I find it helpful to read memoirs of people who have been successful in the field. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman mentions a number of episodes of him feeling like a fraud or a failure, as a graduate student or junior faculty. Many other scientists and scholars report the same. Feel free to talk to grad students or faculty around you—I would bet that most of them went through this. Most of the successful grad students I knew felt that way some of the time or most of the time.
Feeling out of your depth in science (and I suspect most other competitive fields) isn’t an indicator that you’re doing badly—it’s an indicator that you’re badly calibrated. It’s a routine feeling that you should just ignore until it goes away.
Something occurred to me while I was in the shower. Suppose for a moment I really was incompetent, and not just because I had little lab experience—I was just plain incompetent at labwork, I really was a fraud/failure/what have you, and to ignore those feelings would be critically bad. What would I expect to see in the world, that would distinguish that from “no, you’ll be fine, this is what everyone goes through”, and what would I expect to see differently from “no, you’ll be fine, you’ll actually be really good at this, good enough to make significant, even undergrad textbook contributions in 10 years’ time”? Because there should definitely be something I should be able to observe that would be different, and if there isn’t, then it seems safest to proceed with maximal caution and minimal self-estimation.
My impression is that being a scientific fraud is hard work. The system is designed to catch honest mistakes—reviewers will tell you “this analysis doesn’t make sense” or “this is a source of error you didn’t control for,” or even “we don’t know what’s wrong, but we don’t believe this result.” And they’ll say it anonymously and confidentially when they don’t publish your paper.
Being a fraud requires deliberate dishonesty. You would know if you were faking data. And if you are an LW reader, you probably would notice if you were doing selective reporting in such a way as to undermine your statistical tests. You would know if you were committing fraud. If you don’t do it, you aren’t it.
That brings us to incompetent. I don’t think there’s a category of otherwise-intelligent non-handicapped people who just cannot do lab work. The prior probability on “gets accepted to grad school / undergrad research / whatever and cannot learn” is low. Do you find that in general there are things you can’t learn?
The people I’ve known who failed out of science did not fail through inability or catastrophic mistake. They got distracted by something else in life, or they never got very interested in their work, or they were very badly advised, or the like. Sometimes it’s bad luck—the funding runs out unexpectedly, their advisor turns out to be a bad match, the data or samples get destroyed by accident, or somesuch.
Many people aren’t good enough or dedicated enough or lucky enough to make important scientific contributions. Certainly, most people don’t make important contributions. But that’s a different problem than incapacity, and probably shouldn’t worry you too much. You can very easily have a happy life as a mediocre scientist. You can even do something important. To pick an extreme example, Angela Merkel doesn’t seem to have done anything notable as a researcher, but has left her mark in other ways.
Something I didn’t know until just now is that Merkel’s PhD did actually help her career in politics. Fairly early in her career, she was made minister for the environment and nuclear policy—and I assume that her chemistry PhD was part of her qualification for the post.
As for feeling like a fraud: I don’t fabricate data, naturally. But there’s always that moment at the mass spec where you go “eh, that looks like it should be the right peak, rather than this slightly smaller, but closer peak.” It’s not fabricating data, but it feels like it’s in the same vague region, from the same source. But I meant something more like “other people are doing your work for you, you’re a burden, they’re just humoring you until they’re convinced you’re to be got rid of.”
As for incompetence: I do find it difficult to understand, for example, complex math. Homotopy groups stumped me for weeks, and I’m still not sure how I tottered through the rest of my recent math, but apparently it was satisfactory enough for a reasonably good grade for someone generally renowned as intelligent. (And it was also his last class taught here, too, says the voice. He was just being nice.) But as best I can tell, there’s not a lot I just plain can’t learn, can’t come to terms with, can’t abstract and assimilate and build on, given enough spoon-days.
As for mediocrity: one of the many things that keeps me up at night, when the anxiety is particularly bad, is the idea of never amounting to anything significant, of just being mediocre. The idea terrifies me, that I will fail to stamp my name on men’s minds forever. Another is self-modifying to the point where I no longer worry about the things I worry about, and then falling prey to them. My foibles are almost sentient in their cleverness and self-preservation. They even have their own designated inner self-part.
I know of it. I was trying to avoid the term because it feels wrong, feeds the wrong, and also rationalist taboo. Also reminding myself that feeling dumb means you’re learning, and feeling really dumb means you’re learning a lot. Just ignoring it won’t help, I don’t think, and other mental issues do point to that I’m really, really badly calibrated.
Ah. That’s a different problem.
I find it helpful to read memoirs of people who have been successful in the field. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman mentions a number of episodes of him feeling like a fraud or a failure, as a graduate student or junior faculty. Many other scientists and scholars report the same. Feel free to talk to grad students or faculty around you—I would bet that most of them went through this. Most of the successful grad students I knew felt that way some of the time or most of the time.
Feeling out of your depth in science (and I suspect most other competitive fields) isn’t an indicator that you’re doing badly—it’s an indicator that you’re badly calibrated. It’s a routine feeling that you should just ignore until it goes away.
See also the term “impostor syndrome.”
Something occurred to me while I was in the shower. Suppose for a moment I really was incompetent, and not just because I had little lab experience—I was just plain incompetent at labwork, I really was a fraud/failure/what have you, and to ignore those feelings would be critically bad. What would I expect to see in the world, that would distinguish that from “no, you’ll be fine, this is what everyone goes through”, and what would I expect to see differently from “no, you’ll be fine, you’ll actually be really good at this, good enough to make significant, even undergrad textbook contributions in 10 years’ time”? Because there should definitely be something I should be able to observe that would be different, and if there isn’t, then it seems safest to proceed with maximal caution and minimal self-estimation.
Incompetence and fraud are separate.
My impression is that being a scientific fraud is hard work. The system is designed to catch honest mistakes—reviewers will tell you “this analysis doesn’t make sense” or “this is a source of error you didn’t control for,” or even “we don’t know what’s wrong, but we don’t believe this result.” And they’ll say it anonymously and confidentially when they don’t publish your paper.
Being a fraud requires deliberate dishonesty. You would know if you were faking data. And if you are an LW reader, you probably would notice if you were doing selective reporting in such a way as to undermine your statistical tests. You would know if you were committing fraud. If you don’t do it, you aren’t it.
That brings us to incompetent. I don’t think there’s a category of otherwise-intelligent non-handicapped people who just cannot do lab work. The prior probability on “gets accepted to grad school / undergrad research / whatever and cannot learn” is low. Do you find that in general there are things you can’t learn?
The people I’ve known who failed out of science did not fail through inability or catastrophic mistake. They got distracted by something else in life, or they never got very interested in their work, or they were very badly advised, or the like. Sometimes it’s bad luck—the funding runs out unexpectedly, their advisor turns out to be a bad match, the data or samples get destroyed by accident, or somesuch.
Many people aren’t good enough or dedicated enough or lucky enough to make important scientific contributions. Certainly, most people don’t make important contributions. But that’s a different problem than incapacity, and probably shouldn’t worry you too much. You can very easily have a happy life as a mediocre scientist. You can even do something important. To pick an extreme example, Angela Merkel doesn’t seem to have done anything notable as a researcher, but has left her mark in other ways.
Something I didn’t know until just now is that Merkel’s PhD did actually help her career in politics. Fairly early in her career, she was made minister for the environment and nuclear policy—and I assume that her chemistry PhD was part of her qualification for the post.
As for feeling like a fraud: I don’t fabricate data, naturally. But there’s always that moment at the mass spec where you go “eh, that looks like it should be the right peak, rather than this slightly smaller, but closer peak.” It’s not fabricating data, but it feels like it’s in the same vague region, from the same source. But I meant something more like “other people are doing your work for you, you’re a burden, they’re just humoring you until they’re convinced you’re to be got rid of.”
As for incompetence: I do find it difficult to understand, for example, complex math. Homotopy groups stumped me for weeks, and I’m still not sure how I tottered through the rest of my recent math, but apparently it was satisfactory enough for a reasonably good grade for someone generally renowned as intelligent. (And it was also his last class taught here, too, says the voice. He was just being nice.) But as best I can tell, there’s not a lot I just plain can’t learn, can’t come to terms with, can’t abstract and assimilate and build on, given enough spoon-days.
As for mediocrity: one of the many things that keeps me up at night, when the anxiety is particularly bad, is the idea of never amounting to anything significant, of just being mediocre. The idea terrifies me, that I will fail to stamp my name on men’s minds forever. Another is self-modifying to the point where I no longer worry about the things I worry about, and then falling prey to them. My foibles are almost sentient in their cleverness and self-preservation. They even have their own designated inner self-part.
I know of it. I was trying to avoid the term because it feels wrong, feeds the wrong, and also rationalist taboo. Also reminding myself that feeling dumb means you’re learning, and feeling really dumb means you’re learning a lot. Just ignoring it won’t help, I don’t think, and other mental issues do point to that I’m really, really badly calibrated.