We Are in Need of Renaissance People

19 pointsposted 13 hours ago
by wyclif
(victorhanson.com)

34 Comments

CuriouslyC

12 hours ago

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.

butterfly42069

12 hours ago

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.

jltsiren

12 hours ago

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.

from-nibly

11 hours ago

> A "Renaissance person" is not a self-educated generalist

> 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.

jltsiren

11 hours ago

First, because the "self-educated" part is irrelevant here.

But more importantly, the difference is in the degree. Generalism is a matter of interests and focus. A Renaissance person is an ideal and an outcome. The Renaissance ideal was that elite men should strive to be good at everything they do. In the recent history, the people who have been called Renaissance men were typically at the top of their fields, with significant accomplishments in other fields. And those accomplishments take time.

kazinator

13 hours ago

> 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.

stanislavb

12 hours ago

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.

kiba

12 hours ago

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.

AstralStorm

11 hours ago

Musk does everything to serve his dream. Pity it's a broken self-serving dystopia and he cannot see it.

As for success, his skill is con artistry over investors. Also known as venture capitalism. He invented nothing and will continue to invent nothing.

Anyone can decide things that do not actually matter with aides that can make things work. He didn't even pick the aides in case of Tesla and SpaceX so does not get thw credit for that.

The guy is not exactly a good strategist considering how many of ventures needed to fulfill his dystopian vision failed.

Why is it dystopian? It's full of people laboring alone and separated in virtual cellars. Every thing he does is an enclosure: a dome, a car with no driver, a rocket. To compensate you get to sit in a VR helmet and interact with a robot.

sys64739

12 hours ago

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.

082349872349872

10 hours ago

I was amused by one of his early books, in which he bitterly complains about his poor experience in academia: part of one of his bellyaches was that at home he could piss outside but at the university they wanted him to use the bathrooms.

kiba

12 hours ago

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.

hzay

12 hours ago

> 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.

lotsofpulp

12 hours ago

Is he overweight and/or sedentary? If so, I don’t see what a doctor can do other than prescribe a GLP-1.

AstralStorm

10 hours ago

You know what a lifestyle coach is? Or a physiotherapist?

A few surgeries, treatments and lifestyle interventions can do it. Though it's not an easy task. And further, not a cheap one. Treatments tend to synergize.

There's so many specialized doctors.

The generalist is called a general practitioner, but commonly reduced to a specialist in ENT infections.

jgoewert

12 hours ago

Started reading, ok... not bad... then the Musk wank fest comes in. Anything beyond that is pointless to read and everything before is devalued heavily. In the market-forum of ideas and thought, worthless to me.

No point in listening to the tax plan from someone who wants my family wiped off the earth.

X - Closed

jakubmazanec

3 hours ago

Exactly, seeing Musk besides Franklin is a joke. The world could perhaps use more renaissance people, but Musk, Jobs and others are not them.

from-nibly

11 hours ago

I closed as soon as I saw the picture putting elon as a Renaissance man. There are no great men only great con artists

LarsDu88

12 hours ago

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?

kiba

11 hours ago

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.

Have7878forever

8 hours ago

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.

aaronbrethorst

12 hours ago

I wonder if the author of this post—and the linked book in the sidebar, "The Case for Trump (2024 Edition)" would consider Trump a renaissance man.

dyauspitr

12 hours ago

Isn’t a Renaissance man someone skilled in multiple fields and pretty much a generalist at anything to throw at him?

saulpw

12 hours ago

Elon Musk is his example, including:

> 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!)

MaxfordAndSons

12 hours ago

Trump seems much more like a specialist to me.

coding123

13 hours ago

We do need people to be excited about life again.

kazinator

13 hours ago

... and if for some that means being enthusiastic about X and craving bromance with Musk, then so be it. Who are we to judge this blogger.

AstralStorm

11 hours ago

We can judge them by the consequences of their actions.

ndndjdjdn

12 hours ago

They are.

from-nibly

11 hours ago

Who is?

ndndjdjdn

11 hours ago

Various average joes. I see lots of polymathism at work. Extreme sports, art, music to go along with coding or whatever.

It it is just not to the genius level that is required to get HN excited.

Many switch to coding from another profession. Examples: real engineers, army, accountants.

LarsDu88

12 hours ago

"We need more Renaissance people"

Me: Ok great

"Like Elon Musk"

Me: Sure. He makes rockets and cars, I guess...

"His new X replacement is an unfettered platform for free expression"

Me: HAHAHAHAHAHHA. No. Furiously Google's author's name to confirm this is indeed yet another partisan shill