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cousin_it comments on Public Choice and the Altruist's Burden - Less Wrong
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You did a good thing: my last two top-level posts were partly motivated by this comment of yours. And for the record, at the same time as I was writing them, at my day job we launched a website with daily maps of forest fires in Russia that got us 40k visitors a day for awhile, got featured on major news sites and on TV, and got used by actual emergency teams. It's been a crazy month. Thankfully, right now Moscow is no longer covered in smoke and I can relax a little.
Coincidentally, in that time I had several discussions with different people about the same topic. For some reason all of them felt that you have to be "serious" about whatever you do, do it "properly", etc. I just don't believe it. What matters is the results. There's no law of nature saying you can't get good results while viewing yourself as an amateur light-headed butterfly. In fact, I think it helps!
You have to work on systematically developing mastery though. Difficult problems (especially the ones without clear problem statements) require thousands of hours of background-building and familiarizing yourself with the problem to make steps in the right directions, even where these steps appear obvious and easy in retrospect, and where specific subproblems can be resolved easily without having that background. You need to be able to ask the right questions, not only to answer them.
It doesn't seem natural to describe such work as an act of "amateur light-headed butterfly". Butterflies don't work in coal mines.