5 ms·

I heard this from my peers in undergrad all the time and it befuddled me. I thought "so ... you have no curiosity about the world? about how stuff works?." I'm

by copperx 11y ago

I heard this from my peers in undergrad all the time and it befuddled me. I thought "so ... you have no curiosity about the world? about how stuff works?." I'm not claiming that I had hifalutin ideals; I knew that money was important, but I had this (perhaps naive) idea that if I became an excellent practitioner in whatever I did the money would follow. I just wasn't prepared to hear "I'm just here to get a good job" from most of my peers. Some, I would expect, but not most.

CardenB 11y ago
The disconnect is in your "money will follow" statement. Most people simply don't believe that. At least in my experience.
JoeAltmaier 11y ago
A thoughtful graduate student schooled me on this, when I was a Junior working in her lab. She was interviewing widely, looking for a job that suited her goals. She said "If you take the highest offer, then they're deciding for you. Its just prostitution then." I've remembered that for 35 years.
- dpark 11y ago
  Prostitution doesn't stop being prostitution just because you accept a lower rate. If it's prostitution to take the highest paying job, it's prostitution to take any pay at all. There are certainly other factors to consider than just salary, but to dismiss that consideration as "prostitution" is absurd. Money may not buy happiness, but it buys everything else. I'm a big fan of food, clothing, and shelter, all of which money can buy in abundance. But I was lucky to pick a field with high pay and lots of good employers, so I have the luxury of choosing both.
dec0dedab0de 11y ago
I thought "so ... you have no curiosity about the world? about how stuff works?." I don't know when you went to school, but now you can satisfy that curiosity with the Internet. The reason for school is to make connections, and have proof of experience for your resume.
- dspeyer 11y ago
  Not so easily. If you're trying to learn really difficult things, classes are a huge help.
hibikir 11y ago
It's really easy to think that a set of life decisions are good because they worked well for you, but that's not how the world works: Across every road, there are a lot of events we cannot control, decisions made with imperfect information. We make mistakes, we fail, through no special fault of our own. Every path is great if you are talented AND lucky. But it makes no sense to evaluate a road by just looking at the top successes: If that were the case, I'd tell my son to go into acting, because it went great for Tom Hanks and Brad Pitt. No matter how hard you work, or how talented you are, the very top is something we cannot guarantee to anyone. So it's pretty rational to look at a career path, a set of life decisions, by looking at average cases, not just the very top. Going out there because you are curious about the world, and ending up doing something where only the very top percentiles do well is only a great story if you win. I know a girl that went with those lofty ideals into psychology, along with a high IQ. She now answers phones at a call center. Two PhDs in biology: One is teaching English in Japan, because she couldn't bear a 20+ year post doc path, getting paid less than half of what I made in my first job out of school. My brother, top of his class in biology too. Got a Phd with honors. But he was born in the wrong country, and his best job offer is for a position that asks him to do 10+ hour days, rotating into the night 1'3rd of the time, all for 850 euros a month. Welcome to a country with over 20% unemployment. So it's really easy to think it's important to have curiosity as long as you also pick a profitable course of study too, or are quite lucky. Otherwise, it's the same mindset that can dig you into a hole. Picking a career just because of the money, and not getting any love for it as you go is a road to failure too: Many people drop out of programming for those reasons, and few options are more profitable on average than programming. But I can't blame people for keeping an eye out of the available options. I know I did: There were many things I thought I would have enjoyed doing, and I picked one that also looked profitable. I can't say I regret it.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  There is no "the world". There are only people making choices, often on the basis of a default morality they've never thought about. The kinds of failures you're describing are exactly what you get when the default morality is "Make as much money as possible". You can say it's currently maladapted to expect more, and that's possibly true. That doesn't mean it's an ideal situation, or a praise-worthy one. If the talents of smart people are consistently underutilised, that's a social problem and not just a series of unrelated individual failures.
DavidTNcl 11y ago
> but I had this (perhaps naive) idea that if I became an excellent practitioner in whatever I did the money would follow. It wont.
ori_b 11y ago
> I thought "so ... you have no curiosity about the world? about how stuff works?." For most people, a library solves that more efficient and cost effectively than a university, at least to the level that they care about. It would be nice if university were cheap enough to be an answer to curiosity, but as it stands,

by copperx 11y ago

CardenB 11y ago

The disconnect is in your "money will follow" statement. Most people simply don't believe that. At least in my experience.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago

A thoughtful graduate student schooled me on this, when I was a Junior working in her lab. She was interviewing widely, looking for a job that suited her goals. She said "If you take the highest offer, then they're deciding for you. Its just prostitution then." I've remembered that for 35 years.

dpark 11y ago
Prostitution doesn't stop being prostitution just because you accept a lower rate. If it's prostitution to take the highest paying job, it's prostitution to take any pay at all. There are certainly other factors to consider than just salary, but to dismiss that consideration as "prostitution" is absurd. Money may not buy happiness, but it buys everything else. I'm a big fan of food, clothing, and shelter, all of which money can buy in abundance. But I was lucky to pick a field with high pay and lots of good employers, so I have the luxury of choosing both.

dec0dedab0de 11y ago

I thought "so ... you have no curiosity about the world? about how stuff works?." I don't know when you went to school, but now you can satisfy that curiosity with the Internet. The reason for school is to make connections, and have proof of experience for your resume.

dspeyer 11y ago
Not so easily. If you're trying to learn really difficult things, classes are a huge help.

hibikir 11y ago

It's really easy to think that a set of life decisions are good because they worked well for you, but that's not how the world works: Across every road, there are a lot of events we cannot control, decisions made with imperfect information. We make mistakes, we fail, through no special fault of our own. Every path is great if you are talented AND lucky. But it makes no sense to evaluate a road by just looking at the top successes: If that were the case, I'd tell my son to go into acting, because it went great for Tom Hanks and Brad Pitt. No matter how hard you work, or how talented you are, the very top is something we cannot guarantee to anyone. So it's pretty rational to look at a career path, a set of life decisions, by looking at average cases, not just the very top. Going out there because you are curious about the world, and ending up doing something where only the very top percentiles do well is only a great story if you win. I know a girl that went with those lofty ideals into psychology, along with a high IQ. She now answers phones at a call center. Two PhDs in biology: One is teaching English in Japan, because she couldn't bear a 20+ year post doc path, getting paid less than half of what I made in my first job out of school. My brother, top of his class in biology too. Got a Phd with honors. But he was born in the wrong country, and his best job offer is for a position that asks him to do 10+ hour days, rotating into the night 1'3rd of the time, all for 850 euros a month. Welcome to a country with over 20% unemployment. So it's really easy to think it's important to have curiosity as long as you also pick a profitable course of study too, or are quite lucky. Otherwise, it's the same mindset that can dig you into a hole. Picking a career just because of the money, and not getting any love for it as you go is a road to failure too: Many people drop out of programming for those reasons, and few options are more profitable on average than programming. But I can't blame people for keeping an eye out of the available options. I know I did: There were many things I thought I would have enjoyed doing, and I picked one that also looked profitable. I can't say I regret it.

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
There is no "the world". There are only people making choices, often on the basis of a default morality they've never thought about. The kinds of failures you're describing are exactly what you get when the default morality is "Make as much money as possible". You can say it's currently maladapted to expect more, and that's possibly true. That doesn't mean it's an ideal situation, or a praise-worthy one. If the talents of smart people are consistently underutilised, that's a social problem and not just a series of unrelated individual failures.

DavidTNcl 11y ago

> but I had this (perhaps naive) idea that if I became an excellent practitioner in whatever I did the money would follow. It wont.

ori_b 11y ago

> I thought "so ... you have no curiosity about the world? about how stuff works?." For most people, a library solves that more efficient and cost effectively than a university, at least to the level that they care about. It would be nice if university were cheap enough to be an answer to curiosity, but as it stands,