Does the world need polymaths?

Re:Does the world need polymaths? by Retric on Monday August 21, 2017 @10:51AM (#15065007)

Groups of people have issues scaling. At the scale of the say the DoD you end up with a lot of inefficient redundancy which pushes organisations to specialize.

Google for example does not actually do that many different things, it just has crazy amounts of leverage.

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Re:Does the world need polymaths? by pureGuano on Monday August 21, 2017 @11:11AM (#15065126)

I think people are (slowly) re-learning the importance of redundancy. Having multiple, competing implementations makes you far less vulnerable to shocks.

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Re:Does the world need polymaths? by posterboy on Monday August 21, 2017 @01:35PM (#15066139)

Using relational databases as a model for the structures in question, some form of redundancy (secondary and primary keys) is needed to avoid more redundancy (dublication). I actually don't know what I'm talking about, if it made sense to someone, please correct me where I'm wrong.

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Re:Does the world need polymaths? by Retric on Monday August 21, 2017 @01:41PM (#15066185)

This is not really productive redundancy as for example the Navy and Air Force can't easily swap HR systems. This is mostly everyone being their own little snowflake.

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Re:Does the world need polymaths? by dilemma on Monday August 21, 2017 @08:07PM (#15068788)

Individuals have even more trouble scaling.

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