What is the very model of a modern...
By
Arcanaville,
Posted on: 2011-09-01 17:17 in Comic and Hero-Villain Culture
The sad truth is that what would once be called a Renaissance man is what is now called a loser today...
People who have multiple interests in multiple fields and pull them together in different ways to make brilliant things happens... it's not that they don't exist any more it's that they are considered unable to be of value because they aren't consistent about any one thing and their interest is all over the place... and as quick as our world is going they are often said to be looking too much at the future, thinking it is closer than it really is...
In other words...if you want to look for the Leonardo of today the best place to look is on the streets or in basements, still living with their parents.
You need a few things to make a Renaissance person. Adaptability, curiosity, openmindedness, literacy, and an eye for details, IMO. Beyond that, it's pretty much whatever they are interested in. Offer them several things, such as what you mentioned (biology, music, engineering, etc) and let them pick whatever floats their boat.
I wouldn't even say they'd need to know basic math necessarily, since things may be instinctive to them. Take catching a baseball for instance. Most people can at least get in the vicinity of the area to catch the ball without even really thinking about it. But try to get those same people to do the vector math required to determine where and when they need to be to catch it, and they'd be stumped.
There are very few people doing multiple disciplines - those that are can come up with advances by tying in things "not obvious" to one that's old news to another. (I believe Feynman was like this with matrices... they were known about and unused in a branch of mathematics, sitting around for a few decades at least, and were the precise tool he needed to solve a problem in physics.)
A renaissance (wo)man is, at the simplest, educated in a broad number of disciplines. We may think of something like you mentioned - agriculture, art, biology, etc - but they don't have to be *that* widely ranged.
An *ideal,* to me, would be someone with a good grounding in the sciences, arts and history. Someone who has a full appreciation of (for instance) music and architecture, astronomy, physics, a touch of logic/rhetoric and politics would be fair. Of course, the more overlap the easier it would be to "master" the various areas - someone with an interest in working in stone may have a knowledge (if not education) in geology, be a sculptor, and learn architecture (with an appreciation of historical buildings - history and art.)
Stepping into the more modern realm, you could probably find some without stepping away from a computer - someone doing 3d illustration and animation may have a fairly good grasp of math, of programming (depending on what they do,) of art (lighting, movement, the human figure) and architecture/history (for settings and environments.)
Frankly, I think there are more around (depending on the degree you want to look at) than you may think. The biggest quality (IMHO) would be the willingness - or even more, eagerness and desire - to learn and to expand out of your "comfort zone."
....Major General? .... Scientist Salarian?
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-renaissance-man.htm
I think this explains it well enough.
I'd have to agree on a part of it, part of being a Renaissance Man/Women is both mental and physical. It's more than just knowledgable in multiple fields of study. It's also about the physical.
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I was trying to stay away from giving examples in my original post but Shigeru Miyamoto would likely be considered a Renaissance man...
And, not to sound arrogant, but the idea needing to know a lot of things about a lot of things has always struck me as the best and natural way to be if you are going to look at being a writer, game designer, whatever (unfortunately I'm on the few people that hold that that i have met in those areas)... and if I was further in the educational system I'd be considered a polymath/Renaissance man. Though in my current situation one might say I'm an aborted polymath ^.^
the reason I say that they are more likely to be called a loser and be on the streets or in their mom's house...it's because our society doesn't reward people like that often. It rewards specialization and the ability to be a drone for the most part. Because of that and because that type of personality is usually so stubborn they are more likely to falter and fail than they are to get anywhere.
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But those are all skills directly related to their actual field: "necessarily included skills" you might call them.|
Originally Posted by Memphis_Bill
Stepping into the more modern realm, you could probably find some without stepping away from a computer - someone doing 3d illustration and animation may have a fairly good grasp of math, of programming (depending on what they do,) of art (lighting, movement, the human figure) and architecture/history (for settings and environments.)
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Now, an animator who studied dance, medicine, psychology, building codes - things that might have only a passing connection to their primary field but that they could synthesize into their work would be more of the kind of generalist related to what we normally call polymaths, albeit at a lesser level than a Leonardo.
My primary professional field is information systems and security, but over the years to best serve my clients I've had to learn their businesses, jobs, fields, and skills. I've become proficient or at least knowledgeable in everything from medical billing to architecture to nuclear power plant operations. It is an extremely difficult and uncommon skill to find and to be frank 95% of the people who claim it don't have it in a practical sense, especially because (in my opinion) one of the things we don't teach children is the general skill of learning. We hope its something they pick up while we're teaching them other things. 99.99% of them don't. One day we should get around to fixing that.
I'm not an *expert* in all the things I'm familiar with, so I'm not claiming to be a literal polymath as the term is normally used. I'm less Leonardo and more MacGyver: I learn about a wide range of things just because I want to know, but I often find myself in situations where that knowledge then becomes useful in unexpected ways. One of the earliest instances of this was a summer job I had long ago. I was only supposed to print reports and hand them to people. However, these were chemical analysis reports, and I could read the chemistry symbols and understood what much of the terminology was, chemistry being one of my interests at the time. So even though I was nothing but a clerical assistant, my knowledge of chemistry allowed me to do that particular job much more efficiently than previous people because I did not need any spin up time to learn what went where. A small thing, but these things tend to add up.
In my case, I was doing that so efficiently they decided to take a chance letting me *write* some those reports. Which required me to learn this language called RPG (RPG-II, in fact). Five years later I was working at a job that needed someone to help support a very old inventory system written in, that's right, RPG. Which forced me to learn inventory systems. Which would not become useful to me again for a decade.
That's sort of how these things work for generalists. Everything is an opportunity to learn something which might, just maybe, become useful later. But we don't learn them because we think they will be useful later. We just try to learn *everything*, knowing that *something* will eventually be useful later, but never knowing specifically what - or caring, actually (I know how to program an HP 2100. The odds are already pretty low I will ever be able to leverage that experience again, even though these things very stubbornly refuse to die).
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just an aside... when I was taught that and because of the general slowness of certain aspect of that technology RPG and the system it's generally used with AS-400 is used pretty much every where in almost all businesses... And knowing that pretty much guarantees you a pretty good pay check... especially now adays as it isn't a popular thing to learn or be taught ^.^ unfortunately I suck at finding jobs so meh.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Which required me to learn this language called RPG (RPG-II, in fact). Five years later I was working at a job that needed someone to help support a very old inventory system written in, that's right, RPG. Which forced me to learn inventory systems. Which would not become useful to me again for a decade.
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Unless you're supporting something ancient, I don't think many people teach RPG-II anymore: RPG-IV is substantially different from RPG-II (so I've heard: I've never written anything in RPG-IV).|
Originally Posted by Durakken
just an aside... when I was taught that and because of the general slowness of certain aspect of that technology RPG and the system it's generally used with AS-400 is used pretty much every where in almost all businesses... And knowing that pretty much guarantees you a pretty good pay check... especially now adays as it isn't a popular thing to learn or be taught ^.^ unfortunately I suck at finding jobs so meh.
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Another side track on RPG: it used to promote (but not mandate) what it called the master program cycle, or cyclic programming. Most procedural people hated it. This concept re-emerged as the event driven model which drove both the Win16 system and the Mac OS from birth to OS9. This oddly created a circumstance where many RPG programmers could jump directly to Win16 programming easier than many C programmers could initially.
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I've always been a fan of this Lazarus Long quote from Time Enough For Love by Robert Heinlein in reference to a modern sort of Renaissance Man:|
Originally Posted by Rodoan
What makes a good and practical Renaissance person in today's world? Can there even be one?
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| A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. |
Author of There's Something in the Water (Arc # 60327)
Not only was that genuine frontier jibberish...
Courtesy: Preventing unnecessary homicides for over 4000 years.
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Heh my employer uses the AS-400 system... err OS... err whatever you want to call it, want a link to thier employment app?|
Originally Posted by Durakken
just an aside... when I was taught that and because of the general slowness of certain aspect of that technology RPG and the system it's generally used with AS-400 is used pretty much every where in almost all businesses... And knowing that pretty much guarantees you a pretty good pay check... especially now adays as it isn't a popular thing to learn or be taught ^.^ unfortunately I suck at finding jobs so meh.
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They like to update the AS-400 every coupla years and my regional boss tells me how they have shell out big bucks for folks to write code for it when they do.
------->"Sic Semper Tyrannis"<-------
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suuure though it's been like a decade since I programmed anything on an AS-400 and I'd have to relearn it which would take a few hours >.>
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Originally Posted by ebon3
Heh my employer uses the AS-400 system... err OS... err whatever you want to call it, want a link to thier employment app?
They like to update the AS-400 every coupla years and my regional boss tells me how they have shell out big bucks for folks to write code for it when they do. |
What is the very model of a modern...
Renaissance man? or woman?
I'm not sure if it was my brief contemplation of the steampunk wings and comparing them to DaVinci's designs or some other fleeting thought, but I was wondering today what would make a practical Renaissance man or woman of this day and age?
If I had children and wanted to teach them to be such an ideal, (or was going really, really deep in designing RP heroes) are they still to learn art, biology, agriculture, engineering, politics? Do I teach them Latin? Have them master Greek classics and politics? Do we "sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings"? Do I abandon or heavily moderate Shakespeare and the past in favor of training in computers, astrophysics, and future tech?
What makes a good and practical Renaissance person in today's world? Can there even be one?