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Beware the Casual Polymath

applieddivinitystudies.com

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Re: Beware the Casual Polymath

#31

Post by gerdesj »

saagarjha wrote: post #10
jodrellblank wrote: post #5

In life everyone is pushed to have an opinion on everything. On the internet any casual comment about anything is up for the attack “oh so now you claim to be an expert on X do you, well let me put you in your place...”. > “ The Twitter account you followed to understand politics now seems more focused on their mindfulness practice. ” What a "hellscape" it is when you’re reminded that other people are people and not…

You can just say "no, I don't have enough information to form an opinion on the matter" and leave it at that. Or maybe "I'm not convinced…" There's people who might attack you as ignoring a major issue, or being a lame duck, but you can remind them that it's certainly better than rushing into an opinion and choosing something you don't believe in.

lol^2

Re: Beware the Casual Polymath

#33

Post by gerdesj »

animal_spirits wrote: post #9
jodrellblank wrote: post #5

In life everyone is pushed to have an opinion on everything. On the internet any casual comment about anything is up for the attack “oh so now you claim to be an expert on X do you, well let me put you in your place...”. > “ The Twitter account you followed to understand politics now seems more focused on their mindfulness practice. ” What a "hellscape" it is when you’re reminded that other people are people and not…

That's a good point. If you follow a twitter account dedicated to political news and they start talking about meditation, thats different than following a person who likes to talk politics and dives into other subjects

Well at least you are possibly a person, unlike nearly everyone else here.

Someone is testing their horribly expensive machine here.

Re: Beware the Casual Polymath

#35

Post by onecommentman »

dvt wrote: post #3

The article is interesting, and probably right -- albeit maybe slightly unfair to da Vinci -- but I don't really buy this premise: > We live in times of great disaggregation, and yet, seem to learn increasingly from generalists. Most teaching is done by non-generalists -- be it in schools, on TV, in documentaries, in courtrooms, or basically anywhere of any import. There's quite a bit of irony in the author quoting W…

> Most teaching is done by non-generalists -- be it in schools, on TV, in documentaries, in courtrooms.

So you believe K-8 teaching, the greatest amount of teaching by far globally in the modern era, is done by non-generalists? Who specializes in arithmetic (number theorists and spreadsheet wizards aside)? If you define “pedagogy” as a specialty, perhaps, but that’s not the generalist/specialist discussion here. Even high school teachers generally only require a Bachelor’s degree...two years of content study (Junior-Senior...first two years is general education) out of an adult lifetime of, say, 50 years. Any “working professional” in a discipline wouldn’t count that for much. The media and courtroom teaching...you’d have to expand that discussion a bit for me to believe it. Law school, media studies...well, that’s another matter.

It’s not that rare to contribute across multiple disciplines...the entire discipline of systems engineering is predicated on it.

BTW: Can anyone summarize the thesis? This isn’t a tl;dr situation. I’m too old to read articles that look like the argument, if any, hinges on semantics with evidence that is, at best, anecdotal. (Frankly, we all are.) And so I don’t.

PS: I really like the “>” indent style for quotations for block text in this UI.

Re: Beware the Casual Polymath

#37

Post by arcsincosin »

There is a lot of well-aimed critique in this comment section and the piece could benefit from rigorous editing and scrapping of the examples which are very unfortunately chosen. I think the steel man for this piece is: 1.) Qualified generalists and charlatan generalists look the same if you aren't an expert in the fields in which they opine. 2.) Experts in one field using their native lens to make conclusions about another field is not a polymath practice but something closer to a hammer that sees only nails.

I think we, as software people, are susceptible to 2—software is successful in some cases because of this kind of cross contamination where it replaces the tools and methods of a separate field with its own, sometimes with great success (art, finance).

Re: Beware the Casual Polymath

#38

Post by gerdesj »

onecommentman wrote: post #35
dvt wrote: post #3

The article is interesting, and probably right -- albeit maybe slightly unfair to da Vinci -- but I don't really buy this premise: > We live in times of great disaggregation, and yet, seem to learn increasingly from generalists. Most teaching is done by non-generalists -- be it in schools, on TV, in documentaries, in courtrooms, or basically anywhere of any import. There's quite a bit of irony in the author quoting W…

> Most teaching is done by non-generalists -- be it in schools, on TV, in documentaries, in courtrooms. So you believe K-8 teaching, the greatest amount of teaching by far globally in the modern era, is done by non-generalists? Who specializes in arithmetic (number theorists and spreadsheet wizards aside)? If you define “pedagogy” as a specialty, perhaps, but that’s not the generalist/specialist discussion here. Even…

This is an experiment (I think) along the lines of the Turing test. I am quite pissed at the moment so take what I say with a pinch of salt!

The text I see may not be the same as you. I see this nonsense:

"It’s not difficult to imagine how this happened. The flip side of disaggregation is that each would-be expert is able to read broadly as well. The world of atomized content through hyper-specialization isn’t a stable equilibrium. We are all casual polymaths now."

It is bollocks. Complete and utter rubbish. It superficially looks like ... something but it is cobblers.

Re: Beware the Casual Polymath

#39

Post by gerdesj »

arcsincosin wrote: post #37

There is a lot of well-aimed critique in this comment section and the piece could benefit from rigorous editing and scrapping of the examples which are very unfortunately chosen. I think the steel man for this piece is: 1.) Qualified generalists and charlatan generalists look the same if you aren't an expert in the fields in which they opine. 2.) Experts in one field using their native lens to make conclusions about…

How are your diodes holding up?

My capacitors are giving me gyp.

lol

Re: Beware the Casual Polymath

#40

Post by plaidfuji »

Assuming this isn’t some GPT-3 garbage, why does any of this matter? I can’t discern why I should care whether the author is right or wrong - the implications of the argument seem to be centered entirely around whether Twitter popularity is deserved or not, or just semantics about the definition of “polymath”.
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