I don’t know if self-esteem problems are fixable by pond-hopping.
The world is big. There will always be many people way more awesome than you. You can’t prevail in a status competition against the entire world and even in a small pond you’ll be well aware that there are oceans out there.
Well, that’s nice in principle, and easy to think, but how do you actually go convincing yourself to consistently feel it? If you have an answer, I sincerely want to know it, because I’ve become acquainted (doing the first labwork of my life) this summer with feeling like an absolute fraud, despite reasonable success and complete inexperience.
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.
Well, I am not sure I had do any particular self-convincing, that’s just the way I naturally feel.
Basically, I know that I’m not the best in the world by pretty much any criteria—there are people smarter than me, stronger than me, richer than me, etc. etc. But then, why should that matter? I am not in a competition with these people. We are not fighting over some resources. Let’s assume I have some global rank in, say, smartness—if my rank changes will it affect my life in any way? No, it won’t.
Things are different in a local context—maybe you want to win the affections of a particular girl or a boy. Maybe you entered a sports tournament. Maybe you want to get into a particularly selective school. In these cases I care about how I compare to others in the same local context—because whether my ranking is high or low will directly affect outcomes that are meaningful to me.
But globally—meh. I don’t care that there are thousands of people who understand quantum physics much better than I do. So what?
I suspect it ultimately boils down to the issue of self-worth. Do you consider yourself worthy because you’re better than someone? Or do you consider yourself worthy just because you are?
As it turns out, I consider myself worthy only when I’m better than someone, which sometimes takes the form of being able to help others, exert control over situations, or solve problems myself. This tends to spiral into feeling (self-)loathing when reading about some fictional people—Lazarus Long is a good example. At the moment, mental issues prevent me from consistently feeling worthy just for existing.
That’s really not the point. It’s because it’s so common and so easy to be worse than me that I don’t really take notice. Yes, I am aware that there is a critical error in thinking that, and then worrying about not being very good. I am attempting to resolve it.
In theory, if you define a niche narrowly enough, you can become “best in the world” at it, but, chances are, nobody is going to care. A niche still has to be big enough to support a community in order to be satisfying...
I want to recalibrate my sociometer so I stop comparing myself to people who are way more awesome than I am and feel better about myself.
I don’t know if self-esteem problems are fixable by pond-hopping.
The world is big. There will always be many people way more awesome than you. You can’t prevail in a status competition against the entire world and even in a small pond you’ll be well aware that there are oceans out there.
The way to win is not to play the game.
Well, that’s nice in principle, and easy to think, but how do you actually go convincing yourself to consistently feel it? If you have an answer, I sincerely want to know it, because I’ve become acquainted (doing the first labwork of my life) this summer with feeling like an absolute fraud, despite reasonable success and complete inexperience.
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.
Well, I am not sure I had do any particular self-convincing, that’s just the way I naturally feel.
Basically, I know that I’m not the best in the world by pretty much any criteria—there are people smarter than me, stronger than me, richer than me, etc. etc. But then, why should that matter? I am not in a competition with these people. We are not fighting over some resources. Let’s assume I have some global rank in, say, smartness—if my rank changes will it affect my life in any way? No, it won’t.
Things are different in a local context—maybe you want to win the affections of a particular girl or a boy. Maybe you entered a sports tournament. Maybe you want to get into a particularly selective school. In these cases I care about how I compare to others in the same local context—because whether my ranking is high or low will directly affect outcomes that are meaningful to me.
But globally—meh. I don’t care that there are thousands of people who understand quantum physics much better than I do. So what?
I suspect it ultimately boils down to the issue of self-worth. Do you consider yourself worthy because you’re better than someone? Or do you consider yourself worthy just because you are?
As it turns out, I consider myself worthy only when I’m better than someone, which sometimes takes the form of being able to help others, exert control over situations, or solve problems myself. This tends to spiral into feeling (self-)loathing when reading about some fictional people—Lazarus Long is a good example. At the moment, mental issues prevent me from consistently feeling worthy just for existing.
There always¹ is someone somewhere worse than you.
i.e., about 99.99999998% of the times.
That’s really not the point. It’s because it’s so common and so easy to be worse than me that I don’t really take notice. Yes, I am aware that there is a critical error in thinking that, and then worrying about not being very good. I am attempting to resolve it.
In theory, if you define a niche narrowly enough, you can become “best in the world” at it, but, chances are, nobody is going to care. A niche still has to be big enough to support a community in order to be satisfying...
Certain times for certain people they are: “out of sight...” an’ all that.
It might help to poke around in your mind to find out what’s going on when you compare yourself to other people.