The Professional Amateur
A Four-Month Late Mission Statement
Introduction
If you read my back catalog, you’d know that the topics I like to cover are both very broad and very varied. From writing, the time travelling properties of caffeine, climate change, and economics, I cover basically whatever I want, whenever I want, however I want.
It makes for interesting articles, if nothing else.
The purpose of this blog was just to stash my wayward musings. That has not changed. But I think that after four months of going at it, my wayward musings have all gone in a single direction, writing towards an ending my heart knew but my head did not.
I want to be a professional amateur.
The Concept of a Professional Amateur
At first this construction is contradictory on its face. Someone enters a field as an amateur and progresses to being a professional as they get better. The idea of staying an amateur – in fact becoming a professional at it, seems as silly as looking for dry water or soft steel[1]. However, I think that not only do professional amateurs have the potential to excel, they are also more important than ever in our world.
Professional amateurs are dabblers, jacks of all trades and masters of none. Flitting between one discipline and another, using knowledge from one to buttress the other, professional amateurs learn enough of each field to be conversant, but not enough to be pigeonholed into that discipline. They bring a rigorous, professional approach to learning to fields in which they are relative amateurs, hoping to improve their performance at both by one stroke.
Above all, professional amateurs are experts at one thing - being productively wrong. By bringing fresh eyes and new perspectives to old problems, they follow in the shadows of true professionals and ask overlooked questions, or bring in their knowledge from other fields where applicable. Even if what they suggest doesn’t actually work, it forces people to open their mind, get out of their routines, and forge new paths forward. This atmosphere of learning and growing is the ferment from which innovations spring. As alcohol loosens the inhibitions and lightens the mood, so too does the professional amateur, telling stories learned from all walks of life, with the hope of enhancing all of them.
Businessmen, writers, lawyers, and ideally managers and politicians would be the types of professions where professional amateurs are best used - somewhere where domain knowledge is necessary but single-domain knowledge is insufficient to get the job done. Armed with interdisciplinary knowledge and a wide perspective, these people help direct and shape the forces that underpin the modern world in ways that are beneficial to all.
At least, that’s how I choose to see it. I’m an optimist at heart.
Elon Musk is Not the World’s Best Engineer
I think we can all agree that Elon Musk is not the world’s best engineer.
Sure, he sits at the head of Twitter, Tesla, and SpaceX, all firms that would imply he’s a good engineer of software, electric cars, and rocketry. And he likely does have knowledge in those fields, but for him to be the best engineer?
Why is your best engineer spending so much time shitposting on Twitter?
Clearly, it’s either because you don’t have enough engineering work for him to do (which we just established is false), or he’s simply not your best engineer – you want him for something else, say his promotional skill or ability to promote your brand. He’s not what you’d call a professional about it, either, considering he smoked weed live on camera on the Joe Rogan podcast. The stiff upper lip of professionalism this is not.
Despite this, he gets paid to do this thing he has no formal education for. No four-year degree, no master’s, no PhD. By all rights, he’s a professional amateur.
The Modern Technocracy
The long version of my thoughts on this are in my post about The Eternal Present, but the idea is simple. We increasingly live in a world where other people are no longer the driving force behind things, but procedures. Flowcharts. Decision trees constructed by technical expertise in order to remove judgment and make us follow technique – the one best way, according to Jacques Ellul. We agree to this curtailment of our judgment because we acknowledge that technique is the best way to do things, because it makes us money. After all, a mature adult has their college degree or higher education – the same kind of education that the Smart People at the Government Departments prescribing The One Best Way have, so their success is your success, right?
Only so long as you agree with them, yes.
Modern education is siloed in order to put professionals out into the world as quickly as they can – as they should, the sooner people learn something they can use, the better. The problem comes from the fact that people feel absolutely incompetent outside of their fields of expertise and/or interest, delegating their decisions to others. Even if they wanted to start remedying this situation, they have no idea where to begin, since they have to climb back out of their figurative silo and hop into someone else’s. Democracy is built on everyone having a say and putting it out there, and with a vast majority of people scared into silence by their lack of qualifications, the system’s core assumption has been kicked out from under it.
Upcoming articles will explain this better, but this is an example of society-wide communication overhead. Each individual is overloaded with information, forcing them to focus on their area of expertise and withdraw from others, confining themselves to only what they know, and having no opinion on what they do not.
Not so the Professional Amateur.
The Professional Amateur Mission Statement
My goal is to bring you old ideas in new combinations, and any new ideas that result. I commit myself to publishing at least one article every Friday night at 6 PM (GMT+8). Anything over and above that, you can consider a treat, or an idea I was so taken with that I had to write it out immediately, rather than waiting for the usual time.
I’d figure out a proper paid subscription so I can pay Substack their due, but Stripe doesn’t work in my country. Until then, I only take tips.
The blog has a personal benefit over and above just getting a lot of readers. Writing the blog functions as a thought audit, allowing me to iron out my reasoning and get things straight in my head.
In general, what we’ll be writing is casual dives or my personal takes on topics handled in a way that will allow you to easily segue into more professional or domain-specific parts of the conversation. By exercising our abilities in independent reasoning and giving you an idea of the framework that undergirds domains where I feel I have something to say, the Professional Amateur attempts to equip you to “peek under the hood” and inquire further on your own, both in the direction and to the depth of your interests.
In a world where everyone is throwing up their hands and leaving it to the “experts”, I, the Professional Amateur, will simply not. I will not abdicate my ability to reason and create to my more qualified peers. I will not surrender my say in society because I am of the wrong class. Most importantly, I will not subject myself to the ossifed formalism of modern thought, which resembles more a mere derivation of the past than a conjecture of the future. I will be wrong - intentionally, fearlessly, educationally wrong.
My articles will not be dry textbooks. Humor, understanding, narrative - I will attempt to make every essay a Full Cream Essay, and give them all to you in a single package. They will hop domains, just as easily speaking of urban planning as they do the architecture of the mind, reasoning in great leaps, without having to build a bridge of studies to get to where we wish to go. Instead, they will float upon conjecture and analogy, perhaps opening new paths where others may follow, or simply being flights of fancy and fantasy.
The journey is the destination. The mere act of thinking - not only within your expertise, but without it, is the prize.
We are not academics. Theory’s main purpose here is to buttress or explain personal observations, and you can be sure that every piece will center around an observation. I will play a little fast and loose, since real life is nothing if not fast and loose. People do not work by checking citations and logically checking all the boxes, they ride the waves of emotions, listen to the music of sentences, and all this carries us forwards and inspires us. We will aspire here to be both narrative and professional – the links will be there, the logic clear, but the narrative is the priority. We will be crossing the borders of many disciplines, so have your travel documents with you at all times. Ensure your seatbelt is fastened, tray tables stored in the upright position, and keep your arms and legs inside the ride at all times.
The goal is to one day be able to understand the world around you – to see the currents of current events, rather than feel adrift in an endless ocean of chaos. By introducing you to my mental models of the world, walking you through how I came up with them, I hope to equip you with the ability to formulate your own, and be better for it.
Become the captain of your fate, and the master of your soul.
[1] Sure, there are soft steels… but they’re soft steels. They’re still plenty hard compared to most other things.
Hello Argo, I think that you have hit upon something, the "Professional Amateur". It sounds like a fun journey, but I think that maybe it goes way deeper than you have explained.
a) Professionals get their expertise through years of experience, it's their whole career. They have a job, that allows them to stay with it. Who pays them? Someone who can afford to mount that type of endeavor. That employer will have a series of definite interests, that the professional will sooner or later have to reflect. He sure can't go against them.
You might say that a University has the interest to only discover deeper truth. It's neutral. But that University is also funded, in addition to their tuition. Donors may start small, and stating the earnest objectives of also discovering truth. But then comes the time when their donations are large and the institution has become dependent on them for its operating costs. Then if you don't change this policy, our donations will have to decrease. That institution has been subverted.
It happens 1,000's of times. Fire that professor or we'll cut you off of our charities. Professionals in all fields have become compromised.
Only Amateurs can afford to be honest! That is what you are creating, a reservoir of HONESTY.
b) You say "being productively wrong". But it is not your job to explain things. Your job is to ask obvious but ignored questions, make a hypothesis and force the so-called experts to explain it.
Society has been transformed into being "outward looking" and only based only on comparison. So we have abdicated our responsibility TO THINK. We're no longer human, but mechanical. (I hope someone will come by and oil your joints?) You said the same thing:
Quote
" I will not abdicate my ability to reason and create; to my more qualified peers. I will not surrender my say in society because I am of the wrong class. Most importantly, I will not subject myself to the mere derivation of the past rather than a conjecture of the future. I will be wrong, fearlessly. The journey is the destination. The mere act of thinking - not only within your expertise, but without it, is the prize."
"The goal is to one day be able to understand the world around you – to see the currents of current events, rather than feel adrift in an endless ocean of chaos. By introducing you to mental models of the world, walking through them with you, I hope to equip you with the ability to formulate your own, and be better off for it."
Well said.
c) With regard to promising a certain output, one article a week? Well, I would see how it flows. Sometimes there is a lot to say. It would be cool if new articles came out of questions from the comments. A discussion. I see you recommend Simplicius. He handles current events in a hostile environment. Point is, all his past posts are obsolete. Who goes to "un-current events"? So he doesn't need to organize.
Your posts won't go obsolete, and could remain interesting for some time. But they do get flushed through and buried. On my site I try to keep them available with a table of contents, and find them in the archive. Also I don't travel too far-afield in subject matter. So it is easier to keep them organized. (Substack lacks a lot on this, if they would allow you to keep posts in subject folders that would be fantastic.) But you can do like Simplicius, and start another stack, like his Dark Futura. Although I think he missed on it, because there is too much on the DARK and not enough on the FUTURA. That's my first impression anyway.
d) You are also a "Thinker", so you want people to follow your reasoning. Not necessarily convince, but to get people to question. So how do people "Think"? You talked about the architecture of the mind and riding the waves of emotions. What creates emotions anyhow? Do they have a life of their own? Do we just have to bear the burden of them?
These are first post subjects that could create the ground work for people to understand your reasoning trajectory. This is where I went on my site, to build a repository of mutual understanding.
That's just the way that I did it. From here, yes, I can talk about anything. I am not going to include built-in obsolescence though. For those subjects, let Simplicius and others like him handle it. I will start other blogs to get into any very different subjects. And I probably will not tie them together or relate them. Each will have a life of its own.
I am in to see what's the next thing you come up with.
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What you just described is a polymath and I agree. It's a great place to be! Here's a good intro to the Polymath.
https://www.polymathicbeing.com/p/the-bane-of-specialization-defense