Why Some People Are Impossibly Talented | Hacker News Reader

Why Some People Are Impossibly Talented

bbc.com

70 pointsandrewl20 comments

'According to his son and daughter, he would play music whenever he faced an intractable problem, and would often finish the performance by saying, “There now, I’ve got it”. It was a much better use of his time than continuing to fruitlessly agonise over the maths or physics.'

Fascinating. Definitely have experienced this with hard problems and writing music. There must be some kind of orthogonality going on there.

It implies the existence of a common underlying connection between music (or should I say art in general) and pretty much everything else. And there's the science-society-art triangle that seems to work really nicely together as three pillars of knowledge you can pursue. There's a perspective based on either of those three you can take when considering anything. I have no punchline, it's fascinating to me too.

This tweets says it all:

https://twitter.com/onetrunna/status/1198329720896516096?s=2...

Galatians 4:16

(Paraphrased) “And they hated him because he spoke the truth.”

From the introduction:

Polymaths excel in multiple fields. But what makes a polymath – and can their cross-discipline expertise help tackle some of society’s most pressing challenges?

Yeah but the article overlooks the many polymaths who spread themselves thinly across a variety of different fields, never achieving true mastery of a particular field. The phrase 'Jack of all trades, master of none' springs to mind. There are however polymaths who achieve mastery of all the fields they choose to pursue, although I imagine they are rare.

I guess the question is: would these people be significantly better at any of these fields, if they specialised more? That seems like an open question to me.

My personal experience as a jack-of-all-trades is that if I try to specialise, I dry up creatively and get less effective.

I recently found out about the concept of “scanner personality”, which covers what you mention (I’m also a “sufferer” of it). If I specialise (too much) I feel constrained and dry up creatively as well.

The trick might be to always imagine multiple angles along which you can approach a problem, however specialized the problem might be. That way, you never feel "constrained".

Many world class athletes are also very good at other classes or sports. But by specialising in one event, it will be enough to take them from just outside an OS final in multiple events - to inside an OS final in one event. This can be the difference between a 1 million sponsor contract or no contract.

The articles mentions a criteria that to be a PolyMath one has to make to make at least a major contribution in three different fields. For someone to make a major contribution, by definition they are an expert in that field, therefore there are a fewer people number of Polymaths vs those who are considered as "Jack of all trades".

I don't think even Einstein fits by that definition. An instrument as a hobby hardly is a contribution. Da Vinci is probably one of the closest I can think of by that definition and even he said something like "tell me if anything ever was done" since he felt like he never managed to finish anything properly

The definition also fits Von Neumann perfectly.

There are plenty of uncontroversial polymaths in the 20th century alone - von Neumann (hopefully no need to list here), Chomsky (political science, linguistics, computer science), and Nabokov (literature, chess, entomology) come to mind quickly.

In retrospect, many polymaths look like an expert in only one field because they more or less invented it. (Chomsky synthesized computation and lingustics into computational linguistics; Helmhotz synthesized physics, medicine, psychology, and philosophy to help found modern psychophysics; Frege, Russell, and Whitehead synthesized logic and mathematics into, uh, mathematics.)

Another issue seems to be assuming that all or at least one of the fields is a science (or even a hard science), but this isn't the case. Paul Robeson has been cited as a polymath due to his contribution across several dramatic arts, law degree, his political activism, and football career.

I like the one Bill Burr made a point of highlighting: Arnold Schwarzenegger. Body building champion, movie star, and governor of California.

The question is really how common each base group is and then how many single field experts each accounts for..

I.e. on one extreme every Expert is a jack of all trades that hasn't reached acknowledgement in more fields. A little absurd, but not as absurd as the other extreme: that all jack of all trades that reach expertise in a field simultaneously get acknowledgement in enough fields to be a Polymath.

The only evidence I see in the article towards that question is the analysis of arts hobbies in Nobel prize winners vs average scientists.

... is this a joke? The article covers this in almost exactly these words. I wonder how often HN commenters actually read the full text of the article they're commenting on?

> There are, of course, some good reasons why we might be hesitant to pursue multiple interests. One is the fear that we might spread ourselves too thinly if we devote ourselves to more than one avocation. With a divided attention, we would fail to achieve success in any domain – the idea that the “Jack of all trades is the master of none”.

Oops, my bad. You are right, I didn't read the article fully and presumed it didn't talk about spreading oneself thinly. Thanks for pointing it out ;)

Jack of all trades, mater of none, better than a master of one.

> Studies have found that Nobel Prize-winning scientists are about 25 times more likely to sing, dance or act than the average scientist.

This is a remarkable claim, so I set out to find out if it's justified, or yet another mis-interpreted statistic in a pop science article. I'm leaning towards the latter. The vague phrasing of "studies have found" immediately makes me suspicious.

Google first led me to the book "The Polymath: Unlocking the Power of Human Versatility" by Waqas Ahmed, mentioned in this article (a submarine?), which contains this paragraph:

> "According to a study by American psychologist Bernice Eiduson titled the 'Sigma Xi Survey' based on testimonials by numerous Nobel laureates, most great scientists often have multiple avocational interests. In-depth analysis of Nobel laureates in literature between 1901 and 2002 found that great artists and writers often have multiple avocational interests. He found that the science laureates were highly accomplished outside the lab: more than half had at least one artistic avocation, and almost all had an enduring hobby, from chess to insect collecting; one quarter were musicians; and 18% practiced visual arts such as drawing or painting. These laureates are 25 times as likely as the average scientist to sing, dance, or act; ..."

I was not able to find a specific "Sigma Xi Survey". I assume the title is a reference to Sigma Xi, the scientific research honor society [1]. I don't know when or how this particular Survey was given, or where the results were published.

I did find several other publications by a Dr. Bernice Eiduson, all from the 1960's. Then I discovered that she (not "he") died in 1985 [2], and therefore probably wasn't doing much analysis of Nobel laureates in 2002.

The link just before this claim in the BBC article is to a 2004 paper, "Artistic Scientists and Scientific Artists: the Link Between Polymathy and Creativity", by Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein. This paper seems to be unmentioned in "The Polymath" book, but is perhaps another part of the claim, as its Table 1 and Table 2 are about "NOBEL LAUREATES IN LITERATURE, 1901--2002".

The only mention in this paper of dancing with respect to any science laureates is Table 4: "Frequency of Arts Avocations in Chemistry Nobel Prize Winners Compared with Sigma Xi Members" -- "DANCING" is a big "0" in both cases. Where are all these dancing Nobel scientists they're alluding to? And the table doesn't mention singing at all.

Table 3 is "Hobbies X Citation Cluster for Scientists of the Eiduson Study", which sounds promising but doesn't mention dancing or acting at all.

Is it possible to substantiate the 25x claim? It's really starting to seem like a made-up statistic, and an excuse to sell books. Out of all the alleged singing, dancing, acting scientists, they picked two photographs of Einstein playing the violin. Where's the rest?

And if the first pull quote I chose to check is so emphatic yet so difficult to confirm, what confidence do I have that any of the rest of it is true? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigma_Xi [2]: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-08-10-fi-3906-s...

(Do the Snopes researchers read HN, or BBC?)

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