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POLYMYTH
January 9, 2019
It strikes me that the advocates of the February 7, 2019
"polymath" strategy are doing a pretty weak February 18, 2019
job of arguing for their position...
And I suspect it's because that they themselves have
pretensions of being genius-level masters of everything.
They want to impress you with the sheer breadth of
their knowledge, but much of that material seems
shallow and debateable, and the whole argument would
be stronger if they just focused on the bits of solid
evidence that they've got, rather than doing surveys
of big names, and digging for evidence that they're
not tightly focused on a specialty.
Part of the trouble with people like us-- I mean,
like *them*-- is that if you fancy yourself a
generalist that can understand any field, you're
prone toward doing a lot of scattered skimming
and cursory glances.
This blog post (from "makcorps.com" without any other
author attribution) has been making the rounds:
"People Who Have 'Too Many Interests' Are More
Likely To Be Successful According To Research"
[link]
This "makcorps" piece is a particularly bad
offender, name-dropping trendy but arguably
vapid intellectuals like Malcolm Gladwell
and E.O. Wilson -- what happened to Nicolas There's a style of book that
Taleb? -- and worse, it uses three examples seems popular because it makes
of Modern Polymaths: people feel intelligent without
actually having to work hard.
Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg You need to be careful dealing
with self-styled generalists.
Shallow works that adopt a
So they've picked some highly visible pose of Great Insight are all
examples of famous rich guys as their too appealing...
examples of polymaths...
Someone with pretensions of
We're in Wired Magazine biz-porn territory. keeping an eye on *everything*
This kind of thing initially gave me a is necessarily going to lack
very bad impression of this material. in-depth knowledge...
They might, for example, skim
the first thirteen pages of
"Principia Mathematica" and
act like they've got something
useful to say about it.
The title makes an explicit claim
which can not be established just The makcorps piece itself says
by a survey of the very nothing about any studies, it
successful. just links to Root-Bernstein
on the subject.
A moments thought would suggest the point that
if a strategy requires you to be the next Mark Another moments thought
Zuckerberg in order to work, it's not likely might lead you to wonder
to be a very useful strategy. what the multiple fields
are that Zuckerberg has
mastered. ("Programming"
and "Being a jerk"?)
I'm willing to buy that if you look at the
top-of-the-line Successful Creative Geniuses out
there, you may very well find that they're not
narrow specialists, but that doesn't mean that "Survivorship Bias"
the path to Success is to avoid specialization--
the numbers of people who make it as Creative [link]
Geniuses are extremely small, and if you want to
evaluate the two different strategies you've got
to look at the total numbers of people trying
each, and not just focus on winners.
And that's why I like the 1988 study that
Root-Bernstein eventually gets to in his
Chapter on the subject-- the fact that it's
buried in the middle of his discussion,
with lots of anecdotal material headlined
is very peculiar...
The idea may be that gosh-wow stories about
Einstein are going to be more impressive to
most than a wider study with a control There were earlier
group. That might be a good bet on average, versions of these
but it pushes me in the other direction. pieces that were
much more hostile
My first impression was this that I had to throw
was someone doing a "studies away after calming
have shown..." dodge, where the down and re-reading
"studies" were junk when they the material.
existed at all.
The name "polymyth"
is a hold-over.
(Maybe it should
be "polymiss"?)
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