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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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What “profession” do you list on your tax returns? I end up with “financial advisor”, which is right in a meta way, but so wrong in the descriptive use for which it was directly intended by the US gov’t. And that makes me happy.
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doesn't seem like traditional compression (physician, lawyer, professor, grad student, soldier) gives an accurate pie chart of activities to relative laypeople either, tho. interesting that ppl assume you've been misleading them
Replying to
Why not use the "Uber for X" model and say you write Stratechery (or something similar they would know) for management consulting and magical thinking?
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