Financial/political success isn’t ‘instrumental rationality’. Maslow’s ‘self-actualization’ is.
Undoubtedly so, but based on your comments, I’d say you might be suffering from a too narrow and perhaps also somewhat biased view of the different modes of self-actualization. By this I mean that you’re not taking into account the full scope of the potential modes, and you’re also underestimating the differences in the optimal modes for people of different personalities.
In my opinion, you’re also underestimating some downsides of being a senior member of the modern-day academic nomenklatura (and especially one who is not at its top tier), particularly those that are more pronounced the further a field is from the exactness and meritocracy that is least imperfectly embodied by math. Though you’ve probably met more concrete people from this social class than me, so your judgment may in fact be more accurate than mine.
I think I account for varied personalities well, but treat supposed personality differences which are basically the fear of doing things not in accordance with an established identity as bad motivations and see those as accounting for a significant fraction of supposed personality differences though not for the majority.
I’m confused about “In my opinion, you’re also underestimating some downsides of being a senior member of the modern-day academic nomenklatura ”. What makes you say that?
I’m confused about “In my opinion, you’re also underestimating some downsides of being a senior member of the modern-day academic nomenklatura ”. What makes you say that?
Basically, I have in mind the required level of conformity with the respectable opinion. This is admittedly somewhat speculative on my part since I have neither personal experience nor close friends in such positions, but it seems to me that the standards of conformity expected from a public intellectual with prestigious academic and media affiliations have nowadays reached a level where it’s doubtful whether a genuinely curious and open mind can satisfy them without a great deal of self-censorship and possibly also dishonesty about one’s true beliefs. This seems to me like a significant barrier to true self-actualization by any reasonable definition of the term. Clearly, assuming the problem exists, it will be worse the further one’s interests are from strictly technical and non-ideological topics.
Perhaps it will be clearer if I illustrate it with a more extreme example. Imaging you were an elite member of some intellectual profession in the former U.S.S.R. -- would you rather be a mathematician or an economist? As a mathematician, you could do all the mathematics you liked, with only some rare and minimal lip-service to the system; as an economist, on the other hand, you would have to constantly mold your views according to a reigning ideology clearly remote from reality. Now of course, the modern-day Western world is far from even late-period U.S.S.R., but the difference is in my opinion one of degree, not essence. The position of a high-status intellectual still comes with very severe restrictions on your intellectual freedom.
I’m not sure that the situation of graduate students today in most academic fields is better than that of late period USSR academics. Tenured academics have it much better, but by that far into one’s career most real interest has already been squeezed out.
If people can’t think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible.
He has also formulated your other ideas (i.e. polymathism) as I interpret it of planning life in a bottom-up manner of improving flexibility and options, rather than top-down from a precise end goal (which extreme specialization would suggest).
That might be part of it, but I am pretty sure Vassar also refers to the fact that a lot of young men with the ambition and curiosity to do better spend the vast majority of their time getting more skilled at their strongest skill because that is what they perceive as the optimal path to economic security and status and the fact that academics are encouraged in this severely non-optimal path (in part because it is convenient for academic institutions and advantageous for ambitious academic bureaucrats to divide human knowledge into specialties and subspecialties).
If these young men could relax more and not worry so much about their own status and economic security, they would tend to heed more their natural human sense of curiosity or their more playful social impulses (including perhaps altruism), which are probably all better guides to what to learn next than the desire to advance in the academic status hierarchy. In other words, a burning desire for status, particularly status that comes from a reputation for having some refined skill or expertise, is not as reliable a guide to self-actualization as it was in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. Well, that might not always be true: for example, not working towards the right kind of status can prevent one from having access to the kind of friends and mentors who can best help one to learn. But it is certainly true that a lot of young men (and perhaps women, too, but I tend to think that the fear of social disapproval is a bigger problem there) do not take advantage of the social opportunities for learning that they already have (and limit their educations in other ways) out of a fear of not having enough status or income out of not having a good enough reputation for skill or expertise.
MichaelVassar:
Undoubtedly so, but based on your comments, I’d say you might be suffering from a too narrow and perhaps also somewhat biased view of the different modes of self-actualization. By this I mean that you’re not taking into account the full scope of the potential modes, and you’re also underestimating the differences in the optimal modes for people of different personalities.
In my opinion, you’re also underestimating some downsides of being a senior member of the modern-day academic nomenklatura (and especially one who is not at its top tier), particularly those that are more pronounced the further a field is from the exactness and meritocracy that is least imperfectly embodied by math. Though you’ve probably met more concrete people from this social class than me, so your judgment may in fact be more accurate than mine.
I think I account for varied personalities well, but treat supposed personality differences which are basically the fear of doing things not in accordance with an established identity as bad motivations and see those as accounting for a significant fraction of supposed personality differences though not for the majority.
I’m confused about “In my opinion, you’re also underestimating some downsides of being a senior member of the modern-day academic nomenklatura ”. What makes you say that?
MichaelVassar:
Basically, I have in mind the required level of conformity with the respectable opinion. This is admittedly somewhat speculative on my part since I have neither personal experience nor close friends in such positions, but it seems to me that the standards of conformity expected from a public intellectual with prestigious academic and media affiliations have nowadays reached a level where it’s doubtful whether a genuinely curious and open mind can satisfy them without a great deal of self-censorship and possibly also dishonesty about one’s true beliefs. This seems to me like a significant barrier to true self-actualization by any reasonable definition of the term. Clearly, assuming the problem exists, it will be worse the further one’s interests are from strictly technical and non-ideological topics.
Perhaps it will be clearer if I illustrate it with a more extreme example. Imaging you were an elite member of some intellectual profession in the former U.S.S.R. -- would you rather be a mathematician or an economist? As a mathematician, you could do all the mathematics you liked, with only some rare and minimal lip-service to the system; as an economist, on the other hand, you would have to constantly mold your views according to a reigning ideology clearly remote from reality. Now of course, the modern-day Western world is far from even late-period U.S.S.R., but the difference is in my opinion one of degree, not essence. The position of a high-status intellectual still comes with very severe restrictions on your intellectual freedom.
I’m not sure that the situation of graduate students today in most academic fields is better than that of late period USSR academics. Tenured academics have it much better, but by that far into one’s career most real interest has already been squeezed out.
Is this akin to Paul Graham’s
He has also formulated your other ideas (i.e. polymathism) as I interpret it of planning life in a bottom-up manner of improving flexibility and options, rather than top-down from a precise end goal (which extreme specialization would suggest).
That might be part of it, but I am pretty sure Vassar also refers to the fact that a lot of young men with the ambition and curiosity to do better spend the vast majority of their time getting more skilled at their strongest skill because that is what they perceive as the optimal path to economic security and status and the fact that academics are encouraged in this severely non-optimal path (in part because it is convenient for academic institutions and advantageous for ambitious academic bureaucrats to divide human knowledge into specialties and subspecialties).
If these young men could relax more and not worry so much about their own status and economic security, they would tend to heed more their natural human sense of curiosity or their more playful social impulses (including perhaps altruism), which are probably all better guides to what to learn next than the desire to advance in the academic status hierarchy. In other words, a burning desire for status, particularly status that comes from a reputation for having some refined skill or expertise, is not as reliable a guide to self-actualization as it was in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. Well, that might not always be true: for example, not working towards the right kind of status can prevent one from having access to the kind of friends and mentors who can best help one to learn. But it is certainly true that a lot of young men (and perhaps women, too, but I tend to think that the fear of social disapproval is a bigger problem there) do not take advantage of the social opportunities for learning that they already have (and limit their educations in other ways) out of a fear of not having enough status or income out of not having a good enough reputation for skill or expertise.
Agreed again.
Yes.