Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar by James Marcus Bach

[grundomatic]

Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar by James Marcus Bach is a quick, easy read promoting self-education and wide learning. Less technical than Early Retirement Extreme, less self-helpy than Refuse to Choose, with a lot of his own personal story throughout the book. Could be a good read for the aspiring Renaissance person for another take on "bucking the system and going your own way".

[Scott 2]

I came across Bach from his work in software testing. Funny to see the two worlds collide:

https://www.satisfice.com/

[grundomatic]

I just returned the book and didn't feel like doing a complete write-up, but many things in the book seem to come up here. A few:

Reputation over credentials
Learning one thing making it easier to learn other things
Following interests leading to paid work later
Multi-disciplined approach
Systems thinking

There were also enough differences that it had a different feel than ERE, so I recommend for beginning/aspiring renaissance individuals that want a different take on the subject. Old pros may not get much from it at all.

[Jin+Guice]

This book fucking slaps. Great recommendation!

[grundomatic]

This book fucking slaps. Great recommendation!

No surprise that you would like it. Originally traders and BBQ pit masters, the first buccaneers got tired of being screwed over by Spain, so they decided to live off the (Spanish) economy instead of in the economy. PirateCaptainERE, indeed.

[Jin+Guice]

I do have a real hard-on for pretending to be a pirate and anyone else who uses the same metaphor. I additionally liked this book because it covers skill building, particularly skill building without reference to spending or frugality (but not specifically in opposition to frugality).

[grundomatic]

Yeah, that's why I recommended it. Plenty of personal finance/investing books around, but fewer renaissance ideal books.

[jacob]

I'm not entirely sold. I think the application/method is very niche and hard to replicate. Probably mostly useful for the rare person who, like the author, is gifted, hates school (The working title of the book was IIRC "Schooling kills"), has an IQ>135, and is endlessly curious about learning new things.

Combining this [talents] with an attitude of "everything I need to know can be found on wikipedia"(*)/"learning as I go along" only really works in roles where "asking good questions" is more important that "knowing answers". Software testing would be one such field. Nuclear reactor design is not. Having worked exclusively in the deepest parts of the "answering"-kind of fields that require years of study before one can even begin to be useful, I don't know in what other fields where "fake it until you make it" would be a robust strategy, but I'm sure they exist. I suspect it works best in fields that are in their earliest stages of succession. Recognize them by their extremely short (<3--6 month) training to employment cycle. Remarkably software still falls within this.

Towards the end of the book, he does give a couple of examples, where the strategy has failed to provide remuneration/conventional success concordant with the actual skill level developed (example provided was an analytical philosopher who also builds wooden boats but drives limos for a living). I don't see anything wrong with making a living as night watchman or dishwasher while pursuing all kinds of other interesting interests, but I suspect this would be the more typical outcome of someone who drops out to make their own way.

On the other hand, for those who are FI, the methods are pretty useful for keeping oneself active (at least if you're highly intelligent and have an insatiable curiosity... perhaps these are sufficient but not necessarily necessary??!) beyond the default tropes of travel, concerts, family/children, and/or volunteering/fun jobs.

(*) I'm triggered! The problem with self-education is that it lacks contextual structure. While the lack of structure helps to unbind the "novel" and "non-obvious" parts of the creative trifecta, recall that in order for something to be considered creative, it also has to be useful. Self-education has a [high] risk of developing glaring blindspots in one's knowledge that can result in lots of work wasted on something that a formally educated person would immediately recognize as useless (because they know that the problem was already solved 80 years ago). IOW, self-education easily leads to crackpottery. It's not even a case of carefully checking your results as a self-educated person. That is required but not sufficient. The problem is that you don't know what you don't know. You must at least "review" your work against others. Yet, this means that you must lean on someone who has structured education to keep your unstructured ideas in check. The group of buccaneers must thus contain at least one "structured member".

[Jin+Guice]

@jacob: I don't think the author developed as good of a strategy as I think he thinks he developed. It's not textbook, it's a case study. The ERE book is quite rare in that I think one can just follow the instructions (in so much as there are instructions... the fact that the instructions in the ERE book are general makes it so one can follow them in a range of situations). I think the ERE book is also rare in that it tries to make a formal theory rather than just extrapolating and backwards justifying from one interesting success.

Though the author and the book are very anti-school, he does say several times that if you like school, the mindset can still be applied within a schoolastic setting.

Side-note about academia: Having my own glimpse into academia, I think the idea the ultimate goal of schooling is to contribute to an original research position where the goal is to push the envelope of actual human knowledge is... not what most people think school is for... but that is what PhD+ level academia thinks of schooling as. I think the vast majority see school as training for an eventual job in society and it is very inefficient at that. I also think that the vast majority of jobs don't require much creativity or thinking once one has learned the basics.

I wouldn't recommend this book to you actually as I don't think it contains any new ideas. A big difference between you and I is that I like details and, in most cases, I like to let other people work out the theory.

Why I recommend this book is there still aren't a lot of case studies of people who broke free of the consumer praxis, and while I don't even think this dude did that, he did something adjacent to it and I think reading about people like that is interesting.

So... I don't think the book has great direct advice or is anywhere near "an instruction manual for instructions manuals." What I did like about it was this guys approach to life in general. I agree that there is a time and a place for formal institutions, but I think, on average, our over institutionalized world hampers creativity, thinking and doing for oneself and a "buccaneer" mindset can help some claim that back.

[grundomatic]

On the other hand, for those who are FI, the methods are pretty useful for keeping oneself active (at least if you're highly intelligent and have an insatiable curiosity... perhaps these are sufficient but not necessarily necessary??!) beyond the default tropes of travel, concerts, family/children, and/or volunteering/fun jobs.

Why I recommend this book is there still aren't a lot of case studies of people who broke free of the consumer praxis, and while I don't even think this dude did that, he did something adjacent to it and I think reading about people like that is interesting.

Since I didn't explain myself very well, this is something like what I had in mind when I recommended the book. An alternate starting point into a broad education. While it's not going to lead to a resilient self-reinforcing lifestyle or solve the meta-crisis by creating people that are jacks of all trades, masters of some, the author's method of biting off more than you can chew at that moment and learning as you go, as well as just diving into things that interest you, seems like a step in the right direction compared to working towards becoming a TPS Filer Level III. The recommendation was not for the master, but rather those hesitant to take the first step into learning things beyond their job and one lone hobby. I'll try to identify my audience better, my original post was kind of lazy.

As a side note, I've done nothing but jobs where I could start contributing in a pretty short time period. By the time I've mastered something (using that term very loosely here), I'm bored with it and already looking for the next thing. Learning on the job is often one of my favorite parts of the job.