[HN Gopher] Beware the Casual Polymath
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Beware the Casual Polymath
Author : elsewhen
Score : 32 points
Date : 2020-10-15 20:34 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (applieddivinitystudies.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (applieddivinitystudies.com)
| jodrellblank wrote:
| In life everyone is pushed to have an opinion on everything. On
| the internet any casual comment about anything is up for the
| attack "oh so now you claim to be an expert on X do you, well let
| me put you in your place...".
|
| > " _The Twitter account you followed to understand politics now
| seems more focused on their mindfulness practice._ "
|
| What a "hellscape" it is when you're reminded that other people
| are _people_ and not service-providing objects that exist for
| your one-sided extraction of value. Just because you pigeonhole
| someone as "the politics person" doesn't mean they do that to
| themselves, and just because they tweet about mindfulness doesn't
| mean any claim to being a polymath, and just because you want to
| "learn about politics" doesn't oblige someone to "know their
| place" in your life and stick to it.
|
| I'm sure there's something more interesting and deeper to be
| brought up about how it fundamentally doesn't seem to _matter_ if
| you know a lot or a little, outside the lense of maximising
| capitalist money acquisition, but it 's too hard to get past the
| rest of it and get to it.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| That's a good point. If you follow a twitter account dedicated
| to political news and they start talking about meditation,
| thats different than following a person who likes to talk
| politics and dives into other subjects
| ssivark wrote:
| I think the author/post neglects the most important reason for
| valuing generalists and learning from them. (Hyper)specialists
| have a hard time understanding context outside their narrow
| domains, and filtering the relevance of their own specialization
| to a situation. Having access to a highly sophisticated hammer,
| everything looks like a nail through their lens. Consequently,
| there have a hard time communicating with those not well-versed
| in their field. Eg, while being taught in grad school by a world
| renowned expert, I realized that he'd been teaching the subject
| longer than any of the students had been alive!
|
| Generalists are typically far better at motivating the relevance
| of a problem/situation and filtering out the important details
| from the unimportant. That clarity serves as a great platform on
| which to then incorporate the inputs of specialists from
| different fields relevant to the situation.
|
| Of course, none of this is meant to defend or elevate people
| participation in random internet discussions, or generating
| "content marketing", to "generalists".
| flipactual wrote:
| This seems much less about being casual or being a polymath and
| more about those who overestimate the value of their own input
|
| I'm leaving this comment only because I most often do not
| overestimate the value of my input and therefor don't leave
| comments, but this seems the perfect place to deviate
| paultopia wrote:
| One wonders if the author is a sociologist of knowledge or if
| they are themselves engaged in dilettantism.
| taxcoder wrote:
| > The incentive is to ramp up variance, make bold claims in a
| variety of areas, and hope you're right some of the time.
|
| Well said.
|
| However, is a casual polymath any different than a blowhard with
| a bit of knowledge or a poser? It seems to me a true polymath,
| casual or otherwise, would value knowledge enough he would be
| careful to make claims he was unsure of.
| dvt wrote:
| The article is interesting, and probably right -- albeit maybe
| slightly unfair to da Vinci -- but I don't really buy this
| premise:
|
| > We live in times of great disaggregation, and yet, seem to
| learn increasingly from generalists.
|
| Most teaching is done by non-generalists -- be it in schools, on
| TV, in documentaries, in courtrooms, or basically anywhere of any
| import. There's quite a bit of irony in the author _quoting_
| Wikipedia though. On first reading, I thought that was some sort
| of punch-line.
|
| > Having a variety of interests is no more a sign of generalized
| intelligence than being able to walk and chew gum.
|
| This is a reductive oversimplification, and I really wish the
| author were more fair. There's something pretty incredible about
| someone contributing to multiple fields of study. It's rare, but
| it happens. The fact that some Twitter personality has surface
| knowledge about X and Y doesn't imply that there _aren 't_ people
| out there with actual deep knowledge about both X and Y.
| bean-sprugget wrote:
| But, it seems like there are more polymaths in the past than now
| - more people who were extremely smart, even if the general
| intelligence of people nowadays has increased. I think being a
| "casual" polymath is the important part: like the article
| mentions, you'd need a deep understanding of a subject to
| actually have it's interdisciplinary benefits. I think with the
| Internet today, it's easy to see so many interesting hobbies and
| topics, which takes time and effort away from just pursuing one
| or a few things really in depth.
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