You can always find someone who is great at an individual skill, and you can generally already leverage much of their work, potentially devaluing any further contributions in that area. When considering sets of complementary skills, however, the picture becomes much less clear, for far fewer people possess the required knowledge in all of these areas to successfully combine them. Thus, for a set of complementary skills, the real value comes from combining them.
This is “interdisciplinary fusion”. This is what I’m trying to impart to students with my idea for a new institution that trains polymaths. No one else does this because almost no one else can. They’re stuck in their narrow specialties, unable to leverage the knowledge at the intersection of the disciplines because they’re still trying to master them one at a time in isolation. I considered this approach once, several years ago. I came up with the conclusion that shaped my life since: you can master them faster in parallel. Much faster. Understanding breeds more understanding (if a sort of rigidity in thinking that should be consciously avoided). The more diverse the set of ideas you hold, the more you will be able to generate new ones.
Searching Google for “interdisciplinary fusion” shows that no one seems to quite get what I’m driving at – existing institutions propose curricula that span two or three disciplines and proclaim it “fusion”. First, any system that focuses only on a particular set of related disciplines is by nature incomplete, because a great deal of novelty is going to come from mixing wildly different disciplines, such as computer science and photography or mathematics and music. However, there is a more fundamental problem with existing systems: they fail to address the keystone holding the arch together! They attempt to impart interdisciplinarity without addressing the absolutely crucial intersection points that tie the knowledge together, instead teaching a bunch of unrelated courses that most students never dig deep enough to connect.
This is bad. Lacking that connection makes the whole system nearly worthless. And that is why it is one of the most important points I am going to focus on.
Yes, great, the RSS works now… thanks. 🙂
OK, I will read through the project polymath site and the rest of this one.
Thanks,
Clif
Clif,
It seems the theme I’m using did something with the RSS links. I changed it to another theme (this one’s cleaner anyway), so the whole world should now be able to subscribe to my random ranting 🙂
I do think it’s desirable. All of the current cutting-edge research is becoming interdisciplinary, and it’s yielding some great progress, but it’s still fundamentally ineffective because it requires a team of experts – and no one quite understands what the rest of the team is doing because no one’s expertise completely covers the full scope of the work.
Whether it’s possible is a bit harder to answer. I believe that it is, but I’m not necessarily convinced that it will work for everyone. Of course, some people will not *want* to be polymaths, and that’s fine. I think there is a sizable niche of people who have started learning these things on their own, however, and I think that training can significantly augment their abilities, if nothing more.
My idea on how this may be possible is written out in detail at http://www.projectpolymath.org.
Hmmm, do you think training polymaths is possible, or even desirable? It seems this would require the introduction of some degree of structure counter to the “amateur” autodidacticism that shaped the minds of historical polymaths. And a program focused on teaching only the required skills to BECOME a polymath might develop into something not much more than the standard interdisciplinary studies fare. I am interested in what approach could “tie together” disciplines in a manner defined enough to teach, without negative impact on the diversity of approach that leads to true innovation. I’d definitely like to follow your progress down this path of thought.
Oh, and do you have RSS working in some manner? All of the standard WordPress methods seem to fail.
Thanks,
Clif