The last days of the polymath

http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/edward-carr/last-days-polymath

by wow_sig • 16 years ago

85 31 16 years ago

moreintelligentlife.com

Who all do we have as living polymaths on our planet? Any ideas?

pg• 16 years ago

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

presidentender4• 16 years ago

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.

tel• 16 years ago

I disagree with the metaphor. 'Sparser matrices' implies homogeneity of effort and accomplishment. It's closer to 'sparser trees' where genuinely regaled accomplishments happen in leafs quite far from the root.

Polymaths may become something more of the lucky geniuses who have the adroitness to envision great trees, the tenacity to grow them, and the luck to not waste too much effort in directions they cannot see to fulfillment. They build branches wide and strong with the right root structure and a strong trunk. Other grow bushes or tall, skinny trees, perhaps easily blown down.

rorymarinich6• 16 years ago

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?

daeken• 16 years ago

I agree entirely. While I've specialized (and spent the vast majority of my time) in reverse-engineering, I also write fiction, do sound engineering, (used to) draw, have recently started playing the drums, etc. Am I particularly great at any of these? Not really -- at least not yet -- but that's ok.

As an aside, we've all heard the standard "jack of all trades" quote, but everyone always leaves out the last part of it, which I feel is most important, if only because of the way I can relate to it: Jack of all trades, master of none, though oftentimes better than master of one.

noname1232• 16 years ago

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.

keyist• 16 years ago

It's particularly amusing to see someone spout off on HN of all places, with the sheer number of CEOs, CTOs, and successful founders (http://samsnyder.com/2010/11/19/successful-people-on-hacker-... ). Not to forget successful authors (cstross) and someone like cperciva whose accomplishments would require pagination.

None of whom feel the need to reference their position or achievements unless providing clarification, context, or disclaimers.

rorymarinich6• 16 years ago

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?

zasz2• 16 years ago

I don't think the article would consider any of the people you listed polymaths. One of the article's criterion for being a polymath is that you have interests in diverse fields. A musician who can play several different instruments isn't showing much in the way of diversity. Neither is James Cameron, nor Louis CK, because the examples you cited all are tied together very naturally, and I would argue that being a great director probably means you _have_ to be a good set/costume designer too. And you can't just be really good to be considered a polymath--you have to be an expert. Thomas Young, from the article, showed that light was a wave in addition to a particle, _and_ contributed immensely to linguistics through helping to crack the Rosetta Stone. Making significant contributions or developments like Young's these days isn't possible. With the article's stringent criteria, I'd agree--what polymaths we have today aren't great compares to the ones we used to have, and they're just going to keep getting worse because it's hard to be an expert in anything intellectual nowadays, and it'll only get worse.

rorymarinich6• 16 years ago

I might agree re: Louis CK. I wouldn't agree re: James Cameron. Set/costume design is an entirely different art form from directing; I was actually very impressed when I read about his early work designing for films before he became a director. Saying the two are similar arts would be like saying that, I don't know, working with Photoshop and Illustrator is close to being a marble sculptor.

I'd also cite, say, Ricky Gervais as an instance of a person who is pushing the boundaries of multiple fields at once. His directorial style inspired a dozen other single-camera television comedies (including Arrested Development, which I think is the king sitcom); his acting style and his "theater of embarrassment" similarly begat actors like Michael Cera, and a wide stripe of other comic actors who play off deadpan silence. His writing style, meanwhile, especially for the original Office and for Extras which followed it, was incredibly bleak and devastating, and simultaneously very heartwarming. He had a sympathy for his characters which very few TV shows had. I think his particular blend really set a trend for a decade of television that followed.

I think the problem is how we define "expert". If you mean somebody who is definitively at the top of a field, then, yes, you're right, we don't have many people at the tops of multiple fields at once. That's because it's hard: We have more competitive fields now than we've ever had before. More experts in every single thing. But I'd argue that we probably have just as many people operating on that high a plain of expertise in multiple areas. It's just that when you've got so many, it becomes very, very hard to notice every single one, and so the bar for "exemplary" gets incredibly high. It's a bias in the data that returns more dismal-looking results.

Addendum 1: Unfortunately I can't name many people in the sciences, because I'm as far from a science person as you get. I'd be convinced they're there, though.

Addendum 2: I don't just mean a musician who plays multiple instruments. I mean a musician who plays multiple aesthetic styles with radically different philosophies. There are guitarists who can play funk music and flamenco and free jazz and modern classical. If you know anything about the cultures and styles of any of those four, you know that the difference between playing each isn't just technical ability. It literally requires playing the instrument in ways that are anathema to any of the others.

You might argue that just because all four styles are classified as "music", they are too tied together to count as diverse; I'd argue that you're wrong. They're about as similar to each other as physics are to linguistics, which is to say that while there are similarities, they're simply too far apart to be umbrella'd together without doing each a great disservice.

presidentender4• 16 years ago

I hate to burst your bubble, but that does not make you a polymath. If your novel were published by a profit-minded company, sold well, and entered the public consciousness, if your essays were instead new mathematical proofs or chemistry research, if your song were a symphony which displayed a deep understanding of musical theory, and if your design of a number of web sites were instead the development of a new encryption algorithm, you'd qualify as a polymath.

As it is, your 18-year-old self and your present friends may well be precocious and intelligent, but your interests are not notably broad and your contributions to society have been standard. The friend who blogs and argues politics, or the other who acts - what is "poly" about their "math"? Those are narrow focuses.

Your efforts are broader, but you're in the beginning stages of creative production... and unless you allow others to determine when your works are satisfactory instead of engaging in self-publishing, you'll have a hard time progressing beyond those beginning stages. Self-publishing is fine for blogging, but there's a reason they're called "Vanity Presses."

rorymarinich6• 16 years ago

Completely agreed! I would be astonished if anybody my age was sophisticated/mature enough to have novel thoughts about one subject, let alone multiple. Particularly not in an era when public understanding of most of the arts is 30-40 years behind what we'd call the cutting edge right now. Maybe people specializing in the Internet, because it's so immature, but even then the closest I think it comes is somebody like Blake Ross and Firefox, and I don't think that's quite brilliant enough to count. (It is very popular, though.)

But it's easier nowadays to educate yourself than it ever has been before. That was partly my point: More people are teaching themselves about more things than has been possible in the past. Certainly if I'd been born 10 years earlier, I wouldn't be nearly as well-off as I am now (though this theoretical 30-year-old me would be wiser than the 20-year-old actual me, of course). People are better able to connect to one another, and to test out their ideas, and to experience others' ideas, now that we have this monstrous network that lets you access anything at any time. When I was 13 I was attempting to debate Communist philosophy on a game design forum; I doubt I'd have been doing that without the Internet.

Don't worry. I have no illusions about my prowess. I'm only this year starting to work on things that I think say something meaningful. Maybe five or ten years from now I'll be a legitimate expert in a field or two. Even that would be faster than expected.

(I fail to see, though, how self-publishing somehow prevents me from interacting with others or letting them comment on my work. When my novel was published in 2007, self-publishing let me distribute it freely and thousands of people did — more than would have bought it, I'm sure. Many of those people, including some of the community here, decided to directly respond to it; loads of them, I assure you, were critical. Similarly, I've launched web sites on Hacker News and learned a lot from the critical feedback; my essays and the subsequent comments were similarly devastating.

If anything, I'd say that self-publishing makes it even easier for others to rip me to shreds. It's a self-perpetuating game; the better I get, the more people see my work, and the more informed the subsequent criticism is. I've gone from a community of dozens to a community of tens of thousands. I'm a masochist. I love nothing more than hearing people tell me why I should eat shit and die, especially when they're right.)

RiderOfGiraffes2• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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.

RiderOfGiraffes2• 16 years ago

Cheers!

thebooktocome• 16 years ago

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

Florin_Andrei• 16 years ago

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.

jjcm• 16 years ago

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.

Rantenki2• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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.

Rantenki2• 16 years ago

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.

dannyb• 16 years ago

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!

Mz• 16 years ago

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?

The last days of the polymath

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