The state of the term 'Polymath'

I stumbled across a discussion on r/polymath the other day that really disturbed me.

Someone asked for recommendations of newspapers, magazines, journals etc that people on the subreddit follow as part of their journey to becoming a polymath, and multiple people said that they don't add any of those things to their knowledge diets!

Some said that they just go on other subreddits where they can read the answers of experts in the field. This wasn't the most egregious answer, because there are definitely experts hanging out on Reddit who come in and add their contributions regularly. I literally go to r/A-levelEnglishLit to do that! But there is one huge problem with thinking you can just pop on a subreddit and find everything out that you need to know:

How do you know that you're actually reading the work of experts, and not just some very confident, very wrong people?

I'm not saying that newspapers and magazines are infallible. I'm just saying that it's wild to me that people on a subreddit dedicated to becoming knowledgable in multiple areas could think it's enough to go on a social media platform where anyone can post anything they want and expect to learn more than published content that holds itself to standards of accuracy.

But the real thing that alarmed me is how many people were claiming that AI is the way to becoming a polymath. They said some horribly incorrect things: if you combine AI with YouTube and Reddit, you can learn the important things you need to know.

I hope I can explain to you in a few bullet points why that isn't true:

• AI isn't necessarily trained on accurate or up-to-date information. It's just trained on text. After all, especially early on, the concern was to get AI to respond as if it understands you, not to be accurate or truthful.
• YouTube and Reddit doesn't have high (if any) standards of accuracy. Reddit moderators on some subreddits try their best, but it's a thankless task and it's not like it's their full-time jobs to fact-check everything that comes through their doors.
• When you don't know anything about a subject or know very little, using AI and Reddit and other tools that are giving you information confidently will make you believe things even if they aren't true. To use AI well, you have to already know enough about the topic to call out when it's wrong. Otherwise, it just makes you let your guard down and believe nonsense.
• The point of learning stuff isn't just to cram useless facts in your head. Knowledge isn't the same as fact gathering. Knowledge is about how you process the information, how you connect it to existing information, and what you do with it afterwards. Facts are meaningless if they don't come with a good deal of thorough thought. Slowing down and reading books is a great way to encourage you to think, not just to absorb (see my short comments on The Literacy Crisis by Michael Burns for more on that)

But I don't know why I'm surprised. The term 'polymath' is fraught with people who treat knowledge like it's money and our brains like a bank account. Or like they're trying to 100% facts like trophies in a video game.

In reality, that's not how things work. There is a great deal of benefit to engaging with posts on Reddit and watching YouTube videos. In fact, I'm AI ambivalent! I genuinely think there are good uses of AI, too! But not if you're just trying to cram as many useless facts in your brain as possible.

And the whole subreddit is cringe, to be honest.