There is a lot of well-aimed critique in this comment section and the piece could benefit from rigorous editing and scrapping of the examples which are very unfortunately chosen. I think the steel man for this piece is:
1.) Qualified generalists and charlatan generalists look the same if you aren't an expert in the fields in which they opine.
2.) Experts in one field using their native lens to make conclusions about another field is not a polymath practice but something closer to a hammer that sees only nails.
I think we, as software people, are susceptible to 2—software is successful in some cases because of this kind of cross contamination where it replaces the tools and methods of a separate field with its own, sometimes with great success (art, finance).
Yes, yes - I would add - many 'software' people have to become successful in their own disciplines - and then also develop insights into the domains relevant to the problems they solve. For example, I'll bet HFT finance devs. know quite a lot about that kind of trading, probably more than most people with financial backgrounds who are not involved in trading at all.
The article under discussion could probably benefit a great deal from a concrete definition of what a polymath is. Or at least, what the author believes a true polymath to be.
Software development does indeed beget an odd practice, in which practitioners can accumulate a large body of domain specific knowledge, almost by osmosis.
While I don't know if it can be seen as evidence of polymathematical competency, it does make me wonder if this 'skill', misconstrued, is what the article is attacking.
But the only way to make that clear, is to illustrate the difference between:
- People who happen to accumulate deep knowledge of different fields, in the pursuit of others goals (like software engineers).
- People who obtain competency in apparently diverse skills, that are obviously related (like the author's basketball player, a musician who can play many instruments, or a polylinguist).
- People who truly do have, or have developed, competency in two or more fields.
The last of which the article suggests is rare, but also muddies the definition by denigrating the most famous exemplar (Da Vinci).
Again, what would have helped, was a clearer, or alternative, definition of what we expect a polymath to be. Certainly, if the author is intent on ignoring Da Vinci (?), then you could possibly take Filippo Brunelleschi, or Descartes, and work backwards from there.
I think we, as software people, are susceptible to 2—software is successful in some cases because of this kind of cross contamination where it replaces the tools and methods of a separate field with its own, sometimes with great success (art, finance).