Why So Many Artists Are Highly Sensitive People

Re:Why So Many Artists Are Highly Sensitive People by jerf on Sunday January 03, 2016 @09:49AM (#10830754)

It's hard for a "man of the world" to make time in the 21st century to learn enough about mathematics to make meaningful contributions to the field which still doing the other things being a "man of the world" requires, except perhaps in a few isolated places that happen to overlap something practical. Or, in other words, we programmers probably overestimate the ability for non-mathematicians to contribute to the field because we happen to be sitting in the very best such place already.

Same reason we don't get true renaissance people anymore; one can not even know everything about genetics, to say nothing of biology, let alone half-a-dozen other disciplines.

Are these traits truly associated with "artistry" and "creativity", or are we simply in a place where we've done so much than moving things forward requires monomania?

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Re:Why So Many Artists Are Highly Sensitive People by tkmh on Sunday January 03, 2016 @10:27AM (#10830888)

Yes, no one is a renaissance person any more. But I don't think that there were as many renaissance people in the past as we think. Admittedly I don't have much evidence for this. In the case of maths, I think our idea that many more mathematicians used to be polymaths in the past is slightly skewed dues to the fact that until about 2 centuries ago, 'mathematician' and 'physicist' were not distinct categories. We think of Gauss and Euler as polymaths, but Euler was by all accounts a terrible philosopher.

EDIT: I just remembered that Gauss was an extremely competent philologist, so maybe the above is no longer valid.

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