Based upon a decade of experience promoting polymathy, I would guess about 1% of the population is polymathic. After an enormous effort and five years of work, I found about 3,000 of an estimated 12,000,000. Clearly, that isn't going to fly. Angela Myers Cotellessa and Michael Araki are prominent in a Facebook group of 594 members. Between one third and one half are people I invited from Polymathica. Clearly, it is playing around on the margins. Also, it is becoming dominated by people who are not really polymaths, but fancy themselves as such. There are other larger 'Polymath' groups on Facebook, but they are dominated by Kurzweil style technologists, not polymathic types.
I am moving to Locals because, in the long run, its structure will allow us to build a real community with the power to craft polymathic options in education, careers, research and, community. The first reason for that is the functionality that allows us to advertise for members. The basic structure is free sign up with some accessibility and fee-based membership that allows one access to the social media and premium content. Dave Rubin built locals because his access to Patreon was being restricted. But as he built it, he added great functionality that was unavailable on Patreon.
Signing up for Polymaths will first allow for an e-mail based newsletter. Right now, I am posting things, such as this, sporadically. However, eventually, it, hopefully, evolve into the e-mail based ezine, The Polymath, that I have envisioned for five years or so. Not only will this provide 'value added' to membership, it will provide significant income opportunities for polymathic pundits.
Locals.com also allows for video and audio content. Eventually, I hope that we will have several members who produce and distribute podcasts as well as news, opinion, analysis and entertainment videos. Additionally, those who are more oriented to writing books will be able to quickly offer their work to a large and appropriate market.
Polymathic children need a different form of question first, autonomous education. They will grow up to be lifelong learners and will need the skills of autonomous learning to support their never ending quest for learning. Additionally, as I have argued for over twenty years, we need credentials for Polymaths that cannot really be conferred by traditional institutions of higher learning. As we already see, they tend to create classroom structure and make it a new subject, Polymathic Studies, rather than understanding that polymathy does not recognize subject boundaries.
In order to make this happen, we will need several active participants. Obviously, we will need membership outreach people who will deploy about half our membership revenue to acquiring more subscribers and members. We also will need a person to run the site. Lastly, we will need a person (not right away) who will act as an ad agency, providing monetization for the many people who will serve the subscription and membership base. These functions will be compensated from the other half of the membership fee. I think that we will need about 20K members to really make these fully compensated activities.
Most of the current content providers in Locals are setting their membership at 5 USD per month or 50 USD per year. However, Tulsi.Locals.com and Coffee with Scott Adams, are 70 USD per year. I generally consider this to be too high. I believe that $12 per year is sufficient to fund a growing membership base that will, over time, take us into the seven figures that we will need to really make Polymaths everything that it can be. Therefore, I am going to set the initial member support at $24 per year.
We have a long way to go, but I am extremely hopeful that, at last, we have the platform we need. Eventually, of course, we will be looking for our own platform. But, for now, that is a future dream not a current plan.
Hi all, I live in Canada. And the article " The Inappropriately Excluded " is really something that deeply resonates with me, and has helped make sense of my life. That I've been going back to it for years as a reference. But today found out there is this meetup group. Excellent stuff!
So I'm wondering what are people's interests here?
I like transition planning, and how we'll get through the end of oil,
archival of important documents, talking to international advisors and politicians about it. Also run several businesses. And do a lot of religious stuff,
cause that's best way of connecting with the uh IQ challenged majority in terms they can understand. So for that I run anabaptist.ca and got like outreach for all sorts of faiths, like humanism, islam, communists, chinese, hindus, christians etc: https://anabaptist.ca/dyet/
Hi! Just joined. I discovered this group through the Inappropriatelt Excluded article and it hit home. Looks very interesting :)
After Dobbs v Jackson, people are saying they want to move to Canada? Why? There is no part of Canada that allows abortion after 23 weeks. And, of course, nowhere in Europe are abortions legal after 24 weeks. So, if one really feels that access abortion is so important, the best thing to do is move to California. It has the most Progressive abortion laws pretty much anywhere, save China, North Korea, and Vietnam. Honestly, if this is your thing, then you should move to California. Whatever state you are in, they will celebrate your departure.
