Later today I should finish reading Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip & Dan Heath, an excellent book which anyone who gives presentations or is trying to effect change should read. However, this is not a review of the book, it’s a follow-up to my post on Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur. (Like a Zombie rising from the ground and slowly following me with a pronounced limp, mumbling “Braiiiiins”, this book will just not leave me alone.)
In this book the Heath brothers point to six factors that make ideas stick. Those factors are simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and stories. In the chapter on the concrete factor they talk about an idea’s credibility and the difference between something that is concrete and something that’s an abstraction. On page 113 I read the following:
“But if concreteness is so powerful, why do we slip so easily into abstraction?
“The reason is simple: because the difference between an expert and a novice is the ability to think abstractly.” [emphasis added]
Reading those words immediately made me think of Keen’s Expert v. Amateur. The problem isn’t experts v. amateurs it’s experts v. novices. If you want to use the word amateur against something, it should be professionals v. amateurs. In other words, the central premise of Keen’s book, that if you’re an amateur, you’re not an expert is flawed at best, wrong at worst.
What this comes down to is the definition of the word “amateur”. What you would expect me to do here is to delve into that a little further but this week I also found someone else, whom I admire and respect, that has seemed to come to the same conclusion as I have (at least when it comes to Keen’s flawed use of the the word amateur) and has explained it much more eloquently than I ever will. Lawrence Lessig goes into this in his blog post about Keen’s book in the section “The Amateur Fallacy” so I’ll let you read it there. If for no other reason than to get you to read his complete post as it clearly rebuts each instance in which Keen attempts to use Lessig to prove his point.
Hopefully, this will be my last post on Keen’s work but something tells me that I’ve not yet got a clear shot at the zombie’s head just yet.
