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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

The use of “amateur” is indeed a very poor choice. An amateur is someone who seeks to master a skill or perform a craft for the love of the art, not for money. It’s the professional who is looking for the shortcut, not the amateur.

The amateur is the one who hones a tool’s edge until it’s razor sharp, and cuts away all unnecessary detail until they’ve found the essence of what they’re trying to achieve. The work of an amateur is often highly impractical and uneconomical, but sublimely beautiful.

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I think you are torturing this comparison by using different meanings of amateur and professional

A professional does mean "someone who does something for money" but it also often just means "someone who is very good at something"

Similarly, amateur does mean "someone who does something out of passion without wanting/needing to be paid" but also often just means "someone who is just starting out, is new at something, and is probably not good enough to be a (paid) professional doing it"

You're talking about the "passionate" amateur and comparing it to the "getting paid" professional. I think many people talking about amateurs and professionals are mostly talking about "amateurs (newbs)" and "professionals (very experienced)"

You just twisted the meanings of the words.

An amateur is not a master nor a disciple of a master (e.g. future master).

The vast majority of amateurs have no ambitions nor passion and simply give up early on, that's a rose tinted view.

Since they don't get paid to do it, they have to allocate their precious free time toward the skill, which means they don't have those 40 hour weeks where they spend all their time honing their skill to begin with.

Even someone who does a skill half heartedly without passion nor ambition is going to learn faster with those 40 hours at his disposal.

>The amateur is the one who hones a tool’s edge until it’s razor sharp, and cuts away all unnecessary detail until they’ve found the essence of what they’re trying to achieve.

That's not an amateur and you know that. By your logic Japanese master craftsmen doing this are amateurs.

It’s not I who have twisted the meanings of the words, it’s the people who use the word amateur when they mean hack. The word amateur is very old, and for most of its history [1] it literally meant lover and in the case of practitioners of some art or sport, it meant those who participate out of love for the activity, not for money.

[1] https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/amateur

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