10 ms·
I spent twenty years becoming good at the wrong game
- Ouman 2mo agoA lot of careers have very effective feedback loops for telling you that you're progressing, while being almost completely silent on whether the destination is one you actually want
- jdpigeon 2mo agoWell said. When I was a grad student, chasing what would have been a doomed career in cellular neuroscience, I was unfortunate enough (fortunately in the end, perhaps?) to get struck down by a significant depressive episode. This ended up being the feedback signal I needed to consider changing things up, and I did.
- bluGill 2mo agoIn the end you will die. Religion can possibly offer you something for after death (depending on if you choose the correct one - this is an argument I am intentionally avoiding even though I have opinions). Very few people have a career in religion and thus for most your career will have nothing to say. Genetically if you don't have kids you are a dead end. You career will have some bearing on the life you give you kids (if you have any, I'm not trying to say you should!) but otherwise I believe it should stay out of your kids life. Similar to the above, most people live with a married spouse (common law marriage: a legal marriage is not required for this discussion, though it may or may not matter for other purposes). While many people do meet their spouse through their career this is not required and the career itself has nothing to say about it. (historically kings and queens did marry for career reasons) Note that both kids and a spouse implies you shouldn't allow your career to take up too much time even though many will try to. Many people have hobbies. Even if you love the things you do at work, odds are your mind cannot handle doing it once you are done with work: your career cannot tell you anything about them. There are many people who pick a career because the things like love cannot support the life they otherwise want to live: their career can't tell them about the destination because it is purely something they do to get there. All of this is to say that even if your career would offer you help on the destination, you should ignore it.
- 21asdffdsa12 2mo agoIts more complicated. Even somebody who is a dead end- can feed back into a extended clan-family and thus enrich the survival of related traits. And when you contribute to a societey that overproduces resources, thrives scientifically and does not carry a load of parasites, then your career actions may push the cohort fitness. This of course implies that the offspring of dedicated focus personal has desert flower traits- meaning every offspring will be dumb as a rock, and pro at procreation. Meaning clever people will have "Hippie" pregnant machine offspring and the "spiritual" birth-machines will have hyper-analytical "dead-enders". None of them happy with the state of the world. Life as they say- finds a way- to make you despair with the result of the affair.
- bluGill 2mo agoIt is far more complicated. I touched on the high level, but somebody in philosophy can write books on the subject (they probably know about many many books on the subject).
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- teiferer 2mo agoOr you just, you know, enjoy life ..? When I read your comments above I feel you have the desperate need to go hug a tree. Try it, it may work wonders. (And I mean all that in the most positive way possible.)
- bluGill 2mo agoI thought a good summary of my comment would be "sometimes you need to hug a tree, even though it is useless for anything practical".
- teiferer 2mo agoIncreased happiness is very useful, in my view. That does not necessarily require increase in income. In fact, beyond a certain level (which is not that high), income level and happiness are not correlated anymore. In other words, investing energy into increasing income does at that point rarely result in more happiness. So, why do it, especially if that energy could go more directly into activities that actually increase happiness?
- pjc50 2mo agoThe concept of a "career" as a defined external thing has basically evaporated. There is at best a set of opportunities which you can grab, and a set of dependency credentials and acquaintances which you can use to unlock the opportunities. If the right opportunities do not arise then things can go downhill even if you've "done everything right".
- xyzelement 2mo agoI have a horrid memory of interviewing "a kid" for an entry level engineering job during on-campus recruitment. The "kid" had just finished his PhD in chemistry following a master's and bachelor's in the same field. He was now closer to 30 to than to 20, was interviewing for the same job that a BS-grad can go after, and wasn't competitive compared to them. I asked him why he had spent so much time in chemistry just to pivot and he just literally didn't know. It was hard to look at his graduate education as anything other than a wasted decade that actually has set him back career wise. One interesting question is how does someone do that to themselves? Another interesting question is - what is the value of a PhD when someone uninterested in the field and not-that-thought-out about it can get one? We think of PhD designating that someone has committed to the field and pushed a little edge of the frontier forward through sheer motivation and brillians and it was just hard to imagine this being true for this guy.
- cucumber3732842 2mo ago>One interesting question is how does someone do that to themselves? Because the system arounds you encourages it.
- fifilura 2mo agoYou must be blessed. To always know why you do stuff?
- xyzelement 2mo agoUmm yes, what I did for 10 years and why is a reasonable question especially of someone on PhD level.
- fifilura 2mo agoThis whole chain of consequences probably started around "why did you start studying chemistry when you were 19 years old?". Maybe bit sad. Very common. And also a life.
- 2mo ago
- chubot 2mo agoThis reads like Claude in its abstraction ... I'd rather hear the story about what degree you actually got, what the dissertation was, and some concrete experiences of being disillusioned along the way, etc. Complexity becomes a way to postpone the verdict. etc. Meh
- zenoprax 2mo agoAgreed. I think there is a much better story hiding under the surface but I wouldn't read a follow up because it's like Claude is holding them hostage for content.
- savvynormie 2mo ago[dead]
- engineer_22 2mo ago> Much of my research began with a large claim about society (e.g., "consumer culture constructs identities") and I then searched texts for language that could illustrate that claim. Because almost any passage could be interpreted that way through a sufficiently flexible framework (and enough imagination), it was difficult to say what evidence would prove the claim wrong. Doesn’t sound like you’re doing science, to me. In fact, this is the crux of the whole reproducibility crisis in social sciences, is it not?
- ericpauley 2mo agoThis also stood out to me, such that this article really has no bearing on the validity of advanced degrees in the sciences. Case in point, if you got a "Doctor of Sciences" degree and "had no idea what a p-value was or why the hell anyone would take the logarithm of a number" that is clearly not a scientific degree.
- savvynormie 2mo ago[dead]
- greenavocado 2mo ago> any passage could be interpreted that way through a sufficiently flexible framework (and enough imagination), it was difficult to say what evidence would prove the claim wrong The field of social research in a nutshell
- siriusastrebe 2mo agoStatistics has been great for social sciences is the foundation of any rigor in the field. There are many 'valid' statements about society that can be drawn using statistics. At an individual level, those statistics are fairly meaningless. You can bucket yourself into any number of statistical groupings but being a representative datapoint or an outlier doesn't really explain nor does it solve anything.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- JR1427 2mo agoI have a PhD, because at the time I wanted a career in academia, and I enjoyed research. I did a short post-doc, because I still wanted a career in academia, and enjoyed research. I quit academia because I no longer wanted a career in academia, and I didn't enjoy the research (or my boss). I don't regret my wasted years. Sure, I would have likely earned more money, but it was fun, and made me who I am. I do find it a bit of a shame that my current and previous employers couldn't give two hoots that I have a PhD etc, but oh well. EDIT: I have a PhD and post-doc experience in Cell Biology, and now work as a software engineer at a fairly large hardware company.
- noir_lord 2mo agoI trained and qualified as an Industrial Electrician (not on the same scale as a PhD academically but not a trivial amount of work to do either) and decided I loved the theory and hated the practical. I'm a software engineer and none of that training has ever been directly applicable (though some of the engineering and planning aspects generalised have).
- JR1427 2mo agoI have found it a bit frustrating that I am more junior on the company scale than most people my age. In some respects, I have lots more experience with people my pay grade, but in others, not so much.
- kome 2mo ago"consumer culture constructs identities" to be honest, there's no interest in studying capitalism unless you study its mechanisms critically. and i fear yours was foucault-slop, pseudo-radical drivel that didn't even aspire to change anything. no change = no direction = no meaning. there's some philosophical interest in the question, altho i cannot say exactly where. but if you start from a statement like that and your thesis is mostly a display of what you read, it's barely social science. it is social theory at best, and not particularly good social theory either. the interesting questions - especially in social sciences - are the hows and not the whys. the mechanisms. that would have been more empirical and more interesting. push it further and you'll find you're doing marketing research, which is applied sociology anyway: who buys what, and how, and maybe why, at the end. but twenty years of foucault-slop isn't bad at all. at least you chilled.
- AccountForSale 2mo ago[flagged]
- ojbyrne 2mo agoI’m Canadian and have hired non-Canadians. I have also have been hired by Jews and Indians, and, to be fair, Canadians (though almost entirely in Canada).
- kspacewalk2 2mo agoI've heard the other tropes before but as a Canadian, I'm genuinely surprised that there's one about us.
- delichon 2mo ago> But you may know the move: when a project or career no longer survives a basic question, you respond by making it more elaborate. When I'm defending a political position and it's going so badly that I have to add epicycles, I know I'm on the wrong track. But if I go back to first principles and develop a simpler internally consistent argument, it is usually insanely extremist to modern sensibilities. Turns out that human morality and logical consistency are usually strangers.
- motoboi 2mo agobeware: you can spend your life avoiding the thing you know you must do. You can even become rich or famous or get any other external validation you deem important in the process of not doing the thing you know you must do. The thing you know you must do probably is an internal thing, but can also be an external thing. It's hard to navigate this, but no one cares if it's hard.
- esafak 2mo agohttps://cdixon.org/2009/09/19/climbing-the-wrong-hill/ https://cdixon.org/2009/09/19/climbing-the-wrong-hill/
- shermantanktop 2mo agoI came to a similar conclusion during my masters, with less data and a less well-articulated rationale. I realized that I already had a talent for intellectual bullshittery, and grad school was encouraging it rather than giving me core skills. Looking around at fellow students, the same was true of them, and the competitive environment reinforced this tendency in all of us. I learned to be more self-critical of my thinking than others were, and to recognize when others weren’t holding me to a higher standard. And I left.
- iLemming 2mo agoThis is the element of Russia vs. reality of the rest of the world. And not even just Russia - the entire post-Soviet space is like that. Totalitarian regimes create their own bubbles, ruining countless lives and stymieing overall progress and well-being of our species.
- teiferer 2mo ago> I had no idea what a p-value was or why the hell anyone would take the logarithm of a number. And that my friends is why people need to pay attention in school. Some time around 9th grade or so, the logarithm is taught and it's a mystery how anybody can go through modern life without knowing what it is. A few years back I sat across a financial advisor who wanted to sell me a certain product and I asked him how long it would take for those proclaimed 3.8% yearly to double my money. He took a calculator, entered 1.038 x and then counted how often he had to press = for 2 to appear. I shook my head and walked out the door. Of course not everything is about money. But exponentials play a role everywhere. Not having a basic understanding is failure of the school system ... or society that it is embedded in.
- hyperhello 2mo agoBut that is an excellent way to show how long it takes to someone who doesn’t understand.
- pjc50 2mo agoOP has two problems, one of which is being a Russian national stuck in a state which is collapsing over decades, and the other is being stuck in a postmodernist mire: "Identity, values, ideology, post-modernity; critical discourse analysis, rhetoric, persuasion, functional grammar, genre analysis, sociolinguistics, metapragmatics. At least in my hands, each new framework became another way to support a conclusion I had largely reached in advance" They know the solution: Popperian falsification. "But it has one property much of my previous work lacked: reality gets a vote". It ain't much, but falsifiable work is honest work. I hope they get to the (physical and metaphorical) place they need to live.
- highfrequency 2mo ago> But it has one property much of my previous work lacked: reality gets a vote. Code fails. The parsers disagree. And the data can refuse the story I want to tell. In this project and elsewhere, I am now trying to judge work by what survives outside its own scoreboard: a transferable skill, a finished artifact, a reader, a useful result, an opportunity -- perhaps even a little more freedom. Sounds like there’s an interesting story in here - but just post the prompt you gave to Claude to write this instead of the model output. Imperfect writing is much preferred to AI’s generic decompressed version of your experience.
- pjc50 2mo agoOP is Russian, so perhaps this is an inflection of machine translation.
- savvynormie 2mo ago[dead]
- glimshe 2mo agoIn a sense, this is very anti-Marxism. The amount of work put into anything isn't necessarily linked to their value. I can spend my whole life digging holes and achieve nothing. But the story makes me sad. While I don't feel too bad about humanity reducing its investment on anything related to Foucault, the author appears to be a capable and motivated individual. It would have been great if they could have found something that they like which is also useful for everybody. Win-win.
- brador 2mo agoOne way tickets? Might get interviewed by border patrol.
- giardini 2mo agoFTFA: "... instead of grabbing myself by the balls and admitting that I was climbing a ladder propped against the wrong building.." Indeed a complex metaphor! Perhaps it has a Russian cultural source? An origin story? But i also must ask: would it make any difference if one were climbing a ladder propped against the right building? In any case I am glad I am not a Russian painter - it appears to involve skills that are difficult, painful and not at all easy-to-acquire.
- turquoisegem 2mo ago[flagged]