We are, but we have incentives against it. Your career as a self-educated generalist is going to be significantly worse than as a credentialed specialist. You're going to get weeded out by HR drones for good positions and the positions that you do get an interview for, they're going to try and put you in a box like a specialist and make you a cog in a machine, so you won't get to even use your full skillset.
Yup, as someone in this position HR want nothing to do with me.
My only options have been to make companies or freelance.
I do think the world needs more "generalists" though as we're often the only ones placed to even half understand, combine and fully utilise different specialists.
A "Renaissance person" is not a self-educated generalist but an old person who has had diverse interests and the motivation and the opportunities to pursue them.
If you work on something full time for five years, deliberately challenging yourself and striving to improve your skills, you will probably become pretty good at the thing. But because a full-time job is only 1/3 of your waking hours, you'll have time for other pursuits. If there are 50 productive years in a human live, you can probably become pretty good at 20 different things.
From this perspective, a college degree is not specialization, but the first few percent of the work of becoming a Renaissance person.
> America is increasingly becoming a bifurcated, two-tiered society of a specialized government-corporate-media-political-credentialed class of degreed overseers and managers who attempt to micromanage an increasingly less well-educated, dependent underclass.
Fact: people are better educated today. It's more common to have a university degree than half a century ago (yet unlike decades ago, not to have it count for much).
Speaking of which, being Renaissance is a nice hobby, but it doesn't pay. That's why most people specialize.
Some people like specializing. Spheres of human activity and interest are like fractals. When you specialize and zoom in, you see rich details. Look how diverse computing is.
If you are in computing, to an outsider you seem like a "computer specialist", but within that sphere, you could be a generalist with diverse areas of interest.
Probably the best way to explain that to people might be by analogy to doctors. Imagine someone being a brain surgeon also interested in the heart, kidneys and urinary tract, nose-throat-ears, ... that's a Renaissance Doc.
Some people have one hobby different from their job, maybe two. They specialize off duty, so to speak. They pursue that hobby or two and are good at then, and don't want to take on more at the expense of neglecting what they are good at.
> America is increasingly becoming a bifurcated, two-tiered society of a specialized government-corporate-media-political-credentialed class of degreed overseers and managers who attempt to micromanage an increasingly less well-educated, dependent underclass.
This Musk adulation really takes away from the article. Musk took over Twitter so that he could control tweets that were critical of him, and amplify his own tweets. He knew he would lose billions of dollars in doing so by devaluing the platform, but it was worth it in his eyes.
This. The moment I saw Musk being given as an example of a Renaissance figure, the value of the post dropped close to zero. Musk is a pure snake-oil salesperson. A sham.
I held a more complex view of Musk and I pretty much devour at least two book on him.
He will probably still be the most influential and the most important entrepreneur in our lifetime, and I mean that mostly in a technological sense. But he's certainly not a kind of person I would emulate and not all his business strategy are advisable or necessarily efficient.
Anyway, to credit Elon Musk almost singularly with SpaceX and other big accomplishment does a discredit to the engineers who work there. What he provide is leadership, which means making final engineering decisions and taking responsibility for these decisions.
We often became complacent, unwilling to take even modicum of risk on a project, or only paying attention narrowly to a certain measure of success. Musk exemplify the lack of complacency better than anyone else.
VDH's career skyrocketed once he became a regular among the RW media, especially when lots of handwringing about Western values under siege is required.
> Imagine someone being a brain surgeon also interested in the heart, kidneys and urinary tract, nose-throat-ears, ... that's a Renaissance Doc.
Do you mean that such a Renaissance doc this is not a good thing? I think this is exactly the sort of doctors we need.
Right now, my father has diabetes t2, high bp, a slightly enlarged prostrate gland, a series of UTIs, hernia, skin rashes and probably a few other things. He's fairly rigorous in researching & learning about his conditions. But no doc he consults takes an overall picture of his health. You have nephrologist, urologist, cardiologist and so on. They tend to miss things among themselves until he reminds them.
Yes medicine has advanced greatly but a renaissance doc would be transformative for people like him.
At some point you will hit diminishing return. That's a good time to start exploring other endeavors and add to your skillset.
It's not that specialization is junk or good, it is that we get complacent.
For example, I dabbled with programming and computery stuff all my life. I like to think I am pretty good myself. It is not until a few years ago that I started taking improv classes, a form of theater that I began finding something else that I am really good at. Today, I continue to deepen my technical expertise. Not so much in programming, but in electronics, 3D printing, and CAD. However, I will eventually return to programming to expand my skillset there. In the performing art, I am pursuing voice acting.
There's paying works in voiceacting for sure. Even improv has potential for paying work if I bother to teach a class or coach a team. Money isn't why I pursue these disciplines. I found that I am getting stagnant in my acting skill, so I decided to do something new.
Specialization isn't a bad thing, but it pays to continually expand your skill in both breadth and depth. Not just learn the 15th new framework hotness or wahtever. It might even pay to do something that could be the furthest away from your expertise.
This made me think of Charlie Munger. As he was getting into old age, he told an audience that "to get ahead in life, you should specialize in one thing and get really good at it"
Mr. Munger was really good at stock picking. As he neared his twilight years, he tried to dabble in architecture. To show that he was more than just a rich guy who was good/lucky with picking stocks. He made big donation to UC Santa Barbara conditioned on one clause... that he be allowed to design a dorm.
The dorm he designed was utilitarian to the extreme, maximizing the internal volume of the building. Dorms on the interior received no air, no light... There was so little ventilation that critics accused the building of being "worse than a prison". College administrators worried that the building would increase the suicide rate of this beach side perpetually sunny college campus, by making the students go insane.
So at the very end, Munger was forced to concede he was right...
So how's Elon's takeover of Twitter going right now?
Munger is just one man. His experience isn't everything. Ditto for Musk.
I think of Musk as a specialist. He has glaring weakness in the social realm that he never really done much to resolve. That's why he flailing around with Twitter. It's also holding him back at other companies. If your to-go tool is to yell at subordinates to do nearly impossible or impossible things, that's pretty inefficient. At least that is my impression of Musk's management style.
I don't know about Mr. Munger, but if I were to study architecture, I would maybe consider taking classes, maybe go on trips to see buildings and develop my own taste to augment my own architectural education. Design a few buildings, get some feedback.
There are plenty of people with the potential to be renaissance persons, but they crushed by the need to earn money as a specialist. They can hardly quit their day job and go a renaissance excursion.
There are millions worldwide. You can see advancement in technologies and thinkings exceed what we read during Renaissance time. Dont believe me, search for shenzhen 30 years ago vs today? Even the last 10 years Shanghai and Moscow prosper and developed incredibly than any 10-years periods in Florence. Elon is a bit overhype at this point. His cybertruck set that category of tech years backward. RoboTaxi? My goodness like Waymo never existed. Hyperloop? Yeah ot is called bullet train, Chinese (beating Germans and Japanese) now perfected the development of tracks construction even though not yet with superconductivity.
> His new X replacement is an unfettered platform for free expression. And the more the left abhors their loss of the monopolistic old Twitter’s ideological clearing house, and vows to flee X and start their own new left-wing, censorious Twitters, the more they stay on X.
Of course you did—you proved to yourself that you have a closed, small mind that gets brainworms because you want to make everything a matter of politics. Every time I've posted a story that included any mention of Musk it guarantees it will get flagged on HN. It doesn't even matter if the story doesn't have anything directly to do with Musk or how tangential the connection is—the haters just instinctively flag it, like a Pavlovian response. How utterly surprising.
Readit News
My only options have been to make companies or freelance.
I do think the world needs more "generalists" though as we're often the only ones placed to even half understand, combine and fully utilise different specialists.
If you work on something full time for five years, deliberately challenging yourself and striving to improve your skills, you will probably become pretty good at the thing. But because a full-time job is only 1/3 of your waking hours, you'll have time for other pursuits. If there are 50 productive years in a human live, you can probably become pretty good at 20 different things.
From this perspective, a college degree is not specialization, but the first few percent of the work of becoming a Renaissance person.
> an old person who has had diverse interests and the motivation and the opportunities to pursue them.
How is that not the same thing? The only difference is that you added that they had to be old.
Fact: people are better educated today. It's more common to have a university degree than half a century ago (yet unlike decades ago, not to have it count for much).
Speaking of which, being Renaissance is a nice hobby, but it doesn't pay. That's why most people specialize.
Some people like specializing. Spheres of human activity and interest are like fractals. When you specialize and zoom in, you see rich details. Look how diverse computing is.
If you are in computing, to an outsider you seem like a "computer specialist", but within that sphere, you could be a generalist with diverse areas of interest.
Probably the best way to explain that to people might be by analogy to doctors. Imagine someone being a brain surgeon also interested in the heart, kidneys and urinary tract, nose-throat-ears, ... that's a Renaissance Doc.
Some people have one hobby different from their job, maybe two. They specialize off duty, so to speak. They pursue that hobby or two and are good at then, and don't want to take on more at the expense of neglecting what they are good at.
> America is increasingly becoming a bifurcated, two-tiered society of a specialized government-corporate-media-political-credentialed class of degreed overseers and managers who attempt to micromanage an increasingly less well-educated, dependent underclass.
This Musk adulation really takes away from the article. Musk took over Twitter so that he could control tweets that were critical of him, and amplify his own tweets. He knew he would lose billions of dollars in doing so by devaluing the platform, but it was worth it in his eyes.
He will probably still be the most influential and the most important entrepreneur in our lifetime, and I mean that mostly in a technological sense. But he's certainly not a kind of person I would emulate and not all his business strategy are advisable or necessarily efficient.
Anyway, to credit Elon Musk almost singularly with SpaceX and other big accomplishment does a discredit to the engineers who work there. What he provide is leadership, which means making final engineering decisions and taking responsibility for these decisions.
We often became complacent, unwilling to take even modicum of risk on a project, or only paying attention narrowly to a certain measure of success. Musk exemplify the lack of complacency better than anyone else.
Do you mean that such a Renaissance doc this is not a good thing? I think this is exactly the sort of doctors we need.
Right now, my father has diabetes t2, high bp, a slightly enlarged prostrate gland, a series of UTIs, hernia, skin rashes and probably a few other things. He's fairly rigorous in researching & learning about his conditions. But no doc he consults takes an overall picture of his health. You have nephrologist, urologist, cardiologist and so on. They tend to miss things among themselves until he reminds them.
Yes medicine has advanced greatly but a renaissance doc would be transformative for people like him.
It's not that specialization is junk or good, it is that we get complacent.
For example, I dabbled with programming and computery stuff all my life. I like to think I am pretty good myself. It is not until a few years ago that I started taking improv classes, a form of theater that I began finding something else that I am really good at. Today, I continue to deepen my technical expertise. Not so much in programming, but in electronics, 3D printing, and CAD. However, I will eventually return to programming to expand my skillset there. In the performing art, I am pursuing voice acting.
There's paying works in voiceacting for sure. Even improv has potential for paying work if I bother to teach a class or coach a team. Money isn't why I pursue these disciplines. I found that I am getting stagnant in my acting skill, so I decided to do something new.
Specialization isn't a bad thing, but it pays to continually expand your skill in both breadth and depth. Not just learn the 15th new framework hotness or wahtever. It might even pay to do something that could be the furthest away from your expertise.
Mr. Munger was really good at stock picking. As he neared his twilight years, he tried to dabble in architecture. To show that he was more than just a rich guy who was good/lucky with picking stocks. He made big donation to UC Santa Barbara conditioned on one clause... that he be allowed to design a dorm.
The dorm he designed was utilitarian to the extreme, maximizing the internal volume of the building. Dorms on the interior received no air, no light... There was so little ventilation that critics accused the building of being "worse than a prison". College administrators worried that the building would increase the suicide rate of this beach side perpetually sunny college campus, by making the students go insane.
So at the very end, Munger was forced to concede he was right...
So how's Elon's takeover of Twitter going right now?
I think of Musk as a specialist. He has glaring weakness in the social realm that he never really done much to resolve. That's why he flailing around with Twitter. It's also holding him back at other companies. If your to-go tool is to yell at subordinates to do nearly impossible or impossible things, that's pretty inefficient. At least that is my impression of Musk's management style.
I don't know about Mr. Munger, but if I were to study architecture, I would maybe consider taking classes, maybe go on trips to see buildings and develop my own taste to augment my own architectural education. Design a few buildings, get some feedback.
> His new X replacement is an unfettered platform for free expression. And the more the left abhors their loss of the monopolistic old Twitter’s ideological clearing house, and vows to flee X and start their own new left-wing, censorious Twitters, the more they stay on X.
So, yeah.
(also, hey!)
https://qz.com/1026167/elon-musk-just-bought-x-com-the-domai...
I don't expect much of this renaissance.