Hacking preferences directly is hard, if you don’t have anything that you care more about than your current preference in a particular area. Is there anything that you care about more than your current research path?
Most hacks that I’ve successfully pulled off involved me wanting to go through the steps necessary to do the hack more than I wanted to not go through the steps. For instance, hacking my diet was fairly straightforward because I cared more about health and energy level stability than I cared about continuing to eat the way I have been eating. Especially after I noticed that I was eating the way I had been for essentially no reason.
Agreed. The difference between reward and pleasure is a salient distinction here—it’s difficult to implement a hack solely for its own sake. My suggestion to the OP would be to find reasons to change their preferences, and start by weighing the following factors:
Do you care about maximizing your future likelihood of a stable lifestyle?
How about maximizing your earning potential?
How about the degree of enjoyment you obtain from your work?
Look for links between them—for me, “enjoyment obtained from work” has a very strong weighting effect on “maximizing stability”. I’m sufficiently bad at keeping a job that’s all stress and no rewards for it to be detrimental to seek one (this is not a strength, but it seems to be a limit I’ve encountered often), and hence to optimize myself for such a search. If your current satisfaction with the prospect of changing your focus is very low, can you leverage something else you value highly against that?
If not, it seems like you’re looking at either creating a new niche for yourself (with the associated risks of that) or trying to change your field altogether. Given how much you’ll benefit from your cached skill and expertise gained by pursuing what you enjoy, I’d recommend the former. In your case: current research on machine vision is overwhelmingly focused on methods you dislike. Can you imagine any scenarios where your preferred method might have an edge, or work to supplement the existing method? Can you find a way to persuasively convey them such that you might be able to stake out some territory doing research on it?
If the answer is still no: break your habits, be more empirical. You might need to go exploring and see if you can discover any new interests or talents to which your energies might be efficiently put, which might also entail some degree of “starting over from scratch.” This option is not for everyone and I don’t recommend it cavalierly, but it’s something to think about.
Hacking preferences directly is hard, if you don’t have anything that you care more about than your current preference in a particular area. Is there anything that you care about more than your current research path?
Most hacks that I’ve successfully pulled off involved me wanting to go through the steps necessary to do the hack more than I wanted to not go through the steps. For instance, hacking my diet was fairly straightforward because I cared more about health and energy level stability than I cared about continuing to eat the way I have been eating. Especially after I noticed that I was eating the way I had been for essentially no reason.
Agreed. The difference between reward and pleasure is a salient distinction here—it’s difficult to implement a hack solely for its own sake. My suggestion to the OP would be to find reasons to change their preferences, and start by weighing the following factors:
Do you care about maximizing your future likelihood of a stable lifestyle? How about maximizing your earning potential? How about the degree of enjoyment you obtain from your work?
Look for links between them—for me, “enjoyment obtained from work” has a very strong weighting effect on “maximizing stability”. I’m sufficiently bad at keeping a job that’s all stress and no rewards for it to be detrimental to seek one (this is not a strength, but it seems to be a limit I’ve encountered often), and hence to optimize myself for such a search. If your current satisfaction with the prospect of changing your focus is very low, can you leverage something else you value highly against that?
If not, it seems like you’re looking at either creating a new niche for yourself (with the associated risks of that) or trying to change your field altogether. Given how much you’ll benefit from your cached skill and expertise gained by pursuing what you enjoy, I’d recommend the former. In your case: current research on machine vision is overwhelmingly focused on methods you dislike. Can you imagine any scenarios where your preferred method might have an edge, or work to supplement the existing method? Can you find a way to persuasively convey them such that you might be able to stake out some territory doing research on it?
If the answer is still no: break your habits, be more empirical. You might need to go exploring and see if you can discover any new interests or talents to which your energies might be efficiently put, which might also entail some degree of “starting over from scratch.” This option is not for everyone and I don’t recommend it cavalierly, but it’s something to think about.