CDZ Are We Returning to an Age of the Polymath?

[JimBowie1958]

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
— Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

In the Renaissance era, the ideal of a Universal Education was exemplified by men like daVinci and this expectation continued to about the time of Newton as I understand it. Some have called Newton the last great 'Renaissance Man'. These men actually had achieved a working mastery of every known subject in the Western World of their time.

The modern Age just grew the knowledge base until no one many could ever hope to duplicate the breadth of knowledge as these men did. Specialization was the true advantage of the expert and has been since about the end of the 18th century. The Jack of All Trades was becoming a thing of the past along with knights and chamber pots.

Jack of all trades, master of none,
though oftentimes better than master of one.

The Jack of All Trades label went from being a compliment to being an insult in most men's ears by the 20th century, though they did persist in various places.

But is it coming back? Has the level of specialization in every industry so splintered various fields of knowledge that there is now a need for people who can tie it all together with a merely adequate working knowledge of specialized fields needed?

Case in point: Steve Jobs. This mans greatest strength was not that he was the best software engineer or the best hardware man or best salesman, etc. It was that he understood and had an appreciation for all of them and this guided his mind as he led Apple into being one of the most successful computer companies in the world.

Second case in point; Donald Trump. Now say what you want about the mans policies, but he has mastered three different art forms to great success; negotiations, entertainment (successful 12 year TV show) and writing (top selling book). He has now taken those very different fields of knowledge and applied them together to shock the political world of our time and become the first successful amateur, never-ran-for-office-before Presidential candidate since World War1, at lest far more successful than the experts ever thought he would be.

What are the advantages of being a Jack of All Trades today?
1. Cross pollination of concepts and ideas - it is not always that much of a stretch to take the concept of the computer and apply it to a cell phone, or to take the stage presence learned from a decade of Reality TV and apply it to a Presidential stump speech. This also tends to catch the narrowly specialized expert competition by complete surprise.

2. Unbound by Professional assumptions - Every profession has its shibboleths and often it is the outsider who knows about similar fields of knowledge to spot those flaws and be able to exploit them. Hit them fast and hard and keep hitting and you could emerge the winner even if up against pros who know more about it than you do.

3. Relying on concepts that are based on working knowledge often requires real hands on skill development than many experts only read in books. To catch up on a skill or field of knowledge, one of the best means of learning is to dive in and just do it for yourself. Instead of focusing on reading 20 books about all the ways of building a tool shed, sometimes it helps to just read one good one and then dive right on in and learn by doing it yourself. And then you might find out that the competition that writes about it has never really actually done it themselves and that is why they write about it instead of making a living from it.

"Those who really know how to do things do them, the rest just teach." - an anonymous internet smart ass.

With the availability of UTube to teach practical step by step methods and Wikipedia and thousands of instructional, informational sites available as well, there is a danger of the 'false expert' who poses as an expert when they are not. There is a certain simplicity to many professions that are not that hard and are done by the lesser degreed generalist that makes the true expert seem unnecessary to many people. OF all the work that software engineers do, 90% of it can be done by s high school code monkey.but it is that remaining 10% of problems that you are really hiring the expert to handle. and I think the same can be said of lawyers vrs paralegals, doctors vrs nurses, and architects vrs construction crew managers.

But in a world of expensive specialists, often times it makes a lot of sense to have 90% of the staff nurses and only a few doctors, to have 90% code monkeys led by a real trained software engineer.

Even further, what of people that have that 90% knowledge of a wide variety of fields like a Steve Jobs or Donald Trump? How can one find use for the new Polymaths of our time and put them to work?

Just my impression, but with computerized knowledge more and more personally and instantly accessible, they seem to be the incoming wave of the future.

 

[320 Years of History]

I'm certainly not about to argue for against being either a specialist or a Renaissance Man. At the start of my professional life, I was a specialist. As I advanced, I became a generalist. I have been successful, a high performer, over the term of my career. In raising my kids, I've at times needed to impart and/or apply specialized knowledge, yet at other times they needed general guidance they could use to figure out "whatever" on their own.

Our society, time and space have a place for both types of individual, at least as goes work, jobs and careers. The things that are important are:

1. knowing when to be one or the other,
2. being outstanding at whichever one needs to be at any given point, and
3. managing society so that it doesn't produce too many of either at the wrong moment in history.

Specialization is for insects."

..And yet, insects are among the most successful life forms on the planet.

To catch up on a skill or field of knowledge, one of the best means of learning is to dive in and just do it for yourself. Instead of focusing on reading 20 books about all the ways of building a tool shed, sometimes it helps to just read one good one and then dive right on in and learn by doing it yourself.

That works, as you note, sometimes, that is, it works for some skills/activities and not for others. I dare say that building a shed, writing a computer program, or paving a driveway are some things that diving in might work just fine. Building a spaceship or airplane probably isn't. Whether the "Nike" approach will be most effective and efficient depends on the extent to which "just doing it" will force one to "rediscover the wheel."

you might find out that the competition that writes about it has never really actually done it themselves and that is why they write about it instead of making a living from it.

I presume you are alluding to the distinction between, say, theorists and experimentalists. There again, I think we are at a point whereby the body of collected knowledge has reached the point that both are needed. I suspect the quantum experimentalists would take far longer to figure out how to make quantum computing happen were it not for the quantum theorists having put forth ideas that suggest its even possible to do so. Sure, eventually the experimentalists may have come to suss out that it's possible, but it'd have taken them longer to do so were their efforts divided between testing and theorizing.

 

[Shrimpbox]

I hope you are right. But knowledge will have to be self learned as our bastions of higher education have been reduced to brainwashing institutions.

 

[JimBowie1958]

I hope you are right. But knowledge will have to be self learned as our bastions of higher education have been reduced to brainwashing institutions.

I think that noncertified online colleges that provide real well rounded learning experiences that allow a person to produce a selling product is going to displace the traditional university due to costs, distrust and poor results.

 

[JimBowie1958]

..And yet, insects are among the most successful life forms on the planet.

But would you want that lifestyle?

I presume you are alluding to the distinction between, say, theorists and experimentalists. There again, I think we are at a point whereby the body of collected knowledge has reached the point that both are needed. I suspect the quantum experimentalists would take far longer to figure out how to make quantum computing happen were it not for the quantum theorists having put forth ideas that suggest its even possible to do so. Sure, eventually the experimentalists may have come to suss out that it's possible, but it'd have taken them longer to do so were their efforts divided between testing and theorizing.

Yes, I agree, but on the other hand, new disruptive nontraditional technologies and methods should not be expected to provide theory before results if the results are already there. For example, to my amazement acupuncture helped me a great deal with several ailments that are practically gone now, though coming back due to my acupuncturist moving back home. Why should acupuncture be disallowed because no western theory of how it works exists yet?

 

[320 Years of History]

..And yet, insects are among the most successful life forms on the planet.

But would you want that lifestyle?

I presume you are alluding to the distinction between, say, theorists and experimentalists. There again, I think we are at a point whereby the body of collected knowledge has reached the point that both are needed. I suspect the quantum experimentalists would take far longer to figure out how to make quantum computing happen were it not for the quantum theorists having put forth ideas that suggest its even possible to do so. Sure, eventually the experimentalists may have come to suss out that it's possible, but it'd have taken them longer to do so were their efforts divided between testing and theorizing.

Yes, I agree, but on the other hand, new disruptive nontraditional technologies and methods should not be expected to provide theory before results if the results are already there. For example, to my amazement acupuncture helped me a great deal with several ailments that are practically gone now, though coming back due to my acupuncturist moving back home. Why should acupuncture be disallowed because no western theory of how it works exists yet?

Red:
I had the human equivalent of it for my field when I was a staff accountant in a big firm. It wasn't so bad. In fact it wasn't bad at all.

Blue:
Is acupuncture disallowed?

• http://www.aaom.info/qiunity/06/06/ikmc.pdf
• How many acupuncturists in the United states (US) ? How much dollars business these providers created?By Dr.Arthur Yin Fan, in Washington DC and Northern Virginia

I don't know what ailment you had/have, and don't need/want to. Have you looked here for any guidance?

• scholarly article acupuncture - Google Scholar
  
• acupuncture in the united states - Google Scholar
  
• Acupuncture use in the United States: findings from the National Health Interview Survey. - PubMed - NCBI

I do hope you find some sort of palliative solution that suits your needs.