31–33 of 33 posts
I wonder if the definition of the polymath is changing as our accessable memory is moving outside of the brain. So, now it's not the person who knows a lot about a lot, but the person who can efficiently query the search engine in real time and has the ability to work with the information coming back from it. After all, rote memorization was not the polymath's main strength anyway. Now we're just unburdening them to…
Djerassi has also suffered in his own work because of monomaths’ hostility, especially as a playwright. “They always keep crying out ‘the co-inventor, father, the mother of the Pill’,” he growls. “Without having any knowledge about the play, they start with it. As if it’s got anything to do with it.” Djerassi thinks that this means he has to work harder to promote his work. “No agent has ever been interested in me. They want 29-year-old Irish playwrights, not 86-year-old expatriates.” A trace of bitterness creeps into his voice, but he concedes: “If I were an agent I’d feel the same way.”
Overwhelmed by specialists and attacked by experts as dilettantes, it is amazing that there are any polymaths at all. How do they manage?
I would speculate that the reason that the polymath seems less common is that: 1. Counter-intuitively, polymaths are now ubiquitous. The WWW as well as better information access in general has made it much easier to BECOME a polymath. Because of this, polymaths have to be so much more impressive. My local hackerspace contains several individuals who know/achieve SO MUCH in a variety of disciplines. We have baker, art…
1) I would disagree. The definition of polymath is someone who is an expert at orthogonal subjects. Your definition of expert seems to be slightly lower than mine. My definition would be someone who could give a lecture to other experts in the field with a days notice and be able to answer questions to the satisfaction of the audience. 2) If this were true it would be a short time until science itself crumbled. How t…
2) The population as a whole is increasing exponentially, as is the rate of discovery in a great many fields. While I doubt the situation is sustainable, the condition does exist at least in the short term. There is a degree of subjectivity here, but I stand by my statement.
3) Same as #1, worded differently a bit. I actually spent some time looking up different variations of the definition of polymath, and it turns out orthogonality (or independence, since orthogonality seems to be imply different things in compsci than for other disciplines) is not a requirement, just divergence seems sufficient.
As an aside, I am not trying to redefine polymath for my own benefit, being a broad generalist in a lot of fields, but still too focused on some compsci stuff to be a true expert in any of the other ones.