What is the difference between a job and a profession? It seems that, relative to professional jobs, ordinary jobs tend to be less well-paid, prestigious, autonomous, long-lasting, formally trained, regulated, organized, or associated with idealism and identity. But why are these features correlated, and why do we tend to see profession vs. not as a binary distinction?
You're saying that schools are set up under state legislation, and even though schools are primarily funded independantly of state governments and make hiring and most other decisions independsntly of state governments, that somehow state rules about teacher qualifications don't count as professional qualifications rules. I'm trying to understand why.
I don't see how your point about independant schools has any relevance either. Any company can hire non registered engineers if they like too. There's just some things that need sign off by registered engineers.
Companies are also created under government laws. So does that make every employee a jpint employee of the company and government? Are all hirings joint decisions between government and company?
Your definition of report doesn't agree with the dictionary. The dictionary is a bit wider definition. But even with your definition, things that have happened that are being reported on can include the writter's calculations or investigations, data gathering, thoughts, etc.
Everyone tries to match their views of what they see to their current understandings of the world. It'soften intetesting to see other people do that. It's a major way that we can understand what each other's views are, and improve our own understandind. The fact that Robin comes at things in uncommon ways is valuable.
With reagard to the matter at hand. I don't see how what you have said about professions contradicts Robin's post. He has just gone on to discuss the regulatory aspect of professions which you have stopped short of.
Eeeh, no. None of the above. There is too much for me to address in the time that I have, so this is only going to cover some of it.
The core concepts are that a profession is line of work for which the members are expected to;
1: have a high level of expertise.2: operate largely autonomously.3: uphold a (generally) high level of work quality & behavior (exactly what that is varies by profession).
All the rest is overlooking the forest for the trees. (one *might* be able to find an exception or two as I didn't spend hours trying to infer the exact definition. I only spent a few minutes for one that is good enough to be accurate to at least a 1st or 2nd order of approximation)
Why these are correlated is kind of self-evident. A subject matter expert ought to generally have a high quality work output. Part of how you signal your work quality is how you behave. People with a lot of knowledge or work quality will generally produce better results if allowed to make their own decisions. This nexus warrants distinction because it represents at least a partial inversion of the typical work hierarchy of employer-as-boss.
I think your 'report' professions are stretching a bit. A doctor that produced nothing but diagnoses would generally not be thought of well, unless they were specializing in particularly hard to solve cases. Calling an engineer's project plan or proposal a 'report' is a misnomer as a report is about something that has happened or is happening, not a theoretical. It is also generally to enable a decision, not to try to cause a desired outcome. While accounting for publicly traded corporations' regulatory reporting is a big part of the business, it isn't to 'persuade' investors (though the C-class might wish they would) and lots of accountants don't do much more than produce logs of money movements. These logs could actually be considered a literal report, but not in the way the term was being used.
This is a more general comment; I have noticed that you have predilection to try to cram reality into your hypothesis-of-the-moment rather than the other way around. Your off-expertise musings frequently use non-trivially inaccurate models of the world. As a result, these posts tend to have the character of saying that since tomatoes are technically a fruit, one should put them in a fruit salad.
btw, as a native speaker of a language that doesn't make this distinction, I don't have much confidence in my guesses about just what English-speakers do and don't consider a profession. this suggests to me it might be more narrowly contingent on local culture. If I think of other nebulous but class-related distinctions, like fast food places vs proper restaurants, lowbrow vs literary fiction, I think I grasp more readily where the line would be drawn by consensus.
Robin actually seems unusually willing to accept a world where McDonalds is the one dominant fast food place (or if it were Demolition Man, Taco Bell):
It seems to me that some products (e.g. burgers) benefit more from diversity whereas some products (e.g. units of measurement) benefit more from consistency. I would hate if every burger in the world was a McDonald's burger, but I'm fairly happy that most places nowadays use the metric system, and I think it's a good thing that Europe is forcing companies like Apple to use usb-c ports on their mobile devices. Even if some new cable came along that charged things 5% faster, I'd prefer to be able to charge all of my devices with the one cable and I can't stand using adapters.
One of the products of Professional associations is a set of standards that their members will adhere to, and standards benefit more from consistency than diversity (their whole point is to create consistency). As a consumer, I don't want to have to vet a hodgepodge of different professional associations before hiring a given engineer to help me build a bridge. And so from the engineer's perspective, why would they take their chances with some up-and-coming professional association when they could just stick to the one everybody's already familiar with? Network effects no doubt play a large role here. Having an archipelago of associations would drive innovation more, but it still seems to be a fact that when your product is standards, monopoly ensues.
With that said, I take your point about local vs global standards, but I wonder how much mismatch there really is say in a professional association of engineers in one location vs another. It may be that there's simply a correct way to build a bridge and it doesn't change no matter where you are, or perhaps local considerations (e.g. some countries have less access to high quality materials) are already factored into the global standards.
You're saying that schools are set up under state legislation, and even though schools are primarily funded independantly of state governments and make hiring and most other decisions independsntly of state governments, that somehow state rules about teacher qualifications don't count as professional qualifications rules. I'm trying to understand why.
I don't see how your point about independant schools has any relevance either. Any company can hire non registered engineers if they like too. There's just some things that need sign off by registered engineers.
Companies are also created under government laws. So does that make every employee a jpint employee of the company and government? Are all hirings joint decisions between government and company?
Your definition of report doesn't agree with the dictionary. The dictionary is a bit wider definition. But even with your definition, things that have happened that are being reported on can include the writter's calculations or investigations, data gathering, thoughts, etc.
Everyone tries to match their views of what they see to their current understandings of the world. It'soften intetesting to see other people do that. It's a major way that we can understand what each other's views are, and improve our own understandind. The fact that Robin comes at things in uncommon ways is valuable.
With reagard to the matter at hand. I don't see how what you have said about professions contradicts Robin's post. He has just gone on to discuss the regulatory aspect of professions which you have stopped short of.
Which language is your native language?
Eeeh, no. None of the above. There is too much for me to address in the time that I have, so this is only going to cover some of it.
The core concepts are that a profession is line of work for which the members are expected to;
1: have a high level of expertise.2: operate largely autonomously.3: uphold a (generally) high level of work quality & behavior (exactly what that is varies by profession).
All the rest is overlooking the forest for the trees. (one *might* be able to find an exception or two as I didn't spend hours trying to infer the exact definition. I only spent a few minutes for one that is good enough to be accurate to at least a 1st or 2nd order of approximation)
Why these are correlated is kind of self-evident. A subject matter expert ought to generally have a high quality work output. Part of how you signal your work quality is how you behave. People with a lot of knowledge or work quality will generally produce better results if allowed to make their own decisions. This nexus warrants distinction because it represents at least a partial inversion of the typical work hierarchy of employer-as-boss.
I think your 'report' professions are stretching a bit. A doctor that produced nothing but diagnoses would generally not be thought of well, unless they were specializing in particularly hard to solve cases. Calling an engineer's project plan or proposal a 'report' is a misnomer as a report is about something that has happened or is happening, not a theoretical. It is also generally to enable a decision, not to try to cause a desired outcome. While accounting for publicly traded corporations' regulatory reporting is a big part of the business, it isn't to 'persuade' investors (though the C-class might wish they would) and lots of accountants don't do much more than produce logs of money movements. These logs could actually be considered a literal report, but not in the way the term was being used.
This is a more general comment; I have noticed that you have predilection to try to cram reality into your hypothesis-of-the-moment rather than the other way around. Your off-expertise musings frequently use non-trivially inaccurate models of the world. As a result, these posts tend to have the character of saying that since tomatoes are technically a fruit, one should put them in a fruit salad.
btw, as a native speaker of a language that doesn't make this distinction, I don't have much confidence in my guesses about just what English-speakers do and don't consider a profession. this suggests to me it might be more narrowly contingent on local culture. If I think of other nebulous but class-related distinctions, like fast food places vs proper restaurants, lowbrow vs literary fiction, I think I grasp more readily where the line would be drawn by consensus.
Robin actually seems unusually willing to accept a world where McDonalds is the one dominant fast food place (or if it were Demolition Man, Taco Bell):
https://www.overcomingbias....
Thanks for the thought-provoking post.
It seems to me that some products (e.g. burgers) benefit more from diversity whereas some products (e.g. units of measurement) benefit more from consistency. I would hate if every burger in the world was a McDonald's burger, but I'm fairly happy that most places nowadays use the metric system, and I think it's a good thing that Europe is forcing companies like Apple to use usb-c ports on their mobile devices. Even if some new cable came along that charged things 5% faster, I'd prefer to be able to charge all of my devices with the one cable and I can't stand using adapters.
One of the products of Professional associations is a set of standards that their members will adhere to, and standards benefit more from consistency than diversity (their whole point is to create consistency). As a consumer, I don't want to have to vet a hodgepodge of different professional associations before hiring a given engineer to help me build a bridge. And so from the engineer's perspective, why would they take their chances with some up-and-coming professional association when they could just stick to the one everybody's already familiar with? Network effects no doubt play a large role here. Having an archipelago of associations would drive innovation more, but it still seems to be a fact that when your product is standards, monopoly ensues.
With that said, I take your point about local vs global standards, but I wonder how much mismatch there really is say in a professional association of engineers in one location vs another. It may be that there's simply a correct way to build a bridge and it doesn't change no matter where you are, or perhaps local considerations (e.g. some countries have less access to high quality materials) are already factored into the global standards.