Autodidact Polymaths

How do people become well-read? It seems like there are only so many hours in a day and that topics are so infinitely divisible and multifaceted. Is there a method that makes this kind of knowledge more accessible, or is it more likely that the sorts of people styling themselves after a Hitchens or a Da Vinci are just charlatans reaching outside of their wheel house?

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By reading well.

How does someone become well-learned? By studying well. How does someone study well? By knowing himself.

just practice

Only a NEET has enough time to become a polymath, and they deserve the rope.

>Seething Calvinist in his natural habitat of misery and contempt

You should specialise in one discipline and be the absolute best in your field. It's better to be a master in one field who is respected than to be an amateur in many to whom no one pays any attention.

>27. Value intensiveness more than extensiveness. Perfection consists in quality, not quantity. Everything very good has always been brief and scarce; abundance is discreditable. Even among people, giants are usually the true dwarves. Some value books for their sheer size, as if they were written to exercise our arms not our wits. Extension alone can never rise above mediocrity, and the misfortune of all-embracing individuals is that, wanting to deal with everything, they deal with nothing. Intensity leads to distinction, and to heroic distinction if the matter is sublime.
Balthasar Gracian

t. Jealous wagecuck who can't dedicate his time to his studies

1. Always have something ready to read in places where you have unavoidable down time. Audiobooks in your car, ebook reader on your phone, paperbacks in the field, etc.

2. If you aren't hooked by the end of the first chapter, don't finish the book.

Dunno about Hitchens, but you still see polymaths from time to time. A lot more has been written now than in Da Vinci's day, but most of it is just wagies writing jargon to keep people from learning their jobs. The essentials don't take that long to learn if you know where to look.

nigga when Da Vinci was around there were like 200 good books that you could read. their knowledge of reality was less than 1% of what we know now.

A lot of talk about quantity vs quality itt but very little self-awareness. There is no question that the adjective "well-read" implies having reading much more than the average person, so there's an incontrovertible element of quantity.

Being well-read requires reading with dedication, which will always (barring accidents) turn out reading often, which ultimately means you'll read loads of books whether you're quick and superficial or slow and ruminating.

Likewise becoming a master in any field requires extensive reading: not only you'll need to be broad enough to not be crippled by every new problem that comes along, you need to have read the same issue tackled from different perspectives by different authors.

That said, Gracian-user here is not wrong about the importance of intensiveness. You need to read like it really matters to you, like what you read is food and you're either starving or a gourmet. Some books possess you so much you read them in a frenzy, other are so delightful you can't help slowly rereading them over and over.

But remember it's not only about quality of book or even quality of reading, it's about your relation to them, and what you do even when you're not reading.

So, in short: pay attention to what you read, read it with care and passion, learn to love books and their contents, and very importantly don't stop the work when you close the book. A good reader spends a lot of time thinking and rethinking about what he's read, revisiting it and connecting it to others reads. He also keeps finding excuses, occasion, time and places to read more.

"What would author Y would say about that last chapter in author X's book? Is there an influenc or kinship between that one philosopher and that other? How does what I've read in that romantic novel relate to that historian's account of political upheavals at the time?". Think, read, reread and rethink. Don't be afraid to make connections, even daring connections. Put your thought in writing and compare them to what you read.

Try many ways of reading: reading in various languages, translating, copying by hand, learning by heart, recitating, rephrasing in your own terms. All of those are also means of reading.

Read in the subway, on your phone, on papyrus if you have to. A good reader is opportunistic, he'll read whatever he thinks work reading whenever he can, and he'll plunder books for whatever enjoyment, enlightenment, emotion and insight he can get.

Remember abovea ll that for the passionate reader reading is a joy that nothing can replace (some thing can compare or even be better, but they can't replace it). And a book always leads to another book. That said, start reading and bon voyage.

stop masturbating.

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>Think about discipline
>Remove all distractions
>Put aside time to reading
>Read
>Write notes on what you read
>Develop discipline

But polymath means extensive knowledge or expertise in many fields

this isn't realistic for most people. the best alternative is to branch out and become well rounded.

There were still huge libraries of books filled with knowledge. Some, most of which was false, but nothing says our knowledge is true either.

>Comparing Hitchens to Da Vinci.

Idiot.

>Compartmentalize your education that way you can produce more efficiently for your masters and won't know enough to be independent.

there's an artistry to seeming well-read as much as there is to being well-read.

Just read into one subject and learn things that surround it. You'll get much more from that method than reading shallow and wide.

I understand the impulse, but I think this is wrong.

One of the best methods for becoming *better*-read was Kantbot's notion of "spiraling-out" whereby you read a book, and if you liked it read similar books. Books by the same author, books about the author, books that the author liked or was inspired by, etc. This way you read broadly while at the same time managing to read with some depth. You won't be an expert but you'll have more than a surface level understanding.

An example:
>Read some broad Roman History
>read a bio of Caesar
>read Caesars books
>read the Shakespeare play Caesar
>Read Antony and Cleopatra
>read a bio of Augustus
>Read Augustus by John Williams

You see how that works?