Pay = Competence?
Wednesday is Ideas day at the gym, but after I finish listening to the program, which is about 50 minutes long and still have about ten minutes of exercising to do, I fill in by listening to Future Tense. One of the broadcasts I listened to was an interview with Andrew Keen who has written a book The Cult of the Amateur about how amateurs are ruining American culture.[Link]
I have to admit to not yet having read Mr. Keen’s book although I have put it on my wish list. As those who have perused my mumblings have seen the distinction between amateur and professional is one that is of considerable interest to me. Indeed, I have made argument that much of what is wrong with our society today may be blamed on the abuse and incompetence of professionals, in particular professional politicians. For some reason, government in the last century has increasingly become characterized by deprecation of knowledge workers and the partisan and personal agendas of elected and appointed politicians. Many problems of a scientific and/or technical nature are amplified and accelerated by political non-solutions.
Mr. Keen’s interview on Future Tense, admittedly brief, and others, [Link] indicate a concern that the “writers” of the internet, those who blog and otherwise “publish” information are destroying society by misinformation. He states that information propagation on the internet should be the province of professional journalists.
Baldertripe! Ivory soap fraction of all journalists are as prone to misinformation as are the most rabid and demagogic bloggers. Reportage is almost uniformly slanted, diluted, and neutered. Key information is deleted as not contributing to whatever slant the “professional”journalist wants to convey under the excuse of being too detailed, technical, or difficult for the reader. Analysis is also biased towards the end state favored by the journalist or his employer.
Admittedly bloggers are poor discoverers of information, not being subsidized to search out information or given access to information sources. They also produce better coverage, better writing, and markedly better analysis in the epitome if not in the mean. Overall while the mean of bloggers may lag that of the mean of professional journalists, the upper tails of the blogger distribution are five and six sigma better than the upper tails of the professional journalist distribution. (n.b. the sigma are those of the professional journalist distribution, about an order of magnitude smaller than the sigma of the blogger distribution.)
One suspects that we are the victims of our own insecurity. With the increased insecurity of the workplace in the last couple of decades, we have overextended the application of the term professional. Do we really think that professional French fryers and office clerks are on a par with physicians and solicitors? What has happened to the dignity of craft or trade. Is plumbing a profession or a craft?
And what prithee is wrong with being an amateur? Until the Twentieth century most of the people who advanced civilization and society were amateurs. Yes, most amateurs are unworthy of hire, their abilities sparse and unformed, but the top ten percent of amateurs, those who are exception in their hobby or avocation, are far beyond their rank equivalent professionals. In most cases, we may look to professionals for acceptable performance blighted by stodginess and irrational, insentient, and incognative conservatism, but must trust to the exceptional amateurs for exceptional results that advance humanity.
