Institutions are biography compressors. When somebody asks for my story in a context where I have to actually answer non-flippantly, every non-institutional year of my life adds about a minute to my story, but every institutional year can be efficiently explained in 10 seconds.
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Titles are the ultimate compressors. "Professor" or "VP of Sales" communicates entire volumes. Super shorthand. To communicate free-agent life content equivalent to "I am a professor at X university" (3 seconds) would take me like 3 minutes.
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"Professor" communicates a whole pattern. It says you have a certain pie chart of activities. It says you publish in certain ways, and supervise other people in certain ways. I do very similar things but I have to explain all of it because most people don't know any of it.
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The weakness of young self-descriptors like "blogger" is that they are not tight. They refer to about 100x broader scope of life patterns than say "professor"
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I need a compact way to introduce myself. When I introduce myself as "blogger and consultant" and people later find out everything hiding under there, they sometimes react like I've been misleading or putting a false humility posture. No, I just don't have a compression.
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In this context (titles, occupations), institutions also create barriers to entry, occupational licensing requirements, strict prerequisites. This is what gives many of these titles the ability to act as short-hand, because they imply a particular kind of power.
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