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Can you offer any examples of generalists (and/or rationalists) who have produced significant insights besides Eliezer? When I look at history, I see subject specialists successfully branching out into new areas and making significant progress, whereas generalists/rationalists have failed to produce any significant work (look at philosophy).
Leibniz, Da Vinci, Pascal, Descartes, and John von Neumann spring immediately to mind for me.
There's also Poincaré, often considered the last universalist. Kant is famous as a philosopher, but also worked in astronomy. Bertrand Russell did work in philosophy as well as mathematics, and was something of a generalist. Noam Chomsky is the linguist of the 20th century, and if you consider any of his political and media analysis outside of linguistics to be worthwhile, he's another. Bucky Fuller. Charles Peirce. William James. Aristotle. Goethe. Thomas Jefferson. Benjamin Franklin. Omar Khayyám.
Just thought of Gauss, who in addition to his work in mathematics did considerable work in physics.
Herbert Simon: psychology and computer science (got an economics Nobel).
Alan Turing: don't know how I could have forgotten him.
Norbert Wiener.
Good answers. Also, Pierre-Simon Laplace, one of the inventors of Bayesian statistics, was also an excellent astronomer and physicist (and briefly the French Minister of the Interior, of all things)
Yeah, Laplace certainly belongs close to the top of any such list.
There's probably a few in there. I won't try to dispute them on a case by case basis. There are, on the other hand, literally thousands of specialists who have achieved more impressive feats in their fields than many of the people you cite. (I take straightforward exception to Chomsky who founded a school of linguistics that's explicitly anti-empirical.)
Not to defend anything specific about Chomsky's program, but "anti-empirical" is unfair. "Anti-empiricist" would be more reasonable (though still missing the point, in my opinion).
Another method may be to list the top 10 achievements first and then check whether a specialist or a generalist. I imagine Prometheus was a generalist.
This is a good idea. But I think 10 is too few. It would be better to pick the top 100 or 200, and see how many people who contributed to multiple fields are on the list.
I've not created the list first, but have thought of which of those I listed above have done something that would belong on that list, so feel free to take possible confirmation bias into account on my part, but even after trying to account for that, I think many of the following accomplishments would be on the list:
It's worth remembering that what we're looking for is not just people who contributed to multiple fields but generalists/rationalists: people who took a "big picture" view. (I'm willing to set aside the matter of whether their specific achievements were related to their "big picture" view of things since it will probably just lead to argument without resolution.) Leibniz would definitely fall into that category, for example, but I'm not sure Newton would. He had interests outside of physics (religion/mysticism) but they weren't really related to one another.
It should be noted that Turing and Shannon both studied with Norbert Wiener, and he might have come up with most of their interesting ideas (and possibly von Neumann's as well). Also, Wiener founded the study of cybernetics, made notable contributions to gunnery, and made the first real contribution to the field of computer ethics.
ETA: not to discredit the work of Turing, Shannon, and von Neumann, but rather to note that Wiener is definitely someone who made major contributions and should be on the 'generalists' list.
Wiener is on the original list I gave a couple of posts up.
Do you have a reference for Turing studying with Wiener and Turing getting his ideas from him? I checked all pages in Hodges's biography of Turing that mention Wiener, and none of them mention that he studied with Wiener.
Turing's Entscheidungsproblem paper (which also introduced the Turing machine) was published in 1936. The only (in-person) connection between them I found (though I didn't search other than checking the bio) is that Wiener spoke with Turing about cybernetics in 1947 while passing by on his way to Nancy.
Are there specific discoveries you believe are falsely attributed to Turing, von Neumann, or Shannon, and can you provide any evidence?