Hacker News Reader

Comment by greekanalyst | Hacker News Reader

Great piece. One of the best places cultivating this type of polymathy today is Stanford's Symbolic Systems Program. https://symsys.stanford.edu/

View on HN

I'll also plug St. John's College. https://www.sjc.edu

Definitely. This, plus a graduate degree in a more specific field, and you end up with a very well-rounded education.

FYI I just read some more about polymathy and had a look at the curricula. To me it feels really a bit too 'meta'. You might as well say, stay open and curious to any knowledge.

That said, still I'm open and curious... could you please be so kind as to elaborate how that education is very well-rounded? What would the studies yield more concretely?

I'll plug The University of Texas, specifically the Natural Sciences and Liberal Arts colleges (COLA and CONS). This is because they used to be the same college, and as such have loads of slots for elective courses and often you'll find students from one taking classes in the other college.

I was able to complete degrees in COLA and a CONS simultaneously in four years with one of those four years being study abroad studying one subject to the exclusion of everything else because of it. When I graduated, I had studied two foreign languages and taken elective/upper div courses in poetry, immigration policy, ethics, mathematics, and computer science.

Unless things have drastically changed since I graduated, it still holds true for UT in particular, and is one reason I consider my education to have been so great.

you can't create real polymath... polymaths are self-created... that's the physics of this.

Yeah this is what I don't understand as well, most of the polymath type people I know are naturally curious and self motivated for whatever it is they want to study and do. I am not sure what or how an institution can cultivate such behavior. I suppose it can encourage it to people but again, most polymaths are naturally self motivated and don't need encouragement at all.

Almost everyone is a curious polymath until institutions beat it out of them. We could start simply by nourishing curiosity

They don't have to actively cultivate it but they should remove the walls between it. There's a lot of red tape/administrative confusion at most schools if you want to do anything interdisciplinary, especially if you want to cross more than two disciplines. Institutions should be more like buffets for the polymath. If I want to interlink say landscape architecture, sculpture, acoustics, materials science and biology I shouldn't need more than one signoff much less the 5 it would probably take to do work in something like that at most universities.

The way to 'beat' the system's hard testing requirements is to make the interdisciplinary programs more involved, more quantitative, and just be more thorough and engaging, including soft skills elements.

I think the best outcome is to have such students crush their standardized tests by outperforming them due to having a higher baseline because of the interdisciplinary program's curriculum.

There's a difference between "Create polymaths from scratch" or "Create a polymath degree" (oxymoron, honestly) and just "Let's have a learning environment that allows it".

If you don't understand, then seek the places that do that. Colleges like Reed.

They cannot force somebody to a polymath, but they can create an environment that promotes polymath-ing and allows polymaths to thrive, vs an environment that promotes overspecialisation. This can be reflected to a degree/study program to the extent that overspecialisation can also be reflected in one.

Even just putting together people from different background and trajectories can do miracles sometimes.

100% agree with you on this. I come from a long line of polymaths. My dad is a Caltech EE, but also has a gunsmith business on the side, is a botanist part of a rare fruit growers association, and also brews beer. When you grow up with exposure to this way of thinking that you can indeed be a master of multiple disciplines, it's hard to try and fit in to the box of traditional education. I myself studied classics, Mandarin, Econ and data science. I even run a polymath book club

This. Real multidisciplinary is bottom up, where a person with multiple fields of expertise makes them work together. A singing number of these organizational versions are top down, where some leadership decided interdisciplinary studies are the future, so someone mixes a bunch of courses together and ta-da!

It does look interesting (and related to the Systems school proposed by TFA), though I've also heard it described as a watered-down or easier CS degree. (Then again, CS itself is sometimes criticized as a watered-down or easier engineering degree, or a degree in calculators.)

Data Science sometimes gets a similar watered-down label, but it looks like Stanford's program (at least) might be somewhat technical and may incorporate scientific computation, as well as statistical applications.

The prestige of the degree seems to come more from the quality of the students that are admitted, than what is actually taught to them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com