Published on July 1, 2025 2:54 AM GMT
Don't judge a principle by its professors—look to its practitioners.[1]
"Professor" is an interesting word. At one point in my professional life, I had the opportunity to teach college classes. I often corrected students who called me "Professor Eggs," telling them I was just "Mr. Eggs." "Professor" was a title and a high status I hadn’t earned. But at the same time, the root "profess" often carries the opposite implication. To profess means to declare, sometimes loudly, sometimes without credibility. A profess-er, in this light, sounds less like a scholar and more like a huckster.
An intriguing contrast might be the word "practitioner." Connotatively, it sounds humble, even lowly, the opposite of the high-minded professor. But denotatively, it's closer to the true opposite of a profess-er: someone who applies principles rather than just proclaims them. Practitioners are the ones you call when something needs doing.
I've noticed a tendency, especially in intellectual discourse, to evaluate a principle by looking at its professors, the people most vocal about it. But maybe that’s a mistake. Maybe we should be looking at its practitioners.
Consider some familiar examples of professors who are not practitioners:
Union officials who champion public education but send their children to private school. Advocates of tolerance who can't stand each other. Married commentators who insist that single parenthood is just as effective. Scientists who teach the scientific method, but who practice p-hacking. Or closer to home, a rationalist blogger who never changes their mind.
The issue isn't just hypocrisy. It's misrepresentation. Professors, in the broad sense, shape public understanding of a principle. If their lives don’t reflect its real effects, onlookers may wrongly conclude that the principle itself is flawed, or blessed, or far more effective than it really is. This danger grows when the professor is eloquent: good rhetoric can mask poor integration.
There's an old biblical line: "By their fruits ye shall know them." It's probably true. Professing a belief is easy. Living it is hard. If you want to know what someone really believes, watch what they do, not what they say. This is why revealed preferences offer a better diagnostic than stated ones. And the same goes for principles. The lived consequences of a belief, the results it produces in practice, tell us more than any abstract declaration.
This holds not only for individuals but for ideologies. Don’t just listen to what a belief system claims. Ask what kind of people it reliably produces. Real practitioners encounter friction. They try to apply principles in a messy, constrained world. That forces tradeoffs, workarounds, and deeper understanding. Not every practitioner succeeds, but those who do illuminate what the principle really entails. They show the blind spots, the costs, and the unexpected strengths. They might not talk much about it, but they are living experiments and valuable data.
So don’t judge a principle by its professors. Judge it by what happens when real people try to live by it.
Ask who the quiet implementers are. Are they different? Are they better or worse off? What does their practice reveal that the professors may never mention?
And pay special attention to professors who were practitioners first. They still profess, but they do so with the authority of lived experience. They might just know what they’re talking about.
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This post is nothing new, but a synthesis of ideas I've had while going through the sequences.
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