[sz]

A good read every time. This part stood out:

"In retrospect I realize that in almost everything that we worked on together, we were both amateurs. In digital physics, neural networks, even parallel computing, we never really knew what we were doing. But the things that we studied were so new that no one else knew exactly what they were doing either. It was amateurs who made the progress."

[sqrt17]

Interdisciplinary work is always that: you're contributing to another discipline - being an amateur - because you can bring the perspective of another discipline to it. You're bringing along new questions, and your answers don't need to be better than 30+ years of people trying desperately to find better and better answers to the same questions.

[pavel_lishin]

If everyone is an amateur, isn't the last sentence a tautology?

[ramchip]

I don't think 'not knowing exactly what you're doing' implies 'being an amateur'.