In Praise of Amateurism
I.
One of my icks is reading anything that was clearly only written because the author felt like they had to write, not because they actually felt the urgent need to share something.
That includes most books, most news and magazine articles, and research papers.
And you know what virtually all of these have in common? They’re published by professionals.
Professional authors, professional journalists, professional researchers.
It’s weird that the word professional has such a good and the word amateur has such a bad connotation nowadays.
“Amateur” comes from the Latin word “amare” which means “to love”.
“Professional” comes from the Latin “professio”, meaning a public declaration or vow.
In other words:
Amateur = one who acts out of love
Professional = one who acts out of declaration or duty
Both are absolutely valid modes of operation.
But it’s complete nonsense that only professionals can produce valuable work.
Especially in professions that require creativity I’d argue it’s rather the opposite.
Professional authors have to publish books regularly. That’s their profession. That’s how they pay the bills. That’s what society expects from them if they want to keep calling themselves professional authors. It doesn’t matter if they feel inspired or if they have any particularly good ideas. They have to sit down and type.
Professional researchers have to publish papers regularly. It doesn’t matter if they actually discovered anything interesting.
Worse, they have to carry out research no matter what. Whether they actually feel inspired to explore a deep question is not a factor.
The main concern is that their research is perceived as professional research in the eyes of their peers and public and leads to publishable papers within a few months.
Compare this to how amateurs operate.
They don’t adhere to any schedule. Society doesn’t expect anything from them.
And this gives them the freedom to actually focus on what matters.
Amateurs can freely follow their creative compass.
They can chase hunches and interesting problems without narrow material and objective constraints.
Quota-driven work kills curiosity.
The best work happens when people are free to have long stretches of no output in service of real discoveries.
II.
Not getting paid doesn’t make your work good.
What matters is why you’re doing it.
Many amateurs fall into the same trap as professionals.
They would love to “turn pro“.
So they try to produce work that will be perceived as professional work.
They sit down, at nine o’clock sharp every morning and write 5 pages.
The result is crap.
Amateurs trying to act like professionals are how unreadable junk books and crackpot papers get published.
Professionals at least have mastered their craft. Their work is mediocre, boring but technically sound.
Another misconception is that being an amateur doesn’t mean you’re just toying around.
Amateurs should be serious about their work.
But it’s the “seriousness of a child at play.“
A third misconception is that you can be a professional operating with an amateur’s mindset.
To win the professional game, you have to care about winning it. That self-selection kills curiosity.
People who once felt the spark to explore deep questions learned to suppress it until they forgot what it felt like. They lost it through attrition.
Exceptions do exist, of course. A tiny number of professionals manage to keep their meaningful work separate from their paid work.
But it’s always weird to read about, for example, researchers who proudly explain that on Sundays they finally have time to think about something interesting.
III.
It’s such a shame that amateurism is virtually dead.
Hardly anyone produces creative work just for the sake of it anymore.
Blogging is dead. Weak replacements like Substack constantly pushes users to put up a paywall. And once you do, you suddenly have to adhere to a schedule to give subscribers their money’s worth. You can’t just vanish for a few months until you have again something noteworthy to share. So you start churning out posts for the sake of it. The quality of your work quickly deteriorates.
Amateur research is dead. Killed by peer review.
Anderson’s “Long Tail” never materialized. Yes, it’s easier than ever to publish a book or research paper. But that abundance quickly backfired. With endless options, readers don’t explore the tail. They cling to the head. No one’s digging through thousands of junk titles to find a hidden gem. Even Google basically gave up digging through the internet’s long tail and started showing primarily results from a handful of big websites.
I wish I could propose any solution. Things aren’t looking pretty right now.
Maybe AI will help.
Once anyone can churn out mediocre, technically sound research papers and books their “value” will go to zero. Hopefully that’s when people will stop acting like they matter.
Amateurs don’t need AI to fill pages with fluff because they have no quota to fulfill.
Typing was never been the bottleneck for progress. Thinking was.
And it doesn’t seem like current AI technology is any real help with that.
To understand why there’s just one fact you need to know:
AI models trained on their own outputs become worse not better.
Why?
Current AI tech is simply producing “blurry JPEGs of the internet“.
And if you keep copying JPEGs of JPEGs, the image decays.
Data is the main bottleneck to make current models better. If synthetic data could improve models, we’d have already hit escape velocity.
What this means is that AI isn’t able to produce original ideas, even though it’s admittedly extremely good at giving the impression that it can.
So maybe AI can help level the playing field.
It could help amateurs close technical gaps and eliminate the formal errors that make their work easy to dismiss.
Maybe that’s how genuine curiosity finally gets a fair shot again.