Man Who Knew Everything" (2018)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/24/books/review/david-n-
schw...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/24/books/review/david-n-schwartz-the-
last-man-who-knew-everything.html)

"The Last Man Who Knew Everything" (2006)

[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/jan/20/featuresreview...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/jan/20/featuresreviews.guardianreview7)

~~~
dredmorbius
An interesting general query:

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q="the+last+man+who+knew+everything"...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q="the+last+man+who+knew+everything"&atb=v64-5_a&t=cros&ia=products)

[https://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q="the%2...](https://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q="the%20last%20man%20who%20knew%20everything")

[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q="the%20last%20man%20who...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q="the%20last%20man%20who%20knew%20everything"&btnG=Search&as_sdt=800000000001&as_sdtp=on)

~~~
bookofjoe
Nicely done; thank you!

------
dhimes
TL;DR: Sabine Baring-Gould was a remarkable polymath in the 1800s.

~~~
jeffreyrogers
Haha, if that's all you took away from this you really missed the point.

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dfxm12
I thought the title was going to be a reference to an idea that we no longer
need to waste brain cycles "knowing" trivia that were once taken for granted
since they can now be easily looked up on your phone.

So, I was kinda disappointed by this line:

 _But Sabine Baring-Gould happens to have been the last man who knew
everything. One really does mean everything._

...and as it turns out this is just a long for ad for a new biography.

------
TomK32
in the meanwhile English schools are replacing analog clocks with digital ones
because reading the two handles is too complicated for pupils these days...
[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/26/analog...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/26/analogue-
clocks-students-cant-tell-time-during-exams)

~~~
reificator
> _because reading the two handles is too complicated for pupils these
> days..._

No, it's because they're not exposed to them before reaching school or
anywhere else afterward. So the school then has to teach how to read them.

The fact of the matter is that the world is moving to digital clocks. You can
argue about the merits of each, you can blame the generation that is being
raised without them for not learning something they have no access to, or you
can accept that the world is changing.

