In defense of the dilettante
cultivate intellectual playfulness
“I can handle the business side”
In many tech and startup circles, “idea guys” - nontechnical people who think that they’ve come up with a good idea and all they need is a technical partner to help execute on it - are rampant, to the point of becoming a meme:
These people used to annoy me (particularly as an engineering student in college, dealing with countless idea guys from business school in my beloved startup circles). They came from a place of no technical knowledge of the field that they were trying to disrupt - so how could they have come up with a good idea?!
Earlier me had a lot of disdain for such folks - but, with time and age comes wisdom. I now think there is some value in being an “idea guy” (gender-neutral) of the best sort: curious about many things, playful with ideas, intellectually bold.
Don’t over-valorize experts
(I’ve talked about this a couple of times before - if you know me well, forgive me if it’s an overdone talking point.)
In The Art of Doing Science and Engineering, Richard Hamming describes how being an expert in a field means you’re more deeply embedded in the assumptions that field makes, which makes it harder to come up with a paradigm-shifting insight and “disrupt” the industry.
Kuhn… introduced the concept of paradigm (pattern, example) as a description of the normal state of Science. He observed most of the time any particular science has an accepted set of assumptions, often not mentioned or discussed, whose results are taught to the students, and which the students in turn accept without being aware of how extensive these assumptions are. There is also an accepted set of problems and methods of attacking them.
Maybe “expertise” is overrated. It’s probably healthy to have some skepticism of self-proclaimed experts!
It appears most of the great innovations come from outside the field, and not from the insiders... Consider archaeology. A central problem is the dating of the remains found. In the past this was done by elaborate, unreliable stratigraphy, by estimating the time needed to bury the material where it was found. Now carbon dating is used as the main tool. Where did it come from? Physics! None of the archaeology experts would have ever thought of it.
(The carbon dating example above illustrates an interesting nuance: it probably helps that you’re an expert in something, so that you’re able to take ideas from your field of expertise and apply them to another. Perhaps what made the idea guy so annoying was not that they weren’t an expert in their field but that their ideas were often baseless and weak - but then again, mine probably were too.)
Cultivate your taste
Rick Rubin is a legendary record producer and record label executive. He’s worked with many iconic artists, particularly in hip-hop (Jay-Z, Kanye West, Beastie Boys, and many more) and rock (Red Hot Chili Peppers, AC/DC, and still many more). Yet he claims he “knows nothing about music”!
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Crucially, he attributes his success not to any technical ability but to his taste.
Developing good taste requires examining what it is exactly that you like, and why. It requires self-awareness. It requires some degree of going against the grain. The emotional component of that is significant - cultivating your own taste inherently involves opening yourself up to skepticism and ridicule.
We live in a world that teaches us through every stage of our existence to follow a herd…
… The second you actually step away from any of this and start the work of asking yourself what you like, you start an act of literal rebellion: as a child other kids will tell you you’re weird. As an adult, your peers will pass veiled comments about the time you seem to have and strangeness of your audacity (do you really think anyone cares what you think?), coworkers will think you’re not spending enough time doing work and the icebreakers at the start of meetings focused around the last show you watched will always be really awkward.
—
, On Taste
You have to know what conventional wisdom is, and then disregard it:
If you want to discover great new things, then instead of turning a blind eye to the places where conventional wisdom and truth don't quite meet, you should pay particular attention to them.
In parallel, cultivating your own taste also requires intellectual playfulness. Not only do you need to have the emotional courage to step outside of your bubble - you also need to have access to paths for exploring that are numerous and varied and novel and interesting!
Curiosity is a virtue
I consider myself a fairly curious person.
Undoubtedly, countless people out there have much more intellectual capacity across a much wider range of interests than I do. Nevertheless, I could probably hold my own in an involved conversation on many of these interests. And I genuinely believe that this curiosity has brought a lot of joy and richness to my life!
The term “dilettante” is often used negatively:
The meaning of dilettante has changed since it was borrowed from the Italian in the mid 1700s. Originally, it meant "lover of the arts," but began to take on a negative slant as the idea of doing something as a professional took hold strongly during the 18th century. A dilettante was a mere lover of art as opposed to one who did it professionally. Today, the word implies you're pretending to be more of an artist than you're interested in or capable of being, so if you call your friend who likes to paint a dilettante, it's like you're calling him or her a poser.
Of course, pretentiousness is never a good look. Meeting someone who thinks they know much more than they actually do is almost always unpleasant.
(Though some people out there suffer from the opposite problem.)
But as long as it embraces a healthy dose of humility, I think there’s value in encouraging dilettantism! Dabbling in a range of things has added a lot of color to my worldview, and as I dabble more, the web of connected ideas in my head becomes denser. This adds depth to my thoughts and ideas, broadens the range of people I can build a connection with, allows me to contribute to different types of projects… I could go on. Being intellectually playful and rhyming ideas across different areas is a joyful experience for me. I’ve come to embrace being a dilettante.
And part of being a dilettante is being bold with my thoughts. Throwing my half-formed, midwit ideas out into the world and having them come in contact with reality is the best way to learn - and it’s fun, too!
Thoughtfulness is a virtue, too
The encouraging of intellectual curiosity and playfulness should be tempered by the encouraging of thoughtfulness. It’s good to create the social infrastructure for people to share their ideas freely - and it’s also good to nudge people to think through their ideas. Too many poor ideas in the air lowers the quality of discourse, and makes it harder for things to get done.
The failure mode here is to draw the finite resource of collective attention away from valuable ideas to your lesser-formed ones. Don’t be that type of idea guy.
From time to time I get very angry about the idea of stolen valor, by which I mean people claiming and pretending to be serious when they are not… people who are loudly, publicly unserious pollute the commons by making everyone else a little bit more cynical in response. This makes it harder for any kid to be taken seriously, which in turn means that as a society we get less of the glorious output of serious players. We crush the caterpillars and complain there are so few butterflies.
—
, Are You Serious?
Intellectual gatekeeping is lame
If I’m being honest with myself, the thought that somebody should be excluded from a discussion due to their qualifications reeks of insecurity. It’s classic IYI behavior, as Nassim Taleb might say. Ideas have quality (or a lack thereof) in themselves. There’s probably a correlation between someone’s background and the depth of their thoughts on a certain matter - but at the end of the day, good (or bad) ideas can come from anywhere and everywhere!
So to the idea guys I’ve encountered throughout my life: Apologies if I have been too cynical in the past. I’d like to encourage you (and myself) to continue to be playful and bold with your ideas, while making sure that they’re given some thought before being thrown out into the world.
On taste
Some more content:
Excellent episode of Conversations With Tyler with Rick Rubin
- : On Cultivating Taste
Thanks to
for reading a draft of this!
This post speaks to me in a deeply visceral way. Thank you for writing it.