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Comment by SemanticStrengh | Hacker News Reader

Anyone can become a polymath with training and hard work, leonardo da vincy being the best example.

It is unfortunate we have lost the concept of a "learned" person.

I notice this reading about Voltaire and how often he is referred to as a "learned" person.

Instead it seems like we just so accept the brain is literally a type of computer that we just haven't figured out the architecture for yet. The storage part is completely trivial like a hard drive so the idea of a "learned" person is equally trivial.

Absolutely, with training and hard work.

But there is this strange belief that if someone is extremely skilled in a field, his genius can be applied with little efforts and training elsewhere.

You can be a Chess champion and an excellent Chef, but you this is completely unrelated, except maybe for the discipline.

Same with Philosophy and Theoretical Physics, or almost anything.

You can even be a World class Quake player and be mediocre or barely average at CS.

I half-disagree. Yes there are skills that do not or poorly translate from one field to another. E.g. reaction time in a FPS video game might or might not help reaction time in playing tennis IRL and will probably not help you cook better meals. Although some kinds of brain stimulation (including video games) have a moderate positive effect on a wide range of things, but as said the effect is moderate. As for tennis reaction time, the effect might be strong but not necessarily. However there is one skill or set of skills that do translate over almost all cognitive tasks that involve reasoning/language/understanding/science. I am talking about training in rationality, critical thinking, epistemology and debiasing against brain bugs such as cognitive biases and logical fallacies. This training will help significantly to increase the logical validity (structure) of arguments and to better quantify or evaluate the validity and strength of premises. However this is only half of the equation since being able to evaluate or form logical structures do not allow to verify alone the truthfulness of premises because they are external knolwedge you can't infer from nothing so yeah erudition is the other half and sometimes logic alone with limited knowledge can yield some interesting results and a rationally trained mind can go much further than a person who just has erudition but yeah for a complex topic, you generally need both to have potent explanative power and tentatively exhaustive exloration of the mental search space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

My point is that what we call Human Intelligence is less general than we think.

It is a large aggregate of abilities and skills, with some connections between them.

And we also tend to confuse language and rhetorical ability with general intelligence, because this is an ability we all have and need, that is also acting as a proxy intelligence benchmark but I don't think this ability is general enough to be used in this way.

Problem with this PoV is that these things don't directly impart knowledge of a subject. You might be smarter than your doctor or lawyer, but they are decades ahead of you in terms of training and practice. This includes not just their personal experience in the field but also access to the social stock of knowledge of their profession. Sure, there are problems like institutional bias and groupthink. But these are minor issues compared to the issue of having no grounding or education in the field as is usually the case when engineers opine their unconventional views in different subjects.

So the fallacy behind the fake polymath is not the idea that being smart makes you better at analyzing information. It's the idea that being smart is a substitute for information and expertise. This mistaken assumption can lead smart engineers to beliefs that subject matter experts consider religious or delusional. Mars colonization is a great example in Elon Musk's case.

Btw most of the general training you mentioned isn't part of STEM and is historically associated with humanities subjects like law and philosophy instead. In STEM you typically work with set epistemic frameworks with unambiguous correct and incorrect answers. In this sense, engineers actually learn the opposite of critical thinking and discourse.

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