Polymaths No More? | Hacker News Reader

Polymaths No More?

keithsawyer.wordpress.com

18 pointsazharcs7 comments

"But of course, back in 1800 there was a lot less knowledge overall. One could acquire a working knowledge of a discipline (materials science, optics and the eye, life insurance) just by reading the few books that had been written on the topic. Today all of these fields have had another 200 years of knowledge created."

I think this is faulty reasoning. Yes, the amount of knowledge has increased exponentially but the efficiency one can access that has also increased tremendously. Not only that, free and good learning materials/tutorials/lecture videos, etc. abound. So, in 1800 you could get expertise by reading a few books (or one, e.g. Heaviside spent years holed up with Maxwell's book to come up with his wonderful insights, there were no other books) but to find them was no easy matter.

The 10-year expertise rule is also sometimes misused. That rule applies to expertise of a certain kind (i.e. sending telegraph messages, playing tennis, writing code) and may not be applicable when simple learning is involved. Also, it assumes that one wants to be world-class in the chosen expertise area. Therefore, I think it's a very loose upper bound on the time.

Experience this yourself: Buy Penrose's The Road to Reality and give yourself 6 months. At the end, you'll be at a mid-masters level in Physics (admittedly concentrated on a few topics). Or Feynman's QED book for a similar effect in a different physics area. Or learn how to read Ancient Greek (in college you are expected to read Plato in the third semester! No after then years.)

Another example: My son was having a lot of ear infections and his doctor wanted to get an ear tube put in. After focused reading on the Web for 2-3 days, I felt that I had almost as much knowledge as her on this narrow topic. I even had access to recent research on the subject she didn't know about. Try doing that in the 1800s.

One argument to the above point can be because of the vast amount of information easily available to everyone, it has become easier for an expert or someone who is concentrating on one particular area to create "new" knowledge. So the knowledge you have now will become obsolete quicker than 200 years ago. Your son's doctor is a great example.

For a fun read, check out: "The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Thomas Young, The Anonymous Polymath Who Proved Newton Wrong, Explained How We See, Cured the Sick, and Deciphered the Rosetta Stone, Among Other Feats of Genius"

I think it's fun to play across disciplines :)

It's not about the amount of knowledge, but changes in society that allow vastly more people to become specialists than in 1800. At that point the modern research university had not been invented yet, and science was still effectively restricted to a gentlemanly elite.

Today, universities turn out middle-class PhDs by the thousand, each grinding away in their own tiny corner of academia. The chance is rather small that someone who hasn't dedicated their life to an area can be competitive with the legions of specialists who have.

Another factor people seem to underestimate consistently is that there are simply a whole lot more people today. It's much, much harder to stand out from a population of a billion or seven than the, what, few tens of thousands of literate white people that Europeans noticed in 1800?

Takeaway for me: screw standing out on a global or historical scale. Do good work and get creative and you might get lucky, but first you gotta do the good work and get creative.

Agreed, I'd refine it further: "simply a whole lot more people today with easy access to knowledge". More people + more knowledge + easier access means specialization is not only encouraged, in many cases it's possible to make a living being specialized where it wasn't before.

I believe this problem is another good argument in favor of life extension research. What's going to happen in another 100 or 200 years, when every field has so much knowledge accumulated that it takes an entire lifetime to learn enough to contribute something new?

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