::scr Re: doesn't have the morlocks

[Simon Wistow]

On Fri, Apr 05, 2002 at 09:40:25AM +0100, Richard Marr said:
> Simon, I call you out, you scoundrel !

I heartily agree with you. I think. Although maybe not. 

On the one hand, and maybe I'm not understanding you properly, but I do
feel that not everybody can be good at everything - that, given enough
time, I could become as good an artist as say Michelangelo or as good a
writer as Shakespeare or as good a physicist as Niels
Bohr or Einstein or ...

People are wired differently. We have different strengths and weaknesses
and for one to even be good, let alone as stratospherically good as
those individuals mentioned above. To be truly good at something there
needs to be creative leaps of inspiration. I don't pretend to understand
the process of how our minds work and it would be interesting to see if
an AI could be good at everything but my ut feeling is that because of
the way our neurons interact, it's very difficult to be good at
everything.

To support this I'll mention a book called "Why Michael couldn't hit" by
Harold L. Klawans - a book of essays on neuropsychology and sport that
contains the eponymous study on why Michael Jordan failed to make the
switch from Basketball to Baseball. 

In essence it showed that he'd become so good at basketball that his
neurosn were optimised for it and, at 30-odd something, it was too late
for him to change. Presumably if he'd started playing Baseball he'd have
been good at that too although possibly not since Baseball requires an
entirely different set of skills apart from the ones shared with
baketball.


On the other hand, I agree with you about renaissance people such as
Feynman and Da Vinci who have a passion for things outside their field
and who combine the artistic and the scientific. By studying both fields
they're abe to draw inspiration from twice as many sources. Or
something.

I had a fascinating conversation about this with this man ...

http://www.fuckedgoths.com/images/kitty03.jpg

(he's the one on the right, wearing a dress and the tiara)

where we drank lots, and then somehow switched from superstring theory
to communities and knowledge bases and a whole host of other things.

Some of this is documented (in a haphazard way) here

http://thegestalt.org/simon/cluetrain.html

One thing I thought of later though was whether I was making the classic
statistics mistake of confusing correlation with causation - were these
people geniuses (for want of a better word) because they read so braodly
or did they read so broadly because they're geniuses).

Simon

> PS.
> 
> That title image on the gestalt site...
> (http://thegestalt.org/scr/images/scr.jpg)
> ... did you do that?

Sort of. The photograph is by Ashley Pomeroy and I shamelessly stole it
from this page

http://www.ashleypomeroy.com/peoplelight5.html

and then added some text.






-- 
: square failure, cubic wildcard