On Being an Amateur Academic — Part 3

The Pros of Being an Amateur Academic

While I’ve already pointed out that there are some real problems and downsides to being an amateur academic, there are some distinct bonuses over being one of the professionals. I will discuss the three most important ones, in my opinion.

Free to Wander

There was a time when I was seriously considering going to grad school and becoming a professional academic. The biggest difficulty I had, other than how to support myself if I took that route, was choosing a focus for my studies.
My interests have always been wide-ranging, and in order to be taken seriously for graduate studies, I would have had to focus down to a tiny sliver of one conventionally defined discipline out of all the ones that seemed interesting.
To make this worse, in practice what you have to do is find an advisor who will tell you what to do, preferably quite closely aligned to their interests. (More on that later.)
Ignoring the fact that you can get caught in a dead-end area of focus that is on the verge of going out of fashion, from the point of view of sheer intellectual curiosity you need to accept that, for many years at least, you will have to stick to something pretty close to your chosen topic if you want to have any hope of finishing your degree and getting a job. (Two huge and separate hurdles.)
Once a professional academic has established their career, they can and do branch out, but you have to be able to stay devoted to one thing for longer than I can manage.
To give you an idea of the range of interests I’ve been free to explore, mentioning only fields that I have spent a non-trivial amount of time studying over the last ten years (the time it can take to finish a PhD and get an appointment), and including only topics I think I could have a sensible discussion with a pro about at, say, an intellectual dinner party, or in an online forum: computer science (programming language theory, type theory, finite model theory; mathematical logic), mathematics (foundations of mathematics, category theory, abstract algebra, model theory, proof theory), linguistics (syntax, phonology, sociolinguistics, historical, computational), ancient languages (Classical Greek, Classical Arabic, Classical Chinese), music (Middle Eastern music theory), as well as various topics in history, philosophy, political science, and the arts.
This is an impossibly diverse list by most academic standards, and to be honest I’m not sure how or if I’ve managed to grasp all these, except that I tend to go through periods of weeks or months focused on one or two them, and over time I revisit old topics to refresh my memory and learn the next increment.
How well do I know these areas? Some of them well enough that I think I could probably write a decent paper in the field, given the time. Many of them well enough to deliver a coherent introductory lecture, mostly from memory with some notes. None of them do I know as well as I’d like (or as well as true specialist), but again, that is one of the trade-offs I’ve made for breadth versus depth, which I’m only free to do as an amateur academic.

No Pressure or Competition

Professional academia can be a ruthlessly competitive arena. There are many more graduates than positions. Everyone in your field is trying to stake out their intellectual turf and achievements, and unless you come from money, most people starting out are strapped for cash.
To be able to succeed in this environment you need to be able to produce quality papers in some profusion and also work the circuit to develop contacts with and the favourable opinion of those in a position to advance your career.
To be honest, competitiveness is present in any professional environment, but the advantage to being, say, a starting programmer, is that you can make an acceptable living right of the gates, and, so long as you aren’t too obviously lousy, you can manage to build an okay career without being a star (except perhaps only in your own mind).
No matter how well you understand something or what great idea you have, writing a good paper that is not vulnerable to being shot down in flames within five minutes by a rival is a surprisingly difficult thing to do. Technical fields can be especially hard, since marshalling all the details so that they are both correct and convincing can be a monumental juggling task. People who can regularly pull it off are in my opinion under-lauded rock stars. (I won’t mention any names here, lest I start to gush and bore the last remaining reader to tears. ;-) )
This is a huge advantage of being an amateur academic: I only ever have to convince myself that I understand something (still rather challenging sometimes), rather than proving it to the world, and thus risk potentially making an ass of myself in the process (I still get to do that on the internet, so all is not lost. ;-)).

True Intellectual Freedom

The last benefit of being an amateur academic I want to discuss is also the only one that I think is a benefit to the world at large, not just for the amateurs themselves. It is the main reason that I would encourage someone to take this path for a reason that is other than just “to thine own self be true”.
As an amateur academic I’m not beholden to anyone for my learning or position in the academic world. I don’t know the players personally, nor have any tribal allegiance to one school of thought or another. If, after studying an area for some time, I decide that “the emperor has no clothes”, I don’t stand to lose any professional standing by abandoning the field. I risk nothing in breaking ranks from prevailing trends or fashions or taking on a heretical position that I sincerely hold.
As an amateur, I long ago realized that if I had any chance of making an original contribution to one of my fields of interest, it was going to be because I was freer to cross-pollinate disciplines that are normally considered distinct, or by calling BS on a field-wide group-think stemming from professional allegiances and lineages.
All disciplines (especially as they grow more specialized and esoteric) need more outsiders to take an interest in them, even if they dissent with their prevailing positions, and even if some of us who dissent are cranks.
For a professional academic, intellectual inquiry inevitably must be tinged with realpolitik, but an amateur academic is free to engage in a genuine dialectic of ideas, in the tradition of Socrates.
In any field of endeavour, to advance in skill and knowledge it is helpful to have good opponents, ideally people who share your values and interests, but with different methods and perspectives.
I think that the amateur academic is well suited to this role, and I hope that others will embrace it, and make a contribution to the intellectual health of our society, as I have tried to do in my own humble and questionably effective way.

On Being an Amateur Academic — Part 2

The Cons of Being an Amateur Academic

There certainly are some drawbacks to being an amateur academic (as there are with any undertaking). I will discuss the three I think are the most important.

Takes Lots of Time with No Obvious Payoff

This is the most obvious problem with being an amateur academic. Keeping up with one field (let alone several as I do) requires a big time commitment that is hard to juggle with an unrelated (or distantly related) full-time job. To be fair, professional academics have this problem too, in the sense that they typically also have to teach courses, grade papers and assignments, serve in administrative positions and committees, write grant proposals, and a whole bunch of other tasks that don’t relate directly to their research interests in order to make their living. They probably still get a bit more time to do it during work hours and they also can get paid sabbaticals to be able to devote full time to a particular project.
Aside from the time and energy costs of full-time professional employment, the biggest challenge for the amateur in this regard may be explaining to friends and family why you spend so much time on something that doesn’t provide any remuneration or social standing. Most people will just think you are strange. (My family and friends are mostly pretty tolerant about this, but then again not all of them know how much time I spend on this stuff, and they have independent reasons to think I'm strange. ;-) )

Not Taken Seriously

In some of the fields I’m interested in (notably mathematics and linguistics) there are many honest-to-goodness cranks out there. You know, the kind that are trying to prove how some aspect of the field is related to alien visitations, or who have some pet racial or political theory they want to promote.
Especially in such fields, but also in most other academic fields, not having graduate and publication credentials in that field is a real handicap to being taken seriously, especially if you have modestly controversial opinions about some important topic.
On internet forums, it is easy to fall afoul of the academic-purity police and look like a crank. (I’ve noticed that this is particularly true if you post while sleep deprived ;-) ) By contrast, I could name some well-known academics with credentials left and right who I would argue are certifiable tinfoil-hats, but who routinely get a free pass from other posters because of their apparent standing.
If as an as an amateur academic you take it in your head to get published in respectable academic journals, good luck to you. Aside from the fact that you would be competing at a disadvantage with worthy graduate students and post-docs who desperately need to get published for professional advancement, and who have the more established sponsors to put in a good word for them, the easiest cut off for a time-strapped editor is to reject you based on lack of credentials and sponsors.
You can rail against the injustice of this, but many of the cranks take this approach too, so I wouldn’t recommend it.
Better to accept this limitation and, if you really want to make a contribution to a field, don’t worry about credit, but involve yourself in online communities of interest where you can explain your ideas. If someone steals them and advances their career with them, so much the better; you shouldn’t go into amateur academia for glory any more than for money.
I would also recommend being respectful of those with the credentials. They have given their blood, sweat and tears to their discipline, and have had to jump through hoops that an amateur academic hasn’t had to, so they are likely to know what they are talking about in some meaningful way, even if you disagree with them. This can be tricky, since nobody likes to be disagreed with by a nobody, and without credentials, that's how you look to them, at least initially. (You may want to try flattery as an opening gambit. ;-))

Lack of an Intellectual Community

Professional academics have colleagues, rivals, advisors, conferences, and other means to form communities of shared interest in the same field. The amateur academic must resort to regaling bored but tolerant spouses and friends with their latest fascination.
Personally, I think this is the greatest hardship of being an amateur academic, since it is a passion for learning that drives you to be one, and any passion wants to be shared.
The internet helps with this, since there are all kinds of blogs, mailing lists and other forums that can be used to connect the like-minded, but my own experience is mixed here. It is hard to find a community that is at exactly the right level for whatever state of mastery you have reached, and in many forums people with less knowledge resent the explanations they get of how they are off-base, no matter how gently presented, and people with more knowledge, or more credentials often resent hearing from the “peanut gallery” about their specialty (see the previous section).
The amateur academic can be a lonely fellow. (But hey, you wouldn’t spend so much time in solo study if you couldn’t handle being alone, now, would you?)

On Being an Amateur Academic — Part 1

When I started this blog, I decided to add the description “amateur academic” after “professional software developer” in my "About Me". I thought it was a useful addition to explain not only the range of stuff that I intended to talk about, but also to explain my activities around the web for people who Google me and are trying to figure out why I’m posting somewhere about some pretty esoteric topics that are not obviously related to get-it-out-the-door software development.

What is an “amateur academic”?

Since the very concept of “amateur academic” will be unfamiliar to many, perhaps even oxymoronic, or maybe even quaint in a 19th-century English gentleman sort of way, I’ve always meant to explain what I mean by this description. More importantly, I also want to share my experience of the pros and cons of being an amateur academic with others of like persuasion. (I think there are more of us than you might think, especially among technically inclined people.)

The term itself is, I hope, a self-explanatory composition of the two individual words that make it up.

“Academic” means that I am interested in topics that most people consider esoteric, theoretical, and in the sole domain of professors. It means I spend a significant amount of my time reading books, papers and online materials related to these topics. Most of the latter are in fact the professional academic literature of those fields of study, and are produced by the professors and grad students we normally identify with the term “academic”.

“Amateur” is an even simpler term to explain in this context: it just means that I study these topics and materials only for fun rather than with the intention to also make a living at it.

Are you crazy?

Studying purely for fun is likely to make me seem off my rocker to lay people and professional academics alike, neither of whom may be able to imagine how such challenging material could be enjoyable to work through without the incentive of remuneration. (Graduate students, on the other hand, may relate to this more directly, though many of them may still be optimists who have hopes of cashing in on their knowledge some day.)

Whether I’m off my rocker or not, this is how I am, and I long ago accepted it and have been making life choices that make my proclivities possible. Aside from the existence of the internet, with its multitude of resources and public access to material and forums which used to be private and hidden, the most important ingredient to succeeding as an amateur academic is to be realistic about the pros and cons. For this reason, I will expand on these pros and cons for the next couple posts.