A Portrait of the Citizen Scientist as an Old Man

This post was originally titled "A Portrait of the Dilettante as an Old Man".

I am in my 6th decade of being a dilettante in my spare time.

Hmmm, "dilettante" may be too harsh. Here's "dilettante" in the online American Heritage® Dictionary:

dilettante /dĭl′ĭ-tänt″, dĭl″ĭ-tänt′, -tănt′/

noun

1. One who dabbles in an art or a field of knowledge.
2. A lover of the fine arts.
3. An admirer or lover of the fine arts; popularly, an amateur; especially, one who follows an art or a branch of knowledge, desultorily, or for amusement only.

I've spent far too many hours on this "art" or these "fields of knowledge" for me to consider it "dabbling", or my interest "desultory". And "for amusement only" seems somewhat demeaning, or at a minimum inaccurate? And while "amateur" has connotions of non-seriousness, in reality it just means "unpaid".

I was a professional astronomer & software developer, & I am currently a semi-pro musician, so I was being paid for my interest, at least at the start. That is, of course, all that matters - making $$$ [sarcasm]. [Capitalism ruins everything.]

Seriously though, I have been clearly a citizen scientist on at least 2 projects:

1. As an assistant/2nd pair of hands for my wife taking dozens of water samples of local creeks for Kentucky River Watershed Watch.

2. As a birder, entering 100s of bird lists & compiling to date 4 annual reports on "Birdwatching in Islandwalk". These have shown, I believe, how a program to increase littoral plantings, in particular spike rushes, to control bank erosion, has led to a large increase in our population of common gallinules and american coots, both of whom seem to really like the reeds.

So I will consider all these side activities of mine to be those of a citizen scientist. Hence the new and improved post title. ;->

---

My areas of interest over the years, until very recently:

1. Astronomy/astrophysics, particularly cosmology, extragalactic astronomy, clusters & superclusters of galaxies. My private cosmology, in which the big bang was actually ongoing fissions of pieces of the big bang (retarded cores) left behind in the center of active galaxies - the big bang as zygote - doesn't work. I did work as a professional astronomer 1972-1974.

2. Intelligence, natural & artificial, including evolutionary psychology & theories of mind & consciousness. When I read 3 books in a row where all of it - big brains, language, intelligence, consciousness - were attributed to sexual selection - i.e., "chicks dig it" - rather than species selection, i.e., "survival of the fittest", I was done with that. I did create computerized rule-based expert systems 1982-1986.

3. Economics, or more accurately abundance, blogged extensively here as "Economy of Plenty". Since my retirement from computing in September, 2012, I have read & reviewed/summarized 32 books on economic topics. After determining that economics is not a science - I'm not sure what it is - I discovered MMT, which posits, money is all just arithmetic [currently mostly rigged the way the oligarchs want it]; resources - both sources & sinks - are what we should be worried about. Based on part of MMT, I invented a branch of economics, stability economics! So I'm mostly done with that. I never worked in economics, my status is indeed "amateur".

4. I started singing age 7, playing guitar age 14, played in 3 rock bands in the Boston area aged 18-23, Back In The Day: 1970-1974. Since 2006, I have mostly been a semi-pro (people pay me to play sometimes) musician. After playing rock, blues, R&B, & pop in bands & 1 duo, my musical act since COVID, Jaz Dumoz, is struggling to find an audience. I'm playing pop tunes, mostly 1920-1940s, but, as pop tunes, not as jazz. I am not a jazz musician, I am not particularly a fan. So, the act is totally unique, maybe because, it doesn't work?

   In 2024, I had 0 paying gigs, 1st year since 2005, so my musician status lapsed to "amateur". I did have a gig this year, phew, back to semi-pro! But, losing interest in gigging, I enjoy more working up & recording old tunes - currently 205 on the @JazDumoz YouTube channel.

5. Birding, maybe a couple of decades now, as mentioned above. This year I've got moving the eBird data into a relational database (SQLLite) & doing more year-to-year analysis on my list.

I never dreamed that my 6th & possibly last area of interest would be ... Bullshit.

---

It started with my initial generative "AI" rant "Bullshit All The Way Down", which is now a homepage for the currently 6 posts I have written on this topic. This led me to realize that Bullshit in general pervades our modern society and should be a pressing topic of research. Generative "AI" aka Bullshit Generators will be a large contributor to the coming Bullshit Apocalypse, but there are many other forms of Bullshit that will also do their part.

I have read Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit", review coming shortly, and have a few other short books on the topic on my iPad. And I have started a post "A Taxonomy of Bullshit", to try and enumerate the many ways Bullshit is infiltrating everything. This post was the intro to that post, I have broken it out here so that that post can focus on Bullshit and the coming Bullshit Apocalypse. Watch this space.