The impossibly wide learning of Sabine Baring-Gould | Hacker News Reader

The impossibly wide learning of Sabine Baring-Gould

theweek.com

99 pointsPetiver27 comments

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.

> 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.

Chris-Chan is arguably the most documented person in history(click around sonichu.com for some idea of the scope of documentation), but there's still so much of the minutiae of their life which is unknown, but they would probably consider those things incredibly important.

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).

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

And he wrote on comparably broad topics, e.g. Bible, Antique History, Shakespeare works, Biology, Chemistry and space exploration.

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.)

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.)

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 :)

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

> was he familiar with the General Theory of Relativity?

Probably not very, since he was 80 years old when it was first published.

But that's kind of the point - before theories like that existed, the scope of human knowledge about the world was such that one person could have pretty good grasp of it, since the state of knowledge about each individual topic made it much more accessible to non-experts.

"The Last Man Who Knew Everything" (2018)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/24/books/review/david-n-schw...

"The Last Man Who Knew Everything" (2006)

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/jan/20/featuresreview...

An interesting general query:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q="the+last+man+who+knew+everything"...

https://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q="the%2...

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q="the%20last%20man%20who...

Nicely done; thank you!

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

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

Kurt Godel came along a century later and proved that knowing everything is mathematically impossible. One might say he was a polymath among polymaths, telling other polymaths to stop thinking of themselves as omnimaths.

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.

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...

> 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.

This is not an awfully constructive or relevant comment, and moreover, the article challenges the very perspective of judgment that you take up on the issue

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