polymathy (n. uncountable) /pəˈlɪməθi/
The knowledge of many arts and sciences; variety of learning.
I love learning and, when I was at school, I was particularly good at natural sciences and maths. I went on to do an undergraduate masters degree in mathematics, but for "reasons" it didn't go well. Regardless, as I'm sure with many, in the intervening twenty-to-thirty years, I have forgotten almost everything! I don't much like this situation and the Polymathy Project is my attempt to correct it.
My idea is to use AI as a tutor: assessing my latent levels of understanding; building syllabi upon this; and then exercising those topics via the Socratic method. I hope to attain at least A' Level standard (UK pre-university level) across the board and beyond. However, I'm conscious that I'll have to do this around full-time work, so I have no misconceptions about how long it's going to take (years!) and how ambitious a task this is.
While I feel no need to publish my conversations, this Logseq graph is made public. This is to keep me honest and accountable. It also enables anyone else who wishes to follow along; not by mindlessly reading my notes, but iterating on my instructions and syllabi. (You'll have to do the same work I'm doing, I'm afraid!) That is, I'm giving you the tools to get started.
I will be beginning with the natural sciences and maths, but I hope to add more interests as time progresses. I have another another masters degree in linguistics and like languages in general, but I doubt that would translate well to this mode. So maybe things like philosophy and classics would work well and make more a more rounded education. We shall see!
Those who know me might note the conspicuous exception of computer science. This is simple enough to explain: it's my day job. Not that I "know it all" — I don't and have no formal training in CompSci — but what I do know is enough to make a decent living and its academic subtopics of interest to me squarely fit under mathematics (and maybe physics). When I get to specialisations, I should cover these by fiat.
So what do I hope to achieve? Not a qualification: I've long coveted the idea of a PhD, but I'm not training to be a researcher and the economics of academia are perverse enough that I've stopped envying anyone who is. (Well, maybe still a little bit!) I just like to know things and to exercise my mind on those that interest me. If there's a further goal, it's fluency rather than credentials: being able to explain what I've learnt to a peer, or even a layperson, which is the test that shows whether I've actually understood rather than merely covered something. To take a slightly darker turn, this is also a deliberate act of "inner emigration"; somewhere to put my mind while the rest of my life is under considerable duress. (I should probably be attending to that instead, but…you know.)
Anyway, this is where the inversion comes in. Used the usual way round — as something to churn out content for me — AI makes me lazy: I get the output without doing the thinking that would have produced it. As a tutor, the labour lands back on me. It can set the problem, but it can't sit the exam. The obvious objection is hallucination and I don't dismiss it; I just think the subjects I've chosen are unusually well defended against it. Maths and the sciences don't tolerate quiet inconsistency; a wrong step has to contradict somewhere and finding out where is precisely the exercise I'm here for. Plus, if I do enshrine a howler in these notes, well...you know where to find me.