The Promise of Polymath LLMs

I have long associated with smart nerdy folks with broad interests, especially re tech/future. Groups like “extropians”, “rationalists” and “effective altruists”. While there are many smart nerdy amateur groups who focus on rather concrete topics, like old cars or poker, the folks I’ve like have had a “taste for abstraction”. They like more to reason abstractly, and so over time have collected many abstractions to help them reason. This seems to me a key common element across the diverse topics they like.When such people are nearer to academia, they tend more to learn established abstractions from academic disciplines. Others tend more to collect abstractions from online thinkers, who more often invent their own new abstractions, instead of using established ones. Such novel abstractions are generative, adding to our innovation in abstractions. But they also tend to be less reliable, leading such thinkers more often astray. Academics, in contrast, are slower to adopt new abstractions,…