There is the minor detail that it really helps not to hate each and every individual second of your working life in the process. A goal will only pull you along to a certain degree.
(Computer types know all the money is in the City. I did six months of it. I found the people I worked with and the people whose benefit I worked for to be excellent arguments for an unnecessarily bloody socialist revolution.)
Curious, why did it bother you that you disliked the people you worked with? Couldn’t you just be polite to them and take part in their jokes/socialgames/whatever? They’re paying you handsomely to be there, after all?
One of my brother’s co-workers at Goldman Sachs has actively tried to sabotage his work. (Goldman Sachs runs on a highly competitive “up or out” system; you either get promoted or fired, and most people don’t get promoted. If my brother lost his job, his coworker would be more likely to keep his.)
Also, you can get a PhD in a relevant mathy discipline first, thereby satisfying the condition of having done research.
And the process of dealing with the real world enough to make money will hopefully leave you with better anti-akrasia tactics, better ability to achieve real-world goals, etc.
I don’t think you need to be excessively rich. $1-4M ought to be enough.
Edit: oh, I forgot, you live in scandanavia, with a taxation system so “progressive” that it has an essential singularity at $100k. Might have to move to US.
I’m afraid that’s not really an option for me, due to various emotional and social issues. I already got horribly homesick during just a four month visit.
Alaska might be a reasonable Finland substitute, weather-wise, but the other issues will be difficult to resolve (if you’re moving to the US to make a bunch of money, Alaska is not the best place to do it).
One of my favorite professors was Brazilian, who went to graduate school at the University of Rochester. Horrified (I used to visit my ex in upstate New York, and so was familiar with the horrible winters that take up 8 months of the year without the compensations that convince people to live in Scandinavia), I asked him how he liked the transition- and he said that he loved it, and it was the best time of his life. I clarified that I was asking about the weather, and he shrugged and said that in academia, you absolutely need to put the ideas first. If the best place for your research is Antarctica, that’s where you go.
The reason why I tell this story is that this is what successful professors look like, and only one tenth of the people that go to graduate school end up as professors. If you would be outcompeted by this guy instead of this guy, keep that in mind when deciding you want to enter academia. And, if you want to do research outside of academia, in order to do that well that requires more effort than research done inside of academia.
It’s not the weather: I’d actually prefer a warmer climate than Finland has. It’s living in a foreign culture and losing all of my existing social networks.
I don’t have a problem with putting in a lot of work, but to be able to put in a lot of work, my life needs to be generally pleasant otherwise, and the work needs to be at least somewhat meaningful. I’ve tried the “just grit your teeth and toil” mentality, and it doesn’t work—maybe for someone else it does, but not for me.
my life needs to be generally pleasant otherwise, and the work needs to be at least somewhat meaningful. I’ve tried the “just grit your teeth and toil” mentality, and it doesn’t work—maybe for someone else it does, but not for me.
The first part is the part I’m calling into question, not the second. Of course you need to be electrified by your work. It’s hard to do great things when you’re toiling instead of playing.
But your standards for general pleasantness are, as far as I can tell, the sieve for a lot of research fields. As an example, it is actually harder to be happy on a grad student/postdoc salary; instead of it being shallow to consider that a challenge, it’s shallow-mindedness to not recognize that that is a challenge. It is actually harder to find a mate and start a family while an itinerant academic looking for tenure. (Other examples abound; two should be enough for this comment.) If you’re having trouble leaving your network of friends to go to grad school / someplace you can get paid more, then it seems likely that you will have trouble with the standard academic life or standard corporate life.
While there are alternatives, those tend not to play well with doing research, since the alternative tends to take the same kind of effort that you would have put into research. I should comment that I think a normal day job plus research on the side can work out but should be treated like writing a novel on the side- essentially, the way creative literary types play the lottery.
It’s living in a foreign culture and losing all of my existing social networks.
Of course it is! I am in the same situation. Just finished undergrad in philosophy.
But here life is completely optimized for happiness:
1) No errands
2) Friends filtered through 15 years for intelligence, fun, beauty, awesomeness.
3) Love, commitment, passion, and just plain sex with the one, and the others.
4) Deep knowledge of the free culture available
5) Ranking high in the city (São Paulo’s) social youth hierarchy
6) Cheap services
7) Family and acquaintances network.
8) Freedom timewise to write my books
9) Going to the park 10 min walking
10) Having been to, and having friends who were in the US, and knowing for fact that life just is worse there....
This is how much fun I have, the list’s impact is the only reason I’m considering not going to study, get FAI faster, get anti-ageing faster.
If only life were just a little worse...… I would be in a plane towards posthumanity right now.
So how good has a life to be for you to be forgiven of not working for what really matters? Help me folks!
Conditioning on yourself deeming it optimal to make a metaphorical omelet by breaking metaphorical eggs, metaphorical eggs will deem it less optimal to remain vulnerable to metaphorical breakage by you than if you did not deem it optimal to make a metaphorical omelet by breaking metaphorical eggs; therefore, deeming it optimal to break metaphorical eggs in order to make a metaphorical omelet can increase the difficulty you find in obtaining omelet-level utility.
Correct. However, the method I proposed does not involve redefining one’s utility function, as it leaves terminal values unchanged. It simply recognizes that certain methods of achieving one’s pre-existing terminal values are better than others, which leaves the utility function unaffected (it only alters instrumental values).
The method I proposed is similar to pre-commitment for a causal decision theorist on a Newcomb-like problem. For such an agent, “locking out” future decisions can improve expected utility without altering terminal values. Likewise, a decision theory that fully absorbs such outcome-improving “lockouts” so that it outputs the same actions without explicit pre-commitment can increase its expected utility for the same utility function.
That doesn’t sound very easy.
Sounds a heck of a lot easier than doing an equivalent amount of status grabbing within academic circles over the same time.
Money is a lot easier to game and status easier to buy.
There is the minor detail that it really helps not to hate each and every individual second of your working life in the process. A goal will only pull you along to a certain degree.
(Computer types know all the money is in the City. I did six months of it. I found the people I worked with and the people whose benefit I worked for to be excellent arguments for an unnecessarily bloody socialist revolution.)
For many people that is about half way between the Masters and PhD degrees. ;)
If only being in a university was a guarantee of an enjoyable working experience.
Curious, why did it bother you that you disliked the people you worked with? Couldn’t you just be polite to them and take part in their jokes/socialgames/whatever? They’re paying you handsomely to be there, after all?
Or was it a case of them being mean to you?
No, just loathsome. And the end product of what I did and finding the people I was doing it for loathsome.
I dunno, “loathsome” sounds a bit theoretical to me. Can you be specific?
One of my brother’s co-workers at Goldman Sachs has actively tried to sabotage his work. (Goldman Sachs runs on a highly competitive “up or out” system; you either get promoted or fired, and most people don’t get promoted. If my brother lost his job, his coworker would be more likely to keep his.)
I don’t understand: he tried to sabotage his cowerker’s work, or his own?
CronoDAS’s Brother’s Co-worker tried to sabotage CronoDAS’s Brother’s work.
“Hamlet, in love with the old man’s daughter, the old man thinks.”
Not without getting political. Fundamentally, I didn’t feel good about what I was doing. And I was just a Unix sysadmin.
This was just a job to live, not a job taken on in the furtherance of a larger goal.
Agreed. Average Prof is a nobody at 40, average financier is a millionaire. shrugs
The average financier is a millionaire at 40?! What job is this, exactly?
Thank you for this. This was a profound revelation for me.
Upvoted for comedy.
Also, you can get a PhD in a relevant mathy discipline first, thereby satisfying the condition of having done research.
And the process of dealing with the real world enough to make money will hopefully leave you with better anti-akrasia tactics, better ability to achieve real-world goals, etc.
You might even be able to hire others.
I don’t think you need to be excessively rich. $1-4M ought to be enough.
Edit: oh, I forgot, you live in scandanavia, with a taxation system so “progressive” that it has an essential singularity at $100k. Might have to move to US.
I’m afraid that’s not really an option for me, due to various emotional and social issues. I already got horribly homesick during just a four month visit.
Alaska might be a reasonable Finland substitute, weather-wise, but the other issues will be difficult to resolve (if you’re moving to the US to make a bunch of money, Alaska is not the best place to do it).
One of my favorite professors was Brazilian, who went to graduate school at the University of Rochester. Horrified (I used to visit my ex in upstate New York, and so was familiar with the horrible winters that take up 8 months of the year without the compensations that convince people to live in Scandinavia), I asked him how he liked the transition- and he said that he loved it, and it was the best time of his life. I clarified that I was asking about the weather, and he shrugged and said that in academia, you absolutely need to put the ideas first. If the best place for your research is Antarctica, that’s where you go.
The reason why I tell this story is that this is what successful professors look like, and only one tenth of the people that go to graduate school end up as professors. If you would be outcompeted by this guy instead of this guy, keep that in mind when deciding you want to enter academia. And, if you want to do research outside of academia, in order to do that well that requires more effort than research done inside of academia.
It’s not the weather: I’d actually prefer a warmer climate than Finland has. It’s living in a foreign culture and losing all of my existing social networks.
I don’t have a problem with putting in a lot of work, but to be able to put in a lot of work, my life needs to be generally pleasant otherwise, and the work needs to be at least somewhat meaningful. I’ve tried the “just grit your teeth and toil” mentality, and it doesn’t work—maybe for someone else it does, but not for me.
The first part is the part I’m calling into question, not the second. Of course you need to be electrified by your work. It’s hard to do great things when you’re toiling instead of playing.
But your standards for general pleasantness are, as far as I can tell, the sieve for a lot of research fields. As an example, it is actually harder to be happy on a grad student/postdoc salary; instead of it being shallow to consider that a challenge, it’s shallow-mindedness to not recognize that that is a challenge. It is actually harder to find a mate and start a family while an itinerant academic looking for tenure. (Other examples abound; two should be enough for this comment.) If you’re having trouble leaving your network of friends to go to grad school / someplace you can get paid more, then it seems likely that you will have trouble with the standard academic life or standard corporate life.
While there are alternatives, those tend not to play well with doing research, since the alternative tends to take the same kind of effort that you would have put into research. I should comment that I think a normal day job plus research on the side can work out but should be treated like writing a novel on the side- essentially, the way creative literary types play the lottery.
It’s living in a foreign culture and losing all of my existing social networks.
Of course it is! I am in the same situation. Just finished undergrad in philosophy. But here life is completely optimized for happiness: 1) No errands 2) Friends filtered through 15 years for intelligence, fun, beauty, awesomeness. 3) Love, commitment, passion, and just plain sex with the one, and the others. 4) Deep knowledge of the free culture available 5) Ranking high in the city (São Paulo’s) social youth hierarchy 6) Cheap services 7) Family and acquaintances network. 8) Freedom timewise to write my books 9) Going to the park 10 min walking 10) Having been to, and having friends who were in the US, and knowing for fact that life just is worse there....
This is how much fun I have, the list’s impact is the only reason I’m considering not going to study, get FAI faster, get anti-ageing faster.
If only life were just a little worse...… I would be in a plane towards posthumanity right now.
So how good has a life to be for you to be forgiven of not working for what really matters? Help me folks!
Well, you wanna make an omlet, you gotta break some eggs!
Conditioning on yourself deeming it optimal to make a metaphorical omelet by breaking metaphorical eggs, metaphorical eggs will deem it less optimal to remain vulnerable to metaphorical breakage by you than if you did not deem it optimal to make a metaphorical omelet by breaking metaphorical eggs; therefore, deeming it optimal to break metaphorical eggs in order to make a metaphorical omelet can increase the difficulty you find in obtaining omelet-level utility.
Many metaphorical eggs are not [metaphorical egg]::Utility maximizing agents.
True, and to the extent that is not the case, the mechanism I specified would not activate.
Redefining one’s own utility function so as to make it easier to achieve is the road that leads to wireheading.
Correct. However, the method I proposed does not involve redefining one’s utility function, as it leaves terminal values unchanged. It simply recognizes that certain methods of achieving one’s pre-existing terminal values are better than others, which leaves the utility function unaffected (it only alters instrumental values).
The method I proposed is similar to pre-commitment for a causal decision theorist on a Newcomb-like problem. For such an agent, “locking out” future decisions can improve expected utility without altering terminal values. Likewise, a decision theory that fully absorbs such outcome-improving “lockouts” so that it outputs the same actions without explicit pre-commitment can increase its expected utility for the same utility function.