I spent twenty years becoming good at the wrong game

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• Hacker News
• 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
• > 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
• > 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.

  by highfrequency
• > 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 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 want
  by Ouman
• 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