Imagine a toy model where everyone has a hundred points to put into being good at things.
(This is, to be clear, not just a toy model but an incorrect model. It’s easy to look at your incoming university students and notice a strong inverse correlation between math and verbal SAT scores, forgetting that those get summed together during applications and anyone below a certain threshold probably has their application discarded. Still, let’s use this model for the moment.)
Leading talents in a field maybe put 75 points in their area. Why not 100? Because you need points in living your life
I’m not sure if this hurts or furthers your case, since he was a known extreme polymath in the sense you describe (being the best A/B in the world was probably A/B/C/D.. for him), but for many individual areas of thought was arguably at some point either the “best” or at least maximal for most common ways to measure brilliance.
That is, he was the best A regardless of B and, at a potentially different point in time, the best B regardless of A.
Also, he was famously very well-adjusted for someone of his accomplishments.
Yep, as I said in the parenthetical, the model is incorrect. I’m >95% sure that some people are twice as competent as other people and wouldn’t be surprised to encounter 10x gaps or higher if we’re allowed to pick from outliers in both directions.
Finding an extreme polymath is a good trick if you can do it. Sometimes you can do it.
I wasn’t trying to hold you to that model, since it didn’t seem fundamental to the point of the article (and you already mentioned not being attached to it). It was more an “oh, this reminds me of this guy” kind of thing, which might or might not be relevant to the thing in question (probably less so than I originally thought). Either way, it wasn’t intended as a serious rebuttal.
I would have modeled this as von Neumann getting 300 points and putting 260 of them into the maths and sciences and the remaining 40 into living life and being well adjusted.
Obligatory von Neumann reference when talking about allocation of mental resources.
I’m not sure if this hurts or furthers your case, since he was a known extreme polymath in the sense you describe (being the best A/B in the world was probably A/B/C/D.. for him), but for many individual areas of thought was arguably at some point either the “best” or at least maximal for most common ways to measure brilliance.
That is, he was the best A regardless of B and, at a potentially different point in time, the best B regardless of A.
Also, he was famously very well-adjusted for someone of his accomplishments.
Yep, as I said in the parenthetical, the model is incorrect. I’m >95% sure that some people are twice as competent as other people and wouldn’t be surprised to encounter 10x gaps or higher if we’re allowed to pick from outliers in both directions.
Finding an extreme polymath is a good trick if you can do it. Sometimes you can do it.
I wasn’t trying to hold you to that model, since it didn’t seem fundamental to the point of the article (and you already mentioned not being attached to it). It was more an “oh, this reminds me of this guy” kind of thing, which might or might not be relevant to the thing in question (probably less so than I originally thought). Either way, it wasn’t intended as a serious rebuttal.
Yes, but such humans are very rare. Can you provide a second example of comparable quality?
Are we assuming things are fair or something?
I would have modeled this as von Neumann getting 300 points and putting 260 of them into the maths and sciences and the remaining 40 into living life and being well adjusted.