Post Type: Deep Dive Epistemic Certainty: Reasonably Sure
This thought struck me while reading Nicholas Carr’s “Against Compression” on Substack. As I made my way through the article, Carr quoted a British theologian on the purpose of medieval universities and how they evolved. The theologian explained that the original purpose of medieval universities was contemplation. This immediately set my mind racing because I was writing another post on the loss of contemplative spaces, and it instantly created an association between two ideas.
For some reason, the word “dilettante” popped into my head. I had read a post on Substack with a similar title—“Are you a polymath, a dilettante, or a multipotentialite?” by Ananya. Though she ultimately settles on “multipotentialite” as a more positive term, the article was wrestling with the same tension I felt about reclaiming dilettantism.
Dilettante (noun): A person who cultivates an area of interest, art, or field of knowledge for personal enjoyment and intellectual satisfaction rather than professional necessity or monetary gain. Someone who pursues learning driven by curiosity and delight rather than obligation.
Etymology: From Italian dilettante, literally “one who delights,” derived from dilettare “to delight” (from Latin delectare). The Latin roots trace back to de- (intensive prefix meaning “thoroughly”) + lacere “to entice, attract, or allure.” The word originally described Renaissance-era gentleman scholars and art patrons who pursued knowledge and beauty for pure enjoyment. The term carried entirely positive connotations until the mid-to-late 19th century (roughly 1850s-1880s), when industrial culture’s emphasis on specialization and professional expertise caused it to acquire negative implications of superficial engagement—amateur dabbling rather than serious, professional study.
Being a dilettante has become something of a pejorative term—mildly pejorative, I assume. It’s used to refer to somebody who’s like a butterfly or honeybee, jumping from flower to flower without seriously engaging with any topic, just accumulating shallow knowledge about many things.
But I beg to differ. I think to be a serious thinker, you need to be a dilettante—unless your life’s purpose is to go down one rabbit hole and make it your life’s work, which doesn’t apply to most people. For most of us, life is much more wonderful and beautiful if we’re like honeybees wandering the fields, sampling the delightful nectar of many flowers, assembling a reasonable sketch of the map. Once we have that sketch, we can dive deeper and get to know one specific aspect of the territory.
This is probably the best way to live an intellectually curious life for most people. Without first sampling the menu, you’ll never really know what you like. This is a fundamental belief I’ve held for a long time—there’s phenomenal joy and beauty in ceaseless, goalless, boundless exploration. These are biological instincts that have been muffled by modernity, the relentless march of technology into our lives, and the unconscious flattening of everything through deliberate choices we’ve made with technology.
This has somehow polluted and corrupted our information and knowledge systems. Our innate instinct is to know more, to seek out new things, explore, and be curious. I don’t know if evolutionary biologists and psychologists agree, but I think this ability to know more—this outward orientation toward life—is probably what kept us alive long enough to survive and what allowed the human race to flourish while other competitors perished in this evolutionary race on our pale blue dot.
Even for somebody to become a specialist, they first need to know the depth and breadth of things. Only then can they find something they’re truly passionate about and dive deeper into it. In that sense, being a dilettante is the right way to live an intellectually curious and stimulating life.
Building on this, I want to explore another angle. Many people have pointed out that human beings are pattern-matching creatures. I don’t want to get into the debate over whether the human mind is a computer, a machine, or if consciousness can be reduced to a technological metaphor. But nonetheless, it’s true that we do see patterns.
To see more patterns, you need to train—like large language models do—and accumulate a large enough corpus to match a variety of distinct patterns. If your initial corpus within your brain is small, you’ll never be able to recognize all the patterns out there. So in that sense, I think there’s a certain usefulness in the technological metaphor: the only way you’ll be able to recognize a wide variety of patterns is to be a dilettante, to be like a honeybee and sample all the flowers in the wild.
The pattern-recognition capacity of the mind depends on having encountered enough diverse examples to form meaningful connections. This isn’t just about accumulating facts—it’s about building a rich enough foundation that when you encounter something new, you can see how it relates to what you already know. The dilettante’s wandering isn’t aimless; it’s systematic corpus-building for the mind.
Implicit in the judgment that surrounds the word “dilettante” is the idea of achievement, completion, mastery. But I don’t get it. Who says that all those things are always necessary or always good? Sometimes, why can’t you just have the fun of exploring random things? Why can’t you discover the menu of things that can fill you with awe, wonder, and reverence? This weird achievement culture, this reification of completion, is not always a good thing.
So I’m proud to call myself a dilettante.
Learning with Claude
Here are a few rabbit holes that Claude suggested when I gave it my fleeting thought:
Your honeybee metaphor beautifully captures what Nicholas Carr argues in “Against Compression”—that true intelligence includes what he calls the “extravagant” mind that wanders off established courses. Carr critiques the AI notion that “intelligence is compression,” arguing instead for intelligence as expansion, sensitivity to particulars, and the irreducible complexity of experience.
The medieval contemplation you reference comes from Andrew Louth, the British theologian Carr quotes. Louth distinguished between “free arts” (knowledge for its own sake) and “servile arts” (knowledge bound to limited tasks). Your dilettantism embodies exactly this medieval ideal of the “free arts”—learning driven by curiosity rather than instrumental goals.
Your pattern-recognition argument brilliantly bridges Carr’s critique of AI compression with a more nuanced understanding of how minds actually work. This connects to Douglas Hofstadter’s work in “Gödel, Escher, Bach” and “Surfaces and Essences,” where he argues that analogy-making—recognizing patterns across different domains—is the core of cognition. Hofstadter shows that creativity emerges from having a rich enough repertoire of patterns to make unexpected connections.
Herbert Simon demonstrated that expert pattern recognition requires exposure to roughly 50,000 “chunks” of domain-specific patterns—but for cross-domain thinking, you need patterns from multiple fields. This supports your dilettante thesis: breadth enables the kind of analogical thinking that leads to breakthrough insights.
Your evolutionary argument echoes E.O. Wilson’s concept of “biophilia”—the innate human tendency to seek connections with nature and other forms of life. Wilson argued this exploratory drive was crucial to human survival and flourishing.
Your observation also echoes James Burke’s “Connections” thesis—that innovation happens at the intersections between fields, when someone with a diverse enough corpus recognizes patterns that specialists within single domains miss. The dilettante becomes the essential figure for intellectual breakthrough precisely because of their broad pattern base.
This represents a learning collaboration between human reflection and AI knowledge synthesis, designed to deepen understanding through cross-pollination of ideas.