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My whole childhood and young life I wanted to go into physics academia. I wanted to have influence - to push the boundaries of science. I had an idyllic view of
by reedf1 6y ago
My whole childhood and young life I wanted to go into physics academia. I wanted to have influence - to push the boundaries of science. I had an idyllic view of this purely meritocratic system where people were paid to explore. My first year of undergrad utterly destroyed this notion. I left as soon as I had my bachelors degree. I knew what would await me in grad and post grad work and I'd seen post docs cry after endless work for grants. I wanted financial freedom and happiness, and that eventually won over pushing the boundaries of science. So sorry young me - I quit too.
- agumonkey 6y agoI can understand the pain of leaving that dream, but in a way, a tainted soil is rarely a good dream anyway. I so wish I could do beautiful coding work but societies are not aligned with beauty (even at zero cost) so i'm bailing toward financial independance and peace of mind. Hopefully you and I can make time to join club or do thinking on our own terms.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago> Hopefully you and I can make time to join club or do thinking on our own terms. Reminds me of a thought that's been sitting in my quotes file for a while. "What one wants is to be able to talk with a diverse club of smart people, arrange to do short one-off research projects and simulations, publish papers or capture intellectual property quickly and easily, and move on to another conversation. Quickly. Easily. For a living. Can’t do that in industry. Can’t do that in the Academy. Yet in my experience, scientists and engineers all want it. Maybe even a few mathematicians and social scientists do, too." -- Bill Tozier, Diverse themes observed at GECCO 2006 https://web.archive.org/web/20120625133020/http://williamtozier.com/slurry/2006/07/17/diverse-themes-observed-at-gecco-2006 https://web.archive.org/web/20120625133020/http://williamtoz... (And personally, I do want it too.)
- reasonabl_human 6y agoYep, sounds idyllic. Maybe some form of engineering consulting?
- agumonkey 6y agoIndeed this is a very fitting quote. I can also generalize that to human existence. I've struggled with work life a lot, I've seen good people going robbers, depressed.. but 90% of them came in the morning with the best intentions.. somehow in this system, naturally a sad state of chaos emerges that makes most people very frustrated if not more.
- mjfl 6y agoMe too. What was the context of the quote?
- TeMPOraL 6y agoThe immediate context is the article to which I linked. It's a stand-alone observation by someone attending some conference in 2006. How did I encounter that quote? I have no idea. I thought I found it on HN, but going by HN search, I can only find myself posting it, twice before in the last 5 years. I must have found it elsewhere. I saved it, because it strongly resonated with me - it describes what I would love to do for a living, and what I also think the society needs to improve both research and engineering.
- MauranKilom 6y agoSounds like Paul Erdős had it figured out... https://www.britannica.com/biography/Paul-Erdos https://www.britannica.com/biography/Paul-Erdos > Erdős would show up—often unannounced—on the doorstep of a fellow mathematician, declare “My brain is open!” and stay as long as his colleague served up interesting mathematical challenges. (More anecdotes here: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/hoffman-man.html?source=post_page-----f64e1575de29---------------------- https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/ho...)
- 77pt77 6y agoThe quality of Erdos' output is questionable. He's very famous, but that's it. He's a social success and part of the problem.
- codebolt 6y agoI quit 3 years into my physics/math degree (my university had a joint 5-year masters program) with basically the same insight. Took a masters in CS instead and wrapped up the necessary credits for a bachelors in physics so I'd at least have a piece of paper to show for the effort I put in. My thought at the time was; If I want to do physics full time, I better make it rich first. I saw that the tenure track academic route seemed very far from my naive teenage dreams of what being a physicist would mean, and it was unrealistic that I'd even get accepted into grad school not being fully straight As. Currently enjoying a pretty decent career developing software for banks, so I can't say I regret my decision, esp. after reading articles like this.
- jjoonathan 6y ago> I'd seen post docs cry after endless work for grants. People knock the recent Alien films but you know the scene where the android is leading the team through a theater of charred bodies and you think "holy shit, this is a HINT, how do you not see it?" Well, when I got home, I realized that the disgruntled postdocs around me -- some of whom were smarter and worked harder than me and still got thrown out like so much trash because their thesis didn't pan out -- were also a HINT. How did I not see it before? Thanks, Prometheus. You weren't a great movie, but you had a very important impact on my life.
- ALittleLight 6y agoI have felt this way about work. I notice that people above me in the org chart always seem stressed, constantly in meetings, working late and arriving early cause their normal day is taken over with meetings, fighting with other teams, politics, dealing with uncomfortable situations, etc. When my manager asks me about my promotion plans I just smile and nod.
- Koshkin 6y agoYeah, being one of the ‘clueless’ is no fun... https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
- jbroson 6y agoI think much of the hate towards Prometheus was unwarranted and overblown although it was flawed. You could easily point to plot holes and dumb decisions by characters in Star Wars or any other classic sci fi. And it was still better than 95% of films released that year or since.
- KingFelix 6y agoWhat did you end up moving into?
- giantg2 6y ago"I had an idyllic view of this purely meritocratic system where people were paid to explore." I feel like our society and schooling really pushes the idyllic visions of things as well as the idea of strict meritocracy. I feel like this has left many of us jaded when we realize much of what we were told as we grew up were only half-truths concealing a bleak reality from us, and in some cases dooming us to self-inflicted issues like the one's described in the article.
- ALittleLight 6y agoSchool is just so much nonsense. I used to roll my eyes when I heard people say this, thinking it was a trope for rebellious teens - but, there's a huge amount of stuff you learn and do that has no real value and a huge amount you could learn that would be valuable that people don't teach. Even obvious things like a course on how to cook or do your taxes or any of the things that people actually do in life aren't taught at all. At least they weren't for me. What's the relative utility of any K-12 lesson series compared to a series showing people how to budget or how to prepare affordable and healthy foods? In reality we kind of expect people to learn everything they need to know outside of school and many things they don't need to know inside school.
- NalNezumi 6y agoI used to think that School was much nonsense too, so much that I spent 1 year or 2 mostly skipping it. But: >In reality we kind of expect people to learn everything they need to know outside of school and many things they don't need to know inside school. Yea and isn't school system aware of this? After all, if you learn how-to cook & do your taxes anyway (out of necessity, which is a stronger learning signal nevertheless) why teach it with public funding? The opposite of your complaint is: "Ugh why are school teaching such obvious stuff that you will sooner or later learn anyway? Complete waste of taxpayer money!" I see school as a incomplete(lazy) attempt to teach a broader populace "context" behind everything we have learned as a society so far. But that is too wide, and too deep to cover fully. Hence we cut of at some width and at certain depth, and focus on things you wouldn't learn or even know in a everyday life, the "unknown unknown" so to speak, for the young, energetic, mind. My diastase for school mostly boggle down to how utterly incompetent they were even in this regard, in practice. But maybe you have a more informed view on things that I missed in the short text.
- analog31 6y agoI finished my physics degree in the early 90's, and went straight into industry. At the time, we all knew about the problem of producing more PhDs than could possibly all get academic jobs. We called it "the lie" and "the birth control problem." My dad said it was the same in the 1950s when he got his degree. We pursue the degree for deep personal reasons that are hard to discourage, even in the face of harsh economic reality. I did a back of envelope calculation based on the number of grad students, the number of post-docs, their duration, etc., and concluded that I would need to be a superstar to ever get tenure. And I was not a superstar. On the other hand I've had a good career in industry, with no regrets. I live in a nice town, and rarely have to work long hours. I was extremely lucky that both of my parents are industrial scientists, so I knew there was an honorable alternative to being a professor. The only hitch is that my own professors in physics could encourage my change of plan, but had no idea how to help me pursue it. I guessed correctly that computer programming would be important. ;-) While I was not a research superstar, I was very good at making complicated machines work for other people. That's what I do today.
- SkyBelow 6y agoThis is something that has fundamentally bothered me about our current society. I consider all the positions of people who do things that, when all has been said and done, do not provide value to humans. Then I consider all the positions that will advance humanity. The mismatch is jarring and telling. Something is wrong. I imagine a society where all the funding into ad tech goes into cutting edge research, where we might have to wait a decade or two but before too long we reap the rewards. Even in small cases that that don't matter, even something like creating a video game, how much of the budget goes into the game and how much goes into advertising? Across the gaming industry, how much of the budgets for creating games goes into games that expand the mind, introduce players to new views, and garner interest in new areas of life and how much goes into reskinned slot machines? This pattern seems to appear in many places. Short term optimization over long term gratitude as the social level leading to and caused by the same as the personal level. While it isn't the worse humanity has done, and it isn't anything worse than seen in other species, I wonder if this is a more pervasive and passive Great Filter that'll cling to us even after we have overcome others like the threat of nuclear war.
- xyzzy123 6y agoI think this is a problem for any "deep" occupation which can't readily be measured by immediate financial benefit. If I look around me, I can identify only a very few who are paid a living wage to do a) a thing that they enjoy that b) doesn't have a direct, immediate benefit to others. It's not just physicists, it's theorists of all kinds, the arts, history, and yes, underwater basket weaving too.
- konjin 6y agoIt's worse than that, those areas are taken over by know-nothings who are great at politics and terrible in their field. The people deciding tenure and grants are the best physicists, they are the best politicians who happen to have had a physics degree, or physics adjacent at some point in their education.