From my perspective, this is why society at large needs to get better at communicating the content—so you wouldn’t have to be good at “anticipating the content.”
The meaningfulness point is interesting, but I’m not sure I fully agree. Some topics can me meaningful but not interesting (high frequency trading to donate money) and visa-versa (video game design? No offense to video game designers).
I bet we agree on the substance, and that any disagreement is probably just a word choice thing. Like, if we could figure out how to describe and predict the “real content” for a given person—the way they would feel psychologically and physically on a daily basis to do the job—then that would clearly be much more useful than just knowing the topic. And we probably can improve at that task as a society. I just think it is a difficult problem (as you point out), and I worry that solving it might seem to some people like all it requires is a small change in mental focus. In my experience negotiating a mid career job change and hearing about the experiences of others doing the same, I am skeptical of how much the job shadowing and such helps.
However, I have gotten quite a few benefits from the line of thinking you sketch here. In particular, just knowing how many hours per week a job (or course of schooling) can be a big help. When I originally considered med school, one of the factors that decided me against it was the 80⁄90 hour weeks, and lots of reports that med school students/residents who are parents rely entirely on their partner for parenting duties.
From my perspective, this is why society at large needs to get better at communicating the content—so you wouldn’t have to be good at “anticipating the content.”
The meaningfulness point is interesting, but I’m not sure I fully agree. Some topics can me meaningful but not interesting (high frequency trading to donate money) and visa-versa (video game design? No offense to video game designers).
I bet we agree on the substance, and that any disagreement is probably just a word choice thing. Like, if we could figure out how to describe and predict the “real content” for a given person—the way they would feel psychologically and physically on a daily basis to do the job—then that would clearly be much more useful than just knowing the topic. And we probably can improve at that task as a society. I just think it is a difficult problem (as you point out), and I worry that solving it might seem to some people like all it requires is a small change in mental focus. In my experience negotiating a mid career job change and hearing about the experiences of others doing the same, I am skeptical of how much the job shadowing and such helps.
However, I have gotten quite a few benefits from the line of thinking you sketch here. In particular, just knowing how many hours per week a job (or course of schooling) can be a big help. When I originally considered med school, one of the factors that decided me against it was the 80⁄90 hour weeks, and lots of reports that med school students/residents who are parents rely entirely on their partner for parenting duties.