
Polymaths No More? - azharcs
http://keithsawyer.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/polymaths-no-more/
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Jun8
"But of course, back in 1800 there was a lot less knowledge overall. One could
acquire a working knowledge of a discipline (materials science, optics and the
eye, life insurance) just by reading the few books that had been written on
the topic. Today all of these fields have had another 200 years of knowledge
created."

I think this is faulty reasoning. Yes, the amount of knowledge has increased
exponentially but the efficiency one can access that has also increased
tremendously. Not only that, free and good learning
materials/tutorials/lecture videos, etc. abound. So, in 1800 you could get
expertise by reading a few books (or one, e.g. Heaviside spent years holed up
with Maxwell's book to come up with his wonderful insights, there were _no_
other books) but to _find_ them was no easy matter.

The 10-year expertise rule is also sometimes misused. That rule applies to
expertise of a certain kind (i.e. sending telegraph messages, playing tennis,
writing code) and may not be applicable when simple learning is involved.
Also, it assumes that one wants to be world-class in the chosen expertise
area. Therefore, I think it's a very loose upper bound on the time.

Experience this yourself: Buy Penrose's _The Road to Reality_ and give
yourself 6 months. At the end, you'll be at a mid-masters level in Physics
(admittedly concentrated on a few topics). Or Feynman's QED book for a similar
effect in a different physics area. Or learn how to read Ancient Greek (in
college you are expected to read Plato in the third semester! No after then
years.)

Another example: My son was having a lot of ear infections and his doctor
wanted to get an ear tube put in. After focused reading on the Web for 2-3
days, I felt that I had almost as much knowledge as her on this narrow topic.
I even had access to recent research on the subject she didn't know about. Try
doing that in the 1800s.

~~~
ylem
For a fun read, check out: "The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Thomas Young,
The Anonymous Polymath Who Proved Newton Wrong, Explained How We See, Cured
the Sick, and Deciphered the Rosetta Stone, Among Other Feats of Genius"

I think it's fun to play across disciplines :)

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gamble
It's not about the amount of knowledge, but changes in society that allow
vastly more people to become specialists than in 1800. At that point the
modern research university had not been invented yet, and science was still
effectively restricted to a gentlemanly elite.

Today, universities turn out middle-class PhDs by the thousand, each grinding
away in their own tiny corner of academia. The chance is rather small that
someone who hasn't dedicated their life to an area can be competitive with the
legions of specialists who have.

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Vivtek
Another factor people seem to underestimate consistently is that there are
simply a _whole lot more people_ today. It's much, much harder to stand out
from a population of a billion or seven than the, what, few tens of thousands
of literate white people that Europeans noticed in 1800?

Takeaway for me: screw standing out on a global or historical scale. Do good
work and get creative and you might get lucky, but first you gotta do the good
work and get creative.

~~~
r00fus
Agreed, I'd refine it further: "simply a whole lot more people today _with
easy access to knowledge_ ". More people + more knowledge + easier access
means specialization is not only encouraged, in many cases it's possible to
make a living being specialized where it wasn't before.

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diegob
I believe this problem is another good argument in favor of life extension
research. What's going to happen in another 100 or 200 years, when every field
has so much knowledge accumulated that it takes an entire lifetime to learn
enough to contribute something new?

