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- Hacker News
- This is the element of Russia vs. reality of the rest of the world. And not even just Russia - the entire post-Soviet space is like that. Totalitarian regimes create their own bubbles, ruining countless lives and stymieing overall progress and well-being of our species.by iLemming
- beware: you can spend your life avoiding the thing you know you must do. You can even become rich or famous or get any other external validation you deem important in the process of not doing the thing you know you must do.
The thing you know you must do probably is an internal thing, but can also be an external thing. It's hard to navigate this, but no one cares if it's hard.
by motoboi - I came to a similar conclusion during my masters, with less data and a less well-articulated rationale. I realized that I already had a talent for intellectual bullshittery, and grad school was encouraging it rather than giving me core skills. Looking around at fellow students, the same was true of them, and the competitive environment reinforced this tendency in all of us.
I learned to be more self-critical of my thinking than others were, and to recognize when others weren’t holding me to a higher standard. And I left.
- > any passage could be interpreted that way through a sufficiently flexible framework (and enough imagination), it was difficult to say what evidence would prove the claim wrong
The field of social research in a nutshell
by greenavocado - Statistics has been great for social sciences is the foundation of any rigor in the field. There are many 'valid' statements about society that can be drawn using statistics.
At an individual level, those statistics are fairly meaningless. You can bucket yourself into any number of statistical groupings but being a representative datapoint or an outlier doesn't really explain nor does it solve anything.
- I have a horrid memory of interviewing "a kid" for an entry level engineering job during on-campus recruitment. The "kid" had just finished his PhD in chemistry following a master's and bachelor's in the same field.
He was now closer to 30 to than to 20, was interviewing for the same job that a BS-grad can go after, and wasn't competitive compared to them.
I asked him why he had spent so much time in chemistry just to pivot and he just literally didn't know. It was hard to look at his graduate education as anything other than a wasted decade that actually has set him back career wise.
One interesting question is how does someone do that to themselves?
Another interesting question is - what is the value of a PhD when someone uninterested in the field and not-that-thought-out about it can get one? We think of PhD designating that someone has committed to the field and pushed a little edge of the frontier forward through sheer motivation and brillians and it was just hard to imagine this being true for this guy.
by xyzelement - You must be blessed. To always know why you do stuff?by fifilura
- At the age of 17 or 18 how do you actually know? My kids are going through this now. He's like I don't even know if I want to be an engineer, people just tell me I'd be good at it.by swader999
- > Another interesting question is - what is the value of a PhD when someone uninterested in the field and not-that-thought-out about it can get one?
The value of a PhD is what it brings to you. It will cost vast amounts of unpaid toil and tears, and it will not give you a well-paid job afterwards. But if you love the idea of discovering something genuinely new about this world, having the sheer freedom to dive into a research question without fear or restraint can be exhilarating.
And sure, you can also get a PhD by doing the minimum and letting your supervisor carry you through. But why would you throw years away on something you didn't care about, with nothing but a subsistence living allowance as a reward? You're only cheating yourself at that point.
by epihelix - I think some people get on this train and they don't really know where to get off or what to do whenever they do get off. So inertia keeps them riding along, doing something that is comfortable (even if they don't enjoy it) to postpone figuring out what to do next. Eventually the train gets to the end of the line and they have to get off and figure something out.
I think this is part of the tragedy of our parents generation pushing college at all costs. It is very hard to know what you want to do for the rest of your life as an 18 yo. Even worse to take on all the debt in the world for something you don't end up loving or without a good path to repayment. In previous generations, some of these people would have done a stint in the service or taken a gap year but now there is too much pressure to know "now".
by snarf21 - Your needlessly condescending description of the event coupled with the power imbalance of the situation suggest to me that you got the answers you expected to get simply because that’s what you were looking forby hklgny
- Academia is not a waste of time just because it doesn't translate into "productivity" and wealth. Some people enjoy the pursuit of knowledge, and find great meaning in it.
Increasingly the arts are being defunded based on a similar argument, and humanity as a whole is worse off because of it.
by benfortuna - Oh hey that’s me! Not literally me. Probably I was a little better off. But I was recently in a similar position, and feel like my PhD was a lost decade in some ways.
The answer, as I’m sure many already know, is idealism and a certain kind of naïvité. It’s not an absolute naïvité, but it is some kind of belief in the value of doing something that isn’t “mere” careerism. You think it’s noble to contribute to science. And you do contribute, a teeny eensy weensy bit. You also find out that it’s not everything you imagined it would be. And then you’re 30 and one day you unblind yourself. You look at the job market, and how much money various jobs actually pay. More importantly, you realize quite suddenly that money can actually make your life better, and that, whatever damage it might have wrought on your soul to pursue it, it would at least have enabled you to own a home one day. Maybe have kids. Shit. And the fresh grads who went straight into tech and finance making $300k (hold on, you can make $300k? Wait a second, that’s not a senior executive salary? That’s a normal-ish bourgeois white-collar HCoL salary that people make fresh out of school? Hold on, that’s basically a starting salary in that world? WHAT?)… just naturally understood.
Then you try to explain this on a message board or something. You don’t want pity (after all, your life is very good in the scheme of things), you just want some connection, or maybe even a, “that’s ok, that’s how we learn, life is a twisty path.” But half the people call you a class traitor. The other half call you a mediocre sucker.
- A friend of mine did a PhD in computer science solely and specifically so he could prove to himself that he could do a sustained, multi-year solo project and complete it. He then got a job he totally would've gotten 4 years earlier as well, with just the MSc. When asked (eg by recruiters/interviewers), he always said "because I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it" and personally I find that a very satisfying answer.
All I'm saying is, not everyone doing a PhD and then leaving academia was accidentally climbing up the wrong ladder. Some did it on purpose, just to admire the view.
by skrebbel - > Much of my research began with a large claim about society (e.g., "consumer culture constructs identities") and I then searched texts for language that could illustrate that claim. Because almost any passage could be interpreted that way through a sufficiently flexible framework (and enough imagination), it was difficult to say what evidence would prove the claim wrong.
Doesn’t sound like you’re doing science, to me.
In fact, this is the crux of the whole reproducibility crisis in social sciences, is it not?
by engineer_22 - This also stood out to me, such that this article really has no bearing on the validity of advanced degrees in the sciences. Case in point, if you got a "Doctor of Sciences" degree and "had no idea what a p-value was or why the hell anyone would take the logarithm of a number" that is clearly not a scientific degree.by ericpauley
- > But it has one property much of my previous work lacked: reality gets a vote. Code fails. The parsers disagree. And the data can refuse the story I want to tell. In this project and elsewhere, I am now trying to judge work by what survives outside its own scoreboard: a transferable skill, a finished artifact, a reader, a useful result, an opportunity -- perhaps even a little more freedom.
Sounds like there’s an interesting story in here - but just post the prompt you gave to Claude to write this instead of the model output. Imperfect writing is much preferred to AI’s generic decompressed version of your experience.
- OP is Russian, so perhaps this is an inflection of machine translation.by pjc50
- > I had no idea what a p-value was or why the hell anyone would take the logarithm of a number.
And that my friends is why people need to pay attention in school. Some time around 9th grade or so, the logarithm is taught and it's a mystery how anybody can go through modern life without knowing what it is.
A few years back I sat across a financial advisor who wanted to sell me a certain product and I asked him how long it would take for those proclaimed 3.8% yearly to double my money. He took a calculator, entered 1.038 x and then counted how often he had to press = for 2 to appear. I shook my head and walked out the door.
Of course not everything is about money. But exponentials play a role everywhere. Not having a basic understanding is failure of the school system ... or society that it is embedded in.
by teiferer - But that is an excellent way to show how long it takes to someone who doesn’t understand.by hyperhello
- > But you may know the move: when a project or career no longer survives a basic question, you respond by making it more elaborate.
When I'm defending a political position and it's going so badly that I have to add epicycles, I know I'm on the wrong track. But if I go back to first principles and develop a simpler internally consistent argument, it is usually insanely extremist to modern sensibilities.
Turns out that human morality and logical consistency are usually strangers.
by delichon - OP has two problems, one of which is being a Russian national stuck in a state which is collapsing over decades, and the other is being stuck in a postmodernist mire:
"Identity, values, ideology, post-modernity; critical discourse analysis, rhetoric, persuasion, functional grammar, genre analysis, sociolinguistics, metapragmatics. At least in my hands, each new framework became another way to support a conclusion I had largely reached in advance"
They know the solution: Popperian falsification. "But it has one property much of my previous work lacked: reality gets a vote".
It ain't much, but falsifiable work is honest work. I hope they get to the (physical and metaphorical) place they need to live.
by pjc50 - A lot of careers have very effective feedback loops for telling you that you're progressing, while being almost completely silent on whether the destination is one you actually wantby Ouman
- In the end you will die. Religion can possibly offer you something for after death (depending on if you choose the correct one - this is an argument I am intentionally avoiding even though I have opinions). Very few people have a career in religion and thus for most your career will have nothing to say.
Genetically if you don't have kids you are a dead end. You career will have some bearing on the life you give you kids (if you have any, I'm not trying to say you should!) but otherwise I believe it should stay out of your kids life.
Similar to the above, most people live with a married spouse (common law marriage: a legal marriage is not required for this discussion, though it may or may not matter for other purposes). While many people do meet their spouse through their career this is not required and the career itself has nothing to say about it. (historically kings and queens did marry for career reasons)
Note that both kids and a spouse implies you shouldn't allow your career to take up too much time even though many will try to.
Many people have hobbies. Even if you love the things you do at work, odds are your mind cannot handle doing it once you are done with work: your career cannot tell you anything about them. There are many people who pick a career because the things like love cannot support the life they otherwise want to live: their career can't tell them about the destination because it is purely something they do to get there.
All of this is to say that even if your career would offer you help on the destination, you should ignore it.
by bluGill - The concept of a "career" as a defined external thing has basically evaporated. There is at best a set of opportunities which you can grab, and a set of dependency credentials and acquaintances which you can use to unlock the opportunities. If the right opportunities do not arise then things can go downhill even if you've "done everything right".by pjc50
- Well said. When I was a grad student, chasing what would have been a doomed career in cellular neuroscience, I was unfortunate enough (fortunately in the end, perhaps?) to get struck down by a significant depressive episode. This ended up being the feedback signal I needed to consider changing things up, and I did.by jdpigeon
- I have a PhD, because at the time I wanted a career in academia, and I enjoyed research. I did a short post-doc, because I still wanted a career in academia, and enjoyed research. I quit academia because I no longer wanted a career in academia, and I didn't enjoy the research (or my boss).
I don't regret my wasted years. Sure, I would have likely earned more money, but it was fun, and made me who I am.
I do find it a bit of a shame that my current and previous employers couldn't give two hoots that I have a PhD etc, but oh well.
EDIT: I have a PhD and post-doc experience in Cell Biology, and now work as a software engineer at a fairly large hardware company.
by JR1427 - I have found it a bit frustrating that I am more junior on the company scale than most people my age. In some respects, I have lots more experience with people my pay grade, but in others, not so much.by JR1427
- I trained and qualified as an Industrial Electrician (not on the same scale as a PhD academically but not a trivial amount of work to do either) and decided I loved the theory and hated the practical.
I'm a software engineer and none of that training has ever been directly applicable (though some of the engineering and planning aspects generalised have).
by noir_lord