With Polymaths Like These...

My favourite paper parodying physicists' imperialism is "A Simple Model of the Evolution of Simple Models of Evolution", at http://arxiv.org/abs/adap-org/9910002 The model, presented on page 2, is a hoot.

Richard Posner was one of my dissertation advisers.

My guess is that his IQ is at least a standard deviation higher than all but the very best specialist in every field. And generally after a small amount of study people with such an IQ advantage can outperform those that have devoted their lives to a field.

Also, he works more hours, has a better memory, reads much, much faster and has better concentration than most other people. Him spending a month on a problem is like a normal college professor spending a year on that same problem.

Yeah that doesn't sound like a Chuck Norris joke or anything.

Richard Posner doesnât read books. He stares them down until he gets the information he wants.

That argument will go over well during my thesis defense - "If only you hadn't developed a rigorous methodology, often mathematical, then I would have been out of here years ago!"

BTW, I think you should double check your quote end tags.

(OP has an HTML glitch, BTW; second blockquote tag should be a /blockquote tag.)

He is correct that specialized jargon does provide barriers to entry; however, this is a necessity, as conventional language is often inadequately precise (EG: the distinction between "information" and "pattern" that is essential to information theory, and thus to statistical mechanics and thermodynamics), and the constant elaboration of "and I mean theory in the sense that science uses it, not the colloquial" adds non-trivial cost to conveying the information in intradiscipline communications. Most professionals are willing to listen politely (to polymaths or even non-professionals), try to understand the point undertaken, and endevor to insure that someone unfamiliar with particular jargon-usage will not accidentally fall prey to mistaken reasoning lying in an unrecognized fallacy of equivocation.

However, once the jargon has necessarily evolved, some will take advantage of that evolutionary development to stop discussion when they perceive a threat to their philosophical position, especially those whose positions in the social ecology truly is precarious due to approaching their Peter Principle limit. His error is in assigning this as causative, rather than incidental; a "spandrel"-type mistake.

The extent to which one can get away with such bafflegab may depend on the purity of the field local to the social ecology. This also suggests a solution: polymaths ought first insure that math itself is indeed a strong mono- within their poly-. This allows addressing the question of whether the choice of math model X for information description is the correct choice, as well as providing science with a truly universal language. Admittedly, this approach will eventually run into issues resulting due to Rice's theorem; but science has a long way to go before that's a serious issue. A more near-term problem is that it implies that a course in set (covering the basics, plus showing the constructions of more advanced branches from whatever ZF-equivalent of the day) perhaps might be a universal requirement for a degree in any of the sciences... which will piss off anyone forced to take it.

No one can deny that some people in some fields use terminology as a defensive, protective barrier. I think a lot of people on the tech side harbor suspicions that some entire fields are more prone to this than others.

But it takes a special kind of ego to assume that all specialized language everywhere is designed to keep you, specifically, out of the discussion.

Sorting out whether someone is knowledgeable enough about the matter at hand to deserve a serious hearing is a hard problem since it generally has to be done quickly, on the basis of very little information. The two traditional methods of requiring credentials and checking whether the person knows the jargon of the field, both have a problem with false negatives. Is there a better way?

Him spending a month on a problem is like a normal college professor spending a year on that same problem.

Snort.

I hated this article because the author's entire premise that polymaths are disappearing is that a polymath must have "accomplishments" in varied subjects.
This is the definition of a polymath: a person of great and varied learning.

Accomplishments are nice, but a person is a polymath because they have a lot of varied knowledge. In the information age, polymaths seem less rare simply because they are so plentiful: you can't see the trees for the forest.

...the chairman of British Mensa... "And if you want to speak with authority, then itâs important to be seen to specialise.

It is important to be seen to excel, to stand elevated atop a monadnock of competitors' bloody corpses. You don't care if your surgeon can quote Proust. (What of a plastic surgeon who collects Cubists?)

Mensa requires minimum IQ 2 sigma above the norm. That is 1/50 general population; 1/4 UC/Irvine, 1/2500 Los Angeles Unified School District students. The average person is a bludgeon, the average Mensan is a knife, and we've got lots who are ice picks. So? The git with the correct answer wins. Now, bet the odds the way Google hires.

A lifetime of practice struggles against a hard-wired prodigy fresh out of the box - but only for the application. Either way, mediocrity is a vice of the doomed.

Johan Larson: Is there a better way?

In academia, ad-hoc credentialling; that is to say, pass the kook off to your graduate students to identify the nuance of the particular outlier, to see if they're an unwavering kook or a learning opportunity. If they're interesting, the grad student can give a recommendation accordingly, and the professor might be more inclined to give a longer meeting.

Hi Chad,

As someone whose field was invaded by physicists, I would like to lend a different perspective. I love physicists with the confidence of g-d in correct ideas and the humility of scientists where things are less certain. We've had them barge into Biology, Geometry and other areas and have all been the better for folks like: Crick, Gamow, Witten, Schrodinger and the like.

And as someone who crosses disciplinary borders regularly, I know exactly what you are finding offensive. If a field is well functioning, the jargon feels necessary, functional...even spare. But what is it like to suddenly have 'company' when your field isn't in order?

Well, there are many fields that are not in order. Molecular biologists denigrate 'just-so' stories to avoid ackonwledging evolutionary biologists. Geometers make much of how non-rigorous path-integration is to avoid ceding more than necessary to particle theorists. Economists regularly sniff at biologists, physicists, sociologists and mathematicians for not understanding the supposedly delicate interplay between science and art.

Unfortunately, the comment that specialists in a particular area protect intellectual territory from nomads who wander is absolutely spot on in every case I've named. The rationalization needed to maintain that perspective is that specialization is the mere consequence from the explosion of knowledge.

Here's an example where the specialist went after intellectual 'tourists' from other fields. That's fine. But the specialist wouldn't defend his own challenge to tourists in a forum held at his home university to discuss his concerns further:

http://castroller.com/podcasts/WhatsNewAt/1261007

That's what the article is talking about. Pure claims to territory.

I understand that the current university system finds this offensive. But the nomads find the fences offensive. What if we'd told Crick the physicists he didn't know enough biology and crystalography to contribute to DNA?

Actually ... we did just that! Thank god Crick was smart enough not to pay attention to the barriers erected by the experts to supress the tourists of the world from barging in and proving that they knew better.

Best,

Eric

It's hard to say exactly why I found Edward Carr's article on polymaths so irritating

Dude, you should try blogging about shit that doesn't irritate you!

Speaking as a non-specialist...aren't reasonable barriers to entry a good thing? If you're a polymath with a 150 IQ, is it really too much to ask that you bother to learn the specialized language for a particular field before solving all their problems?

Posner's own field is a byword for jargon, credentialism, and exclusion; what does he do about that?

Also, this line: "It's not my field. I can make mistakes." does not fill me, as one hypothetically deciding between his output and an expert's output, with trust. That's an attitude that asks interesting questions, but not one that gets reliable answers.

This all seems to be a good argument for collaboration. The outsider can bring fresh perspective or new tools. The insider knows the pitfalls, the problems to be solved, and the jargon used to express those problems and pitfalls. A genuine collaboration allows the strengths of these two (or more) experts to expand a field or birth an interdisciplinary product. My own field of research, music cognition, is necessarily interdisciplinary. No one can be expected to be an expert in music performance, music theory, music history, psychology, neuroscience, anatomy, statistics, and philosophy. Several of these fields, sure, at a narrow focus. But not all of them. That is why I need to collaborate with psychologists, and why psychologists and neuroscientists who do not collaborate make embarrassing or damaging mistakes in choosing musical examples or making interpretations. A polymath can certainly help in interdisciplinary research, since he or she clearly has interests in a variety of areas that caused the desire to learn in those areas. But that same polymath should not assume he or she should solve the problem alone.

I used to think I was a polymath, but I've realised I'm just a dilettante...

Everything Scott said.

Also, to Eric, the good evolutionary biologists don't use 'just so' stories, and the geometers are right to point out that path integrals are non-rigorous, so I'm not sure I see what the point is. Fields have standards for a reason.

To Aaron,

Thanks for engaging. I happily agree with you that standards often start off with sober reasons behind them. I hope you will agree with me that they obviously can often go easily into 'rent-seeking' territory.

And the standards are often relaxed by the experts themselves. Actualy, even *great* evolutionary biologists use some version of just-so stories all the time as bi-products of thinking about nature the way top notch physicists run wrong-headed gedanken experiments. I've been in the presence of field leaders who say "The flower is trying to become more enticing because it wants to attract the bee..." even though they know the flower doesn't have a brain. I think, if we're honest, we all do this stuff along the way. And BTW, Dirac's prediction of proton - electron as anti-particle pair is a 'just-so' story from physics.

But that wasn't my point. My point is that an evolutionary biologist can predict something testable and surprising in a lab which wont be properly acknowledged as a major evolutionary achievement because it came from 'outside' even though the evolutionist doesn't have the ability to test their own hypothesis.

As for path-integrals, I don't think they're 'non-rigorous' at all. I think they rigorously lead to conjectures which are often much more illuminating than proofs. Now in an academic math department, my personal feeling is that we like to make as much as we can of the folks who are the first to prove things by running the last leg of the 'proof relay', whereas I think most of us outside academe like to recognize those who illuminate and discover. If the illumination is by proof, so much the better! But I think we did a better job in Geometry and Physics than biology does between selection and cellular/molecular.

Best,

Eric

I assume proton is a typo for positron, and I don't understand what you're getting at all. I don't see a lot of good examples of standards presenting unreasonable barriers. For example, I don't understand your point about evolutionary biology at all. Molecular biologists and evolutionary biology are hardly disparate fields as a quick google will show. Your statement about path integrals don't make sense to me either. Lots of things can inspire interesting conjectures, but (tautologically) the proofs are where the rigor lies. One of the reasons Witten and theoretical physicists were able to say so much about mathematics is that we talk with them. A lot.

Aaron,

The assumption of a typo renders what I said above meaningless. I absolutely meant proton and not positron, and I'm troubled that the history is getting lost as we seek to retroactively photoshop the scientific method.

Dirac, confronted with anti-electron solutions of equal mass to the electron, sought to avoid the rebuke that such particles had not been observed in nature and thus failed to predict the positron which would be discovered soon afterward. He then identified the positively charged solutions with the more massive protons. Heisenberg then went after Dirac's assertion that the positively charged solutions could be protons claiming that there had to be mass parity. As such, it is a just-so story shoehorning the theory to meet the known facts of the moment. Pity.

As for the quick google search, I don't know what you think you are showing or what I'm claiming. No one is claiming that molecular biologists don't believe in evolution or refuse to discuss it. As to whether they evolutionary and molecular biology are disparate fields...I can assure you that even now they are still far less integrated professionaly than they are scientifically.

Lastly you write: "(tautologically) the proofs are where the rigor lies." We both know what you mean, of course. My argument is with assuming there is only one concept of relevant rigor here. I find the discipline needed to generate meaningful and non-trivial 'conjectures' from the path-integral constructions in geometry very demanding, exacting, uncompromising, and ...burn me at the stake.... therefore quite rigorous. Literally and tautologically.

I dare say that this view of synonomizing proof with the one, true, rigor, is what this post was all about. Who, other than those trained in mathematics, will be likely to produce proofs?

Aaron, I've enjoyed your comments and cede to you that your view is the more widely held by molecular biologists and mathematics professors. Grant me, if you will, that the evolutionists and physicists could....just possibly...be ever so slightly ill served by the specialization here.

It is true that physicists remake discoveries from other fields and claim it as their own and as new discoveries. The literature is filled with these "so called discoveries." I'll make a list one day. Many physicists know this. Why not let the general public know too.