Here are other terms that might be used in place of (or combined with?) “Amateur” that have different shades of meaning...
“Self-funded”—Connecting to a relatively long tradition going back long before Vannevar Bush set up what I personally think of as “Vannevarian Science” during a period proximate to WW2 (with the NSF and so on). There were grants before then, from what I can tell, but many fewer, and a lot of science from before that point was performed by what seem, through a modern lens, to perhaps be just “semi-retired geeks with a hobby in experimental natural philosophy”.
“Unsubsidized”—Very similar to “self-funded” but focusing more on the sense in which modern “funding” is almost always (in these post-modern times) still mostly money from a government, using tax dollars, which maybe comes with strings attached (from the perspective of the thinkers) that (from the perspective of tax payers) are in some sense morally proper if the state is operating with the consent of the governed and on behalf of the interests of those who pay taxes. Thus (properly?) the state actor is probably aiming to benefit tax payers by (properly?) controlling the thinkers who are on the tax payroll. (Subsidized thinkers often don’t like to think of themselves as “controlled and/or on someone’s payroll”, so sometimes focus on saying “we” instead of “I” and emphasize peer review or similar non-incentive-compatible processes? Maybe? That was a clever hack when Vannevar et al tried it, but it is not clear how it could work on very long time scales in the presence of political regime turnover.)
“Patron-Funded”—This isn’t self-funded, but it does cut out the coercive machinery of the state. With patreon and youtube there seems to be a minor renaissance of “polypatronized” thinkers, while in the past (before Vannevarian funding models arose) my impression is that singularly rich people, verging on princely (oligarchic?) power, would fund a genius or two so that their filthy lucre (<3) could buy them timelessly important contributions to the advancement of human knowledge… or something? I don’t think I’d know who Cosimo the Elder was if not for his patronage, for example.
“Feral”—If the thinking and data collection and writing are performed by someone who was, for a while, part of ancient and subsidized institutions of research and learning, you expect their thinking to follow many of the normal channels of those with similar formative processes. Then later some separating event might occur such as: being thrown back, or being permanently evoked (perhaps to do work on a black project), or otherwise going extramuros (as by personal choice, and/or after conflicts, to escape inquisitorial interference in their work). There is expected to be a spicy story here!
“Outsider”—As with outsider art, a thinker who “isn’t even feral”, so much as completely formed by themselves, from their own effort, without the oversight or pedagogy of pre-existing disciplinary boundaries or planned formative curricula. Ramanujan might count as “the best sort” of a person like this, and often many of the high quality ones seem to have a life arc where they end up being offered resources by institutions which might otherwise seem lesser (the institutions would seem lesser) for the absence of such bright lights. This life arc is maybe “common for the ones you hear about” but rare in general?
“Autodidact”—Smart enough outsider thinkers are likely to run across this term and might self-identify this way, but so might some feral intellectuals, or just any random smart person who reads and thinks and stuff. I tend to like them, and one way to find them is to notice when people say a rare word, with semantic accuracy, but using an idiosyncratic pronunciation. Such people have often never talked about many topics they’ve studied, having only read the words in text, and then they back-construct plausible pronunciations from the letters, and this is a recognizable hallmark when they are talking. Some people use the label “autodidact” pejoratively, perhaps from believing that knowledge can or should be organized in a standard way, and thinking that it is critical to how specialization and expert communication should work. The criticism is not totally unfounded. If Kuhn is right, there actually can’t be “science science” if everyone remains an autodidact and if no specialist jargon (based on presumptive classics (with recursive selection and amplification (into sociologically reified information cascades))) doesn’t sociologically occur to establish “a coherent field” with practitioners of the fields who mostly mutually recognize each other, and so on.
“Crackpot”—An autodidact of explicitly low quality, often (though not always) with weird metaphysics and, if their oeuvre is publicly visible, sometimes studied by psychoceramacists (who themselves are almost certainly unsubsidized). Some people identify this way as part of a complicated counter-signaling strategy (partly at themselves, perhaps based on half-baked virtue epistemic reasoning?) and the famous one that jumps to mind for me is RAW himself.
For reference (and as a sorted of potted methods section) this sort of typology is something I’ve played with for some time, mostly by the accumulation of many examples, pursuant to a general hobby-level interest in cliology of science.
(This sketch of a lexicon isn’t coherent (or MECE) or a proper taxonomy, much less an ontology, and I don’t want to commit to exactly this here and now… but “amateur” doesn’t seem to me to carve reality at the joints, especially if it normally denotes “not paid and also unskillful” while it sort of connotes “without Vannevarian subsidy, but rather among the hoi polloi”. I would go with “unsubsidized” in fast/dirty contexts and “non-Vannevarian” if I had time to justify the term.)
Cliology of science is interesting because cliology in general is plausibly impossible, and if cliology in general is impossible (as is likely) then an important candidate reason for this would be because “maybe science can’t be predicted in advance”, and so… if science itself (or parts of it) somehow can be predicted in advance… then predicting merely the subset of history that includes science would help in building the full(er) scale vision of a total cliological model… which is semi-plausibly the most important science that might hypothetically exist. Cliology of science is thus a useful place to work if one wants to de-risk the larger project, I think? <3
Also (with apologies for so obvious a plug, but the issue is right next door to the actual topic) if a benificient reader is interested in upgrading me from “Self-funded Metacontrarian” to “Patron-funded Polymath” feel free to PM me <3
Here are other terms that might be used in place of (or combined with?) “Amateur” that have different shades of meaning...
“Self-funded”—Connecting to a relatively long tradition going back long before Vannevar Bush set up what I personally think of as “Vannevarian Science” during a period proximate to WW2 (with the NSF and so on). There were grants before then, from what I can tell, but many fewer, and a lot of science from before that point was performed by what seem, through a modern lens, to perhaps be just “semi-retired geeks with a hobby in experimental natural philosophy”.
“Unsubsidized”—Very similar to “self-funded” but focusing more on the sense in which modern “funding” is almost always (in these post-modern times) still mostly money from a government, using tax dollars, which maybe comes with strings attached (from the perspective of the thinkers) that (from the perspective of tax payers) are in some sense morally proper if the state is operating with the consent of the governed and on behalf of the interests of those who pay taxes. Thus (properly?) the state actor is probably aiming to benefit tax payers by (properly?) controlling the thinkers who are on the tax payroll. (Subsidized thinkers often don’t like to think of themselves as “controlled and/or on someone’s payroll”, so sometimes focus on saying “we” instead of “I” and emphasize peer review or similar non-incentive-compatible processes? Maybe? That was a clever hack when Vannevar et al tried it, but it is not clear how it could work on very long time scales in the presence of political regime turnover.)
“Patron-Funded”—This isn’t self-funded, but it does cut out the coercive machinery of the state. With patreon and youtube there seems to be a minor renaissance of “polypatronized” thinkers, while in the past (before Vannevarian funding models arose) my impression is that singularly rich people, verging on princely (oligarchic?) power, would fund a genius or two so that their filthy lucre (<3) could buy them timelessly important contributions to the advancement of human knowledge… or something? I don’t think I’d know who Cosimo the Elder was if not for his patronage, for example.
“Feral”—If the thinking and data collection and writing are performed by someone who was, for a while, part of ancient and subsidized institutions of research and learning, you expect their thinking to follow many of the normal channels of those with similar formative processes. Then later some separating event might occur such as: being thrown back, or being permanently evoked (perhaps to do work on a black project), or otherwise going extramuros (as by personal choice, and/or after conflicts, to escape inquisitorial interference in their work). There is expected to be a spicy story here!
“Outsider”—As with outsider art, a thinker who “isn’t even feral”, so much as completely formed by themselves, from their own effort, without the oversight or pedagogy of pre-existing disciplinary boundaries or planned formative curricula. Ramanujan might count as “the best sort” of a person like this, and often many of the high quality ones seem to have a life arc where they end up being offered resources by institutions which might otherwise seem lesser (the institutions would seem lesser) for the absence of such bright lights. This life arc is maybe “common for the ones you hear about” but rare in general?
“Autodidact”—Smart enough outsider thinkers are likely to run across this term and might self-identify this way, but so might some feral intellectuals, or just any random smart person who reads and thinks and stuff. I tend to like them, and one way to find them is to notice when people say a rare word, with semantic accuracy, but using an idiosyncratic pronunciation. Such people have often never talked about many topics they’ve studied, having only read the words in text, and then they back-construct plausible pronunciations from the letters, and this is a recognizable hallmark when they are talking. Some people use the label “autodidact” pejoratively, perhaps from believing that knowledge can or should be organized in a standard way, and thinking that it is critical to how specialization and expert communication should work. The criticism is not totally unfounded. If Kuhn is right, there actually can’t be “science science” if everyone remains an autodidact and if no specialist jargon (based on presumptive classics (with recursive selection and amplification (into sociologically reified information cascades))) doesn’t sociologically occur to establish “a coherent field” with practitioners of the fields who mostly mutually recognize each other, and so on.
“Crackpot”—An autodidact of explicitly low quality, often (though not always) with weird metaphysics and, if their oeuvre is publicly visible, sometimes studied by psychoceramacists (who themselves are almost certainly unsubsidized). Some people identify this way as part of a complicated counter-signaling strategy (partly at themselves, perhaps based on half-baked virtue epistemic reasoning?) and the famous one that jumps to mind for me is RAW himself.
For reference (and as a sorted of potted methods section) this sort of typology is something I’ve played with for some time, mostly by the accumulation of many examples, pursuant to a general hobby-level interest in cliology of science.
(This sketch of a lexicon isn’t coherent (or MECE) or a proper taxonomy, much less an ontology, and I don’t want to commit to exactly this here and now… but “amateur” doesn’t seem to me to carve reality at the joints, especially if it normally denotes “not paid and also unskillful” while it sort of connotes “without Vannevarian subsidy, but rather among the hoi polloi”. I would go with “unsubsidized” in fast/dirty contexts and “non-Vannevarian” if I had time to justify the term.)
Cliology of science is interesting because cliology in general is plausibly impossible, and if cliology in general is impossible (as is likely) then an important candidate reason for this would be because “maybe science can’t be predicted in advance”, and so… if science itself (or parts of it) somehow can be predicted in advance… then predicting merely the subset of history that includes science would help in building the full(er) scale vision of a total cliological model… which is semi-plausibly the most important science that might hypothetically exist. Cliology of science is thus a useful place to work if one wants to de-risk the larger project, I think? <3
Also (with apologies for so obvious a plug, but the issue is right next door to the actual topic) if a benificient reader is interested in upgrading me from “Self-funded Metacontrarian” to “Patron-funded Polymath” feel free to PM me <3