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If you want a high paying or high status job, it’s not clear to me how you escape the requirement for very hard work. Just tell people you work really hard but

If you want a high paying or high status job, it’s not clear to me how you escape the requirement for very hard work. Just tell people you work really hard but don't actually do it. You'd be surprised how many seemingly hard-working and successful people use this strategy. Some of them even believe themselves.

analog31 4y ago
The work knows. That's actually the problem. Your work is constantly decaying. You have to beat the rate of decay. Decay can take the form of materials and equipment (often homemade) deteriorating, forgetting what you've read or done (your lab notes are never good enough). Also, you're paying an opportunity cost for taking more time to finish, and you face a constant risk of getting scooped, your professor dying, getting knocked off your horse by personal / health issues, etc. Klausewitz wrote that the only rational strategy in war is to make the maximum possible use of force. Your graduate research project is like that. Of course you also have to be cognizant of wearing out your mental equipment.
- lumost 4y ago
  This makes sense if you are working on a problem in relative isolation, that's relatively well known, and who's research has low optionality to other work. However, there are many problems that are either utterly unknown, impractical to work on outside of a major collaboration, or option well into multiple papers. It would seem that in academia, focusing on the latter will yield better long term career results. If you're a PhD student in a large collaboration, then you can't get scooped. If you are working on a problem no one knows/cares about, then getting scooped is a low risk, if you're working in an area where scooping is common - but you have good equipment/infrastructure - then you can re-use the work for something else. In hindsight, almost all of my professors work was either part of a collaboration or focused on "high option" research. The few theoreticians and others working on areas which could be scooped seemed to either pick up more teaching/administrative work - or focus on "conservative" research.
- jltsiren 4y ago
  There are many kinds of research. Sometimes you need long hours of mindless grinding to get the job done. Sometimes taking a long walk and letting your mind wander is a more productive use for your time. And sometimes you need to return to the work for 10-15 minutes at random hours when the computer finishes whatever it was doing. If your work is cognitively demanding, there are maybe 20-30 productive hours in a week. If you try working harder, the chances are the marginal value of the extra hours becomes negative in the long term. You can get more productive hours by also doing less demanding work, but then there is a risk that the low-value work will take priority and reduce the time you can spend on demanding tasks. Especially when there are external deadlines involved. Getting scooped is something many people are afraid of but which rarely happens in practice. Except maybe if you are working on some ultra-fashionable topics. I can't remember a single instance of it happening to anyone in my 15 years of string algorithms, space-efficient data structures, and their applications in bioinformatics. If someone manages to solve a problem another person was working on using the same approach as that person, it's typically years after the original person gave up.
  - analog31 4y ago
    I'm thinking about biochemistry in particular. There was also little or no scooping in my own field, experimental atomic spectroscopy. Maybe some fields are more cutthroat than others.
- Hermitian909 4y ago
  > The work knows. That's actually the problem. Your work is constantly decaying. You have to beat the rate of decay. It's my experience that while not easy this is relatively straightforward for many valuable types of technical work. The key I've found is that most people are incapable of making themselves seriously work through a textbook. Work through 10-15 good sized textbooks in your field and you are pretty much immediately near the top of your field in the professional world. Most of the churn in skills is happening at much lower levels of abstraction. If you have the fundamentals to understand the higher abstractions backing these changes making a switch is much easier. As a concrete example, I'm at a big tech company using Typescript (TS). While I have less experience with TS than most of my coworkers many already consider me "one of the local experts". This is because: 1. I was previously aware of the challenges Racket trying to add types back in... I think the early 2000s? Forever ago. Anyway I could guess at the limitations TS would have as a result (e.g. when a type inference might fail). 2. I read a book about TS 3. I read the TS docs and changelogs (2) and (3) to roughly 12 hours total. I've had plenty of conversations with people who are much more "guru-ish" than I am and they report similar results e.g. a database expert who has spent 20 years almost exclusively leveraging knowledge discovered in the 80s despite keeping up to date with the field. I don't think this holds in Academia, but most of us aren't there.

analog31 4y ago

The work knows. That's actually the problem. Your work is constantly decaying. You have to beat the rate of decay. Decay can take the form of materials and equipment (often homemade) deteriorating, forgetting what you've read or done (your lab notes are never good enough). Also, you're paying an opportunity cost for taking more time to finish, and you face a constant risk of getting scooped, your professor dying, getting knocked off your horse by personal / health issues, etc. Klausewitz wrote that the only rational strategy in war is to make the maximum possible use of force. Your graduate research project is like that. Of course you also have to be cognizant of wearing out your mental equipment.

lumost 4y ago
This makes sense if you are working on a problem in relative isolation, that's relatively well known, and who's research has low optionality to other work. However, there are many problems that are either utterly unknown, impractical to work on outside of a major collaboration, or option well into multiple papers. It would seem that in academia, focusing on the latter will yield better long term career results. If you're a PhD student in a large collaboration, then you can't get scooped. If you are working on a problem no one knows/cares about, then getting scooped is a low risk, if you're working in an area where scooping is common - but you have good equipment/infrastructure - then you can re-use the work for something else. In hindsight, almost all of my professors work was either part of a collaboration or focused on "high option" research. The few theoreticians and others working on areas which could be scooped seemed to either pick up more teaching/administrative work - or focus on "conservative" research.
jltsiren 4y ago
There are many kinds of research. Sometimes you need long hours of mindless grinding to get the job done. Sometimes taking a long walk and letting your mind wander is a more productive use for your time. And sometimes you need to return to the work for 10-15 minutes at random hours when the computer finishes whatever it was doing. If your work is cognitively demanding, there are maybe 20-30 productive hours in a week. If you try working harder, the chances are the marginal value of the extra hours becomes negative in the long term. You can get more productive hours by also doing less demanding work, but then there is a risk that the low-value work will take priority and reduce the time you can spend on demanding tasks. Especially when there are external deadlines involved. Getting scooped is something many people are afraid of but which rarely happens in practice. Except maybe if you are working on some ultra-fashionable topics. I can't remember a single instance of it happening to anyone in my 15 years of string algorithms, space-efficient data structures, and their applications in bioinformatics. If someone manages to solve a problem another person was working on using the same approach as that person, it's typically years after the original person gave up.
- analog31 4y ago
  I'm thinking about biochemistry in particular. There was also little or no scooping in my own field, experimental atomic spectroscopy. Maybe some fields are more cutthroat than others.
Hermitian909 4y ago
> The work knows. That's actually the problem. Your work is constantly decaying. You have to beat the rate of decay. It's my experience that while not easy this is relatively straightforward for many valuable types of technical work. The key I've found is that most people are incapable of making themselves seriously work through a textbook. Work through 10-15 good sized textbooks in your field and you are pretty much immediately near the top of your field in the professional world. Most of the churn in skills is happening at much lower levels of abstraction. If you have the fundamentals to understand the higher abstractions backing these changes making a switch is much easier. As a concrete example, I'm at a big tech company using Typescript (TS). While I have less experience with TS than most of my coworkers many already consider me "one of the local experts". This is because: 1. I was previously aware of the challenges Racket trying to add types back in... I think the early 2000s? Forever ago. Anyway I could guess at the limitations TS would have as a result (e.g. when a type inference might fail). 2. I read a book about TS 3. I read the TS docs and changelogs (2) and (3) to roughly 12 hours total. I've had plenty of conversations with people who are much more "guru-ish" than I am and they report similar results e.g. a database expert who has spent 20 years almost exclusively leveraging knowledge discovered in the 80s despite keeping up to date with the field. I don't think this holds in Academia, but most of us aren't there.