Casting for a Fool: The False Practitioner vs Theorist Split

Honestly, I’ve got no f***ing idea where this split came from. Because once you look closely, it falls apart.

If you’re a professional, you’re a practitioner. If you’re a practitioner, you’re also a theorist.

This “folk” division into practitioner and theorist rests on a very basic misunderstanding of what theory even is.

Theory is a description of how something works in a given domain. It explains what happened before, what’s happening now, and it has predictive power.

Let me make it brutally simple.

You’ve got a tap in your kitchen. You open it, water flows.

There’s a “tap-water theory”: yesterday water flowed when the tap was opened. If water is flowing right now, someone opened the tap right now. And it predicts tomorrow as well: open the tap — water flows.

Leaks and broken plumbing can wait outside the brackets. The example is doing a different job.

Theory = practice. Practice = theory. Practice is experimental verification of a hypothesis. When a hypothesis gets verified enough times through practice, you get theory.

So the cleaner split isn’t “practitioners vs theorists”.

It’s practitioners vs hypothesis-only types.

I’m not going to play dumb. I get what people mean.

There’s the person who can make it work and deliver a result.

There’s the person who seems to know how, keeps talking about it, and still doesn’t deliver.

People point at the second one and say, “theorist”.

That framing creates a weird nihilism towards theory. Theory becomes “the long road”. Everyone recommends practitioners. The hypothesis-only crowd can go fantasise somewhere else.

That would be fine, except it also hits practitioners.

Inside that group there’s an evolutionary fork: dead-end and progressive.

Like Pichu evolves into Pikachu, and Pikachu evolves into Raichu, a progressive practitioner eventually starts pulling in theory to upgrade practice.

Then a professional deformation kicks in. Their language shifts. Their narrative shifts. From the outside, they start sounding like the hypothesis-only type, because the vocabulary overlaps.

What does a practitioner hear once they begin levelling up on theory?

“You and your clever books. Do more. Drop the smart words and the terms. Plenty of specialists deliver results without knowing any of that.”

And here’s the funny part: this often comes less from a client, more from a colleague in the trenches.

Colleagues devalue theory for one reason: theory is scary.

Once you step into it, the feeling of total control evaporates. You see how much you didn’t know. You realise how much of your “practice” was habit.

So people cling to the “button → result” link like a reflex. Press it, get it. Repeat it, win. It looks like mastery.

Real mastery includes transfer. It includes extrapolation. You don’t just remember what worked once. You understand why it worked, and you can rebuild it in a new environment.

Different niche. Different audience. Different budget. Different product. Different culture. Different life context.

Without theory… that’s weak, to put it politely. You’re not acting. You’re recalling.

While nothing changes, you’re fine. When the world moves (and it will), you freeze.

Theory isn’t “abstraction”. It’s a coordinate system. It lets you vary parameters on purpose. It helps you choose the right key. It turns intuition into argument, and luck into a system.

Still, it’s always easier to say:

“I’m not a theorist. I’m a practitioner.”

Inexperienced clients will nod along, grateful for the simplicity.

Then a crisis arrives. Something stops working. The button stops producing results.

And in that moment the “practitioner” starts behaving like a hypothesis-only type — and goes looking for the person they called a “theorist” yesterday.

This time there’s no debate in the voice.

There’s survival.