From my experience, I strongly do not recommended You and Your Research.
When I started my PhD I read this text as well. Of course I was very motivated of doing only important research. After some time I even found a nice research topic and worked on it for over two years. Even my advisor pointed out that it was a very novel and foundational idea.
At the same time, a colleague published three papers in top conferences. Their approach was basically to look at publications from the previous conference, apply some delta that they had an advantage over other teams and publish this in the next round.
Reviewers were happy because their publications already got cited and they understood the topic well.
Whereas my topic used an algorithm from the seventies that reviewers had to revisit. My topic didn't fit so well into the overall conference trend and so I still have way less citations than those incremental works.
When someone asks me if it's worth doing a PhD I tend to say that you need to like the direction in which science is going. If you don't like it and are rather rebellious, it's better to start a company.
The word "science" is ambiguous. It denotes two very different kinds of activities.
The first is the lofty intellectual ideal of solving a major problem, winning a Nobel, and getting your name in the history books. The second is the daily grind of reading other people's papers, providing peer review, writing grant proposals, and generally interfacing with other humans as a cog in a grand machine. The second is in some sense "easier" than the first. It's a lot more work, takes a lot more time, but it's a relatively straightforward (if often tedious) process that pretty much anyone can do with enough diligence. The first is a lot more fun, can often be done while showering, but is also fraught with risk and dependent on luck. You have to find just the right problem at just the right time under just the right circumstances. You can spend your time slogging, or you can spend your time buying intellectual lottery tickets and hope that lightning strikes, but you can't do both, at least not at at the same time.
The good news is that engaging in the daily slog is often (but not always) good preparation for and improves the odds of having lightning strike. So as a practical matter, that is often a good place to start. You might feel as if you're wasting your time reading everybody else's bullshit papers instead of writing the next Nobel prize winner yourself, but you're not. You're actually an essential part of the process even if you don't end up with the glory. And some day you just might be facing a really hard problem and go, "Wait a minute, this seems kinda like that thing I remember Dr. Arglebargle talking about three years ago, except that he missed this one detail..." and that's when the magic happens.
> When someone asks me if it's worth doing a PhD I tend to say that you need to like the direction in which science is going. If you don't like it and are rather rebellious, it's better to start a company.
Right. I got an MSCS from Stanford in 1985. That was about when it was becoming clear that expert systems were a dead end. The Stanford faculty was heavily invested in expert systems at the time, and were in serious denial. This was the beginning of the "AI Winter". I could see this, because I'd been doing proof of correctness work, where machine-powered predicate calculus could deliver results. It was clear to me that those methods were too brittle for the real world, although they worked fine on the rigid world of computer programs. Hammering the real world into predicate calculus only works if you already almost know the answer. (Drew McDermott's essay, "Artificial Intelligence meets Natural Stupidity" is the classic commentary on that.)
There were some neural net people around, but they were stuck, too, partly because they needed a few more orders of magnitude more compute power before that approach started working. Neural nets had been around for decades, and on a good day in 1970 you could recognize handwritten numerals, slowly. Computer power wasn't increasing that fast in those days. In 1970, there were 1 MIPS mainframes, and in the early 1980s, there were 1 MIPS VAXes. Success with neural nets lay many orders of magnitude in compute and several decades ahead.
So, instead of academia, I did some stuff for a little company called Autodesk.
I never expected computer science to be captured by the ad industry.
Much of the foundational science we learn about in the history books was done by bored rich people. Becoming a bored rich person is still a great strategy if you want to do foundational research. The risks you need to take in order to do that kind of work are too onerous for someone who needs a job to put food on the table.
That's why I have high hopes for humanity once we get closer to post scarcity (if we ever get close). Sure..some people will just watch TV all day, but I'd expect I'd start sitting down with math books and eventually finally learn the stuff I never had the time for when trying to put food on the table.
The rich person life back in the day was having personal tutors at a young age teaching you Latin, Greek, rhetoric, mathematics, music, and so on. Then if you were really good you'd just work on whatever problems you fancied, while the rest of the family probably took care of the fortune. That's my very limited understanding for how it worked for some anyway. They would correspond with other scientists, but mostly focus on their work. There's some advantage to the university system, but the administrative beauracracy is intense. Writing government grants or proposals and so on is an enormous time suck. If you didn't need money, you could focus 100% on whatever you want.
I love sitting down an reading math books. Problem is, it's hard to do after a long day's work where I've been exercising my brain a lot. Especially when I have far more important and time sensitive things to do like cooking, eating, and cleaning up the messes I've made in the day. Sure, that doesn't take all the time, but between that and some time to be human, there's often not enough time + energy left. I think it is clear why so many people get so much knowledge when they're in school. Because your job is to learn. Why you can do so much in a PhD (sometimes, maybe not the best example) because you spend all day doing this. Now just imagine what OSS projects would be if people were doing it full time and not in addition to their jobs? Would the xz incident have happened? Would xz only have "two" maintainers?
You should watch his "live CEO'ing" videos for Mathematica. They're pretty good. He'll be personally testing something out for an upcoming release, something will break and he'll call up whoever was in charge of that function or module and start asking a bunch of questions.
hmm, I think the entire FIRE movement is basically about this, no? Some people want to just do gardening or whatever, but if your hobby is science, that's totally fine too. Not every kind of science can be done on the cheap, but basically any theoretical work can be.
Why is this downvoted? I agree: Yes. His Wiki page[1] says:
> Working independently, Wolfram published a widely cited paper on heavy quark production at age 18 and nine other papers. Wolfram's work with Geoffrey C. Fox on the theory of the strong interaction is still used in experimental particle physics.
And:
> In 1983, Wolfram left for the School of Natural Sciences of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton.
As I understand, IAS is all about fundamental physics research.
I did so after college, had no money, parents were immigrants with no money but always told me to "follow my dreams". PhD payed enough to eat and live a decent life as a 20-something with no dependents. As I got older, I realized the financial burden I was taking, saw my family get into more and more financial trouble and I felt like a helpless selfish brat "chasing dreams" while my parents were trapped and fighting a losing battle... I finished as fast as I could and got a job in tech.
Those who are actually desperate to put food on the table are not going to spend extra years to finish as fast they can, they just leave. Or they don’t start in the first place.
Well, if it is any help, the guy who made this forum once published a book with a collection of his essays. Various topics, including how to become a rich person, in what ways graduate studies are helpful in creating software. Might make sense of putting worldly things in this perspective.
I chose an ambitious/important topic for my PhD. Perhaps it is because stories usually have happy endings, causing us to be overly optimistic, but I imagined that if I just worked really hard on it then eventually I would solve it. In the end I did enough to get the degree, but I didn't solve the problem in any real way. It was five years of struggle that didn't produce any interesting results. The biggest learning for me from the PhD was that it made me more humble and caused me to doubt that something is possible unless a clear path to it is already visible.
I don't know you, neither your life, but if a university granted you a PhD you must have made some headway on the problem. It is possible that you made a bunch of progress but "not enough" from your perspective. We have some evidence that you did good work (your PhD) and no evidence (afaik) that your struggle didn't produce any interesting results.
If you work hard for five years you are going to have some tangible things to show for it. To me it sounds like he didn't accomplish as much as he originally hoped, and he suspects the opportunity cost of continuing with the work is too high.
Considering on how many people are routinely influenced by the sunk cost fallacy when making their decisions, perhaps even that awareness on when to fold is a part of the critical process a good academic goes through in the course their research. The economy and politics have forced me to pivot and without enough self-awareness to realize when to leverage some other skill or the ability to learn another set of skills based on my prior education, even if it meant moving or changing to a field that isn't immediately obvious. I think it's a useful sanity check at times.
That is sort of the point of a liberal arts education broadly, no? It's not a trade school (although I did spend my 20s at a glorified one and worked in what really was a fancy service industry gig - the law - that is partially obstructed by the sort of things at stake that we deal with, but is fundamentally a service and very much one that is customer-facing. I was one of the first few to quit from those in my graduating class that I kept touch with as well.) Owners of sports franchises, worth billions of dollars, fail to understand concepts like this. Those in charge of large companies, with externalities being constraints that we might not see in fairness but still having control of the narrative more or less, fail to demonstrate this. The government and policymakers either ignore or are ignorant of this on more occasions than one can count. Although it's hard to say what would've happened in the alternative, the initiative does alter the dynamics one would eventually have with their new situation, speaking personally. At least I'm not routinely putting in 75-80 hour weeks which is liberating in its own way even if it was routine enough that few bat an eye when put in that position at the start, judging from what my friends mostly ended up doing and not doing.
But the imposter syndrome thing does haunt as well. It takes a while to realize that one hears about plane crashes because planes not crashing do not make the news, after all, and the actual rate of crashes, incidents, and near-misses can be and usually ends up haphazardly reported at best if one doesn't dig into the official quotidian, and jargon-filled language of official reports, and I don't think that it's part of society's expectation for the average person even if it's both an apt analogy and something to look up if one has the time.
That is also a difficult problem - how do you know beforehand, that a problem is worthwhile? That someone else thinks it is important? Or how high is "ambitious" if you never tried to do a thing? There is a lot of luck in that system.
Similar experience here. My PhD research was in a niche (but unhyped) field where it was easy to pump out low-impact papers. My peers who went into more hyped fields had much more citations and much better job outcomes, whether in academia or in industry.
If you want to do high-impact research in the long run, you need to have a strong foundation, which means a solid bed of high-impact papers to point to when you need funding, opportunities, etc.
Just like undergraduate work, your PhD thesis is practise. For the PhD, in the mechanics of doing large scale research and participating in the community. Save the novel and profound stuff for post-doctoral work.
I had a different experience. I aimed for what your colleague did, but none of my work was good enough for top tier conferences, so I ended up with neither novel nor top-tier work.
So I think both options really depend on what you can deliver and in what timeframe.
> Their approach was basically to look at publications from the previous conference, apply some delta that they had an advantage over other teams and publish this in the next round.
I think that's it for most PhD students. Look at recent papers from your advisor (or their co-authors). Once you understand that specialized area well-enough, you should be able to find an epsilon that can be added, or to apply some results to a different use case. A 2-3 papers in somewhat decent conferences should be enough to be able to graduate.
Most people won't solve interesting open problems. They will find questions that nobody has asked before, so they can be the first one to answer it.
Very similar experience here, and I ended up going directly into industry instead of a postdoc because I had the same realization. I'm glad I did it that way, though, because I'm very proud of my research and I think we did something very interesting and novel.
What about pursuing a PhD if you aren't planning to stay in academia? Would its lack bar you from industrial R&D positions? Assuming we're talking about a Computer Science/Engineering discipline.
I would say it really depends. There are certainly specialized area where a PhD is important, but it's hit or miss.
For instance, my team (in a big tech company) has people with very diverse backgrounds. Some tasks require more expertise, but most of the work will fit a generalist profile. Some teams who are more "researchy" have probably more PhDs. I feel doing a PhD gave me more time to learn things, while my current position is more fast paced and I can't afford to spend 2 weeks just learning new things.
Financially, it didn't make sense to do a PhD. It's not even super clear what I learned is helpful now but I'm glad I've had this experience. It gave me a bit more perspective and culture of the field. I don't regret doing it. However, I regret going into academia. Being a professor didn't suit me for many reasons. I'm happier in industry.
Industry is more than willing to look past a lack of a degree given a good track record. Two of the smartest people I know didn't have undergrad degrees. One started as a lineman for AT&T, and learned programming by tending a computer in a field office, and worked his way up to working at some of the biggest tech companies. Your web browser uses technology he wrote (being cagey, as I'm not sure its commonly know that he doesn't have a degree).
Even academia is willing to look past a lack of a degree for the right person -- my ex-wife's PhD advisor's advisor didn't have a PhD himself (but did foundational work in the field).
> Even academia is willing to look past a lack of a degree for the right person -- my ex-wife's PhD advisor's advisor didn't have a PhD himself (but did foundational work in the field).
These seems like more than a generation ago. Things were very different back then. I think now attaining a PhD (or enrolling in one) is the first step towards even starting out in foundational research. Academia today seems to be more about restricting access to the Ivory tower, rather than democratizing it.
Get into the PhD, publish a paper, get internships, and then once you've gotten an internship with a group you're happy with, ask if you can drop out and join them.
> When someone asks me if it's worth doing a PhD I tend to say that you need to like the direction in which science is going. If you don't like it and are rather rebellious, it's better to start a company.
While this feeds into the founder kool-aid we all drank as founders, it also speaks volumes of truth to me to this day: I rejected where biology/ecology was going even when supposedly favourable paradigms--Al Gore's inconvenient truth and Carbon Credits were a thing as I was wrapping up my undergrad and I was appalled by both--were standing in front of progress and the most obvious solutions if you could take the small amount of time to familiarize yourself with emerging technology outside your gradschool bubble. Something I don't think academics are actually capable for fear of seeming to reveal themselves as hyper-specialized in one aspect only rather than the polymath they may seem/convinced themselves that they are.
Also, it is my experience most academics are tone-deaf and incredibly petty individuals: a visit with the tenured faculty was enough for me to run for the hills of the debt-laden, financial crisis impacted work-force.
I still visit my Biochemistry professor from time to time, who did well getting into Bitcoin, when I launched my startup working with the Hemp Industry; and I'm super proud of playing a part in that since we both got hit hard during the 2008 financial crisis. But I'm glad I turned down his offer to work in his lab and get my Masters and went through boot-strapping hell to launch my startup after working in many Industries just to get by.
It was interesting white boarding about the bio-chemistry of CBD (and other cannabnoids for that matter) infused drinks/food I could pitch to my clients as profitable avenues of growth after struggling to make it to class and 'only get a B-' because I just didn't 'fit' (read: rebellious) the school model at all despite having both honors and letters of recommendation to join two labs.
I'm in Grad school now (almost 20 years since starting my undergrad) for CompSci now, but only because I'm working to transition into Big Data and I already work on the large Data Centers spurred on by the AI hype; luckily it's a non-thesis program for experienced and working professionals (I'm currently on assignment for a sub-contractor in WY).
> most academics are tone-deaf and incredibly petty individuals
Yep, their egos get inflated from interacting with students all the time.
If you have been teaching the same subject for 10 or more years, and you are constantly interacting with people who are learning it for the first time and struggling, it's easy to become arrogant.
I'll go 1 step further and say that most of the advice academics give out in terms of learning has been counterproductive for me.
There have been some exceptions, but I have been disappointed for the most part.
Yep. I regularly interact with a seasoned academic who is easily one of the top minds in his area. Having him understand that this doesn’t mean that he is an expert in all areas a constant uphill battle.
And yet programmed love rehashing arguments from 1973.
I wonder sometimes, how many of the people arguing endlessly and religiously about concurrency primitives realize that they are debating “religious” texts from the same prophet, Sir Tony Hoare. But as you say, the lack of immediacy does seem to mess with our heads.
Based on my observations, marriage is the most reliable indicator of graduate student success. At least the male ones.
I don't pretend to know if marriage is the cause of success or if it is merely a correlated phenomena. But I've observed it and talking among my circle, so has a top engineering researcher at a top 10 university. This is a man who has graduated scores of students placing half of them at top universities.
My theory: PhD is inherently unstructured, and requires wading into the unknown without many markers to tell you where you are going.
Marriage creates a structured life outside of work that gives PhDs an anchor to return to periodically. This leads to better long term and consistent progress.
Stephen King describes his success in writing in part due to his successful marriage. There may be some similarities there.
No way. Family puts alot of "make money now" and "be home for dinner" pressure on you. Hardly a good environment for doing research. Not even bringing kids into the equation.
Having been through all of this, young kids are both wonderful, but definitely restrict the ability to completely focus on a research sprint. While 90% habit is important, there were periods where I needed long hours and focus, and those are harder to find now. Adding finances to that, and I'm really glad that I waited until after my Phd to have kids, though plenty of people do it successfully.
Structured, disciplined, habits make you far more productive than working long hours.
At an old job (natl. lab) there was a guy who does his research job for, maybe, two or three hours a day. The rest of the day he is reading unrelated books.
But those three hours are so productive that by March he has filled his employer's scientific paper quota. His managers hate him because they see his fucking around 70% of the time, but by any performance metric (especially quality. His papers are the consequential ones)he's blowing everyone away.
> Based on my observations, marriage is the most reliable indicator of graduate student success. At least the male ones.
At least in math, I would rather say that marriage is a counterindication that a great PhD thesis come out at the end, for the simple reason that being married means that math is only your second love, while writing a great PhD thesis in math requires the topic of your PhD thesis to be your nearly only love for the duration of your PhD studies.
Ya know, that makes sense and all. But I'd want to be careful about subtly implying that doing nothing but your research and forgoing personal relationships in favor of work is _better_ than having a life and a little worse thesis. Most of a career in research happens after the PhD anyway, is it possible those "This is my life" people do worse later on, when their potential contributions to fields would be maximizing?
Having a life is an okay thing to want, if for no other reason than the people who are really crazy for it and want nothing but math research aren't going to listen to anyone about relationships anyway. If you find yourself seriously considering turning it down a little bit to find other avenues to personal fulfillment then you might not be one of those crazies and i think that's okay, maybe even better
Marital status is also correlated with age. Students who enter the PhD having spent a few years working following their undergraduate degree are often a bit more motivated and experienced (though I've had successful students take both paths.)
Well that depends on our definition of bigger. If we're saying bigger is "larger than baby feet" then okay but i think a better definition is "larger than the mean/median". Would baby feet drive down the mean/median that much?
1. If your partner is not in a PhD program themselves, then you can rely on them during what I call “crunch time”, and there are a few of those in every PhD when you’re doing 16 hour days 7 days a week just to get something out of the door. Single students don’t get that luxury and thus inevitably have to be miserable during that period.
2. Secondly, successfully navigating a relationship/marriage takes a lot of the same skills as successfully navigating a PhD. A good PhD at the end of the day is built on a lot of compromises: between your vision and your advisors’, the fields’, your collaborators, and if you’re interning, your industry partners. A relationship teaches you how to navigate that without burning bridges, which may not be true for a headstrong “I’m gonna change the world but I don’t know how” PhD students.
Marriage solves the problem of sex. Especially for male phd students. This is a huge factor at that age, and for the species types that are found in phd programs.
Takes the edge away, saves time and energy, etc. Not fashionable to talk about it in such terms. But it is a factor.
God if only. Unfortunately, they call it the ol "ball and chain" for a reason.
Most men would happily sleep around with many women as they could if they had a "pass" from their partner. I wouldn't even be surprised if more than half of all married men would describe their sex life in terms like "mediocre" or worse.
Marriage is supposed to solve that issue, but I claim that among other things, falling marriage rates indicate that increasingly large numbers of (usually men) are prioritizing sleeping around over settling down.
Well, this also discounts the whole "is a problem for the types of guys found in phd programs" thing. Yeah, a large majority of guys would like to sleep with women. It's not just a factor of, "does my wife expect me to not fuck around", and is significantly, "is there anyone in my life that i can actually have sex with". Loneliness is a big deal and for a quiet and introverted, private guy having a wife raises the potential partners from 0 to 1, an infinitely higher amount.
Yeah, if you have the body type and personality type and time and willingness to seek out and sleep with random women then go for it. But just because you don't fit that bill doesn't mean you don't need sexual comfort in your life. (I don't believe you said that, but it's a useful statement for me to make)
Most phd students are not the bar hopping pick up artists. And female students in campuses don’t exactly hunt phd students to sleep with either.
Marriage works. I am not talking about over 10 or 20 years. But during this period, it solves the problem of sex.
Significant swaths of Ph.D students would abandon all of their scholarly endeavors if they could go bar hopping and be pick-up artists.
"Female students not hunting for Ph.D students" is evidence that, especially for men, getting lots of education is straight up "unattractive".
Why should I even want a Ph.d if all it signals to the other sex is that I'm not just a nerd, but a nerd with a poor ability to calculate ROI. At least a lot of the "jocks" ended up with a good ROI job in finance that they got from their frat brothers rich dad.
Earning a PhD is about showing employers that you are capable of producing novel research results. You should earn a PhD because you are interested in deeply investigating a research problem, and also because you are interested in pursuing a career in research despite the uncertainties that entails, particularly the competition for academic positions and the trend in industry away from unfettered research and toward business-driven research.
If you cannot live with the uncertainty that a research career entails, and if you feel that earning a PhD is a relationship/sexual repellant, then you should consider another career path.
Besides, a PhD didn’t stop Oppenheimer and Feynman.
> Marriage solves the problem of sex. Especially for male phd students. This is a huge factor at that age, and for the species types that are found in phd programs.
In my observation among the students who do well in PhD programs, you can find a lot more asexual people than in the general population. In this sense, you are probably right in the argument
> Takes the edge away, saves time and energy, etc.
Didn't work out for me. I was pursuing a PhD and got married and shortly after had a child. I could no longer comfortably subsist on the salary of a Research Assistant. So I left academia to make more money.
I could imagine marriage helping if one doesn't have kids and the cost of living where the school is located isn't too high or if one's spouse has a successful career.
The advantage of being married is that you don't have to spend as much energy dating and other social activities.
Try to find out why, and please avoid Internet "red pill" stuff. I'm not telling you this as any sort of political statement nor am I trying to fight any culture wars here. This is just the advice of a middle-age guy with perfectly mediocre / average looks, and some life experience.
From what I observe, 9 times out of 10 the problem lies in personality. I know plenty of guys with no money and no looks that have no trouble attracting the interest of the opposite sex. Why? Because they have a great personality, as in, it feels good to be around them. Furthermore, people who rely only on look and status to attract a partner and do not work on themselves are unlikely to have a happy relationship in the long term.
I am not blaming people for having unappealing personalities. This is usually the product of things that are outside of their control, usually some sort of trauma. Life is not fair. A lot of people are traumatized and do not realize it. This can be overcome, but you must want to overcame it and you must be able to face harsh truths. Maybe therapy can help, maybe meditation, maybe even things that are considered "woo" but that allow you to face your demons. Whatever works and clicks with you is a valid answer. All roads lead to Rome if you are courageous enough.
I also don't want to dredge up culture wars stuff, but just wanted to say it's really nice to see men warning other men away from the redpill path. Thanks for encouraging therapy and self-healing.
Personality is everything, and can be developed from leveraging one's sincere ability to be curious.
As someone who accidentally outgrew gaming after playing them more than anyone I knew, a channel by this name, with this kind of content can shine the path forward to other equally interesting sides of one's self.
In my case, I rediscovered creating and building things was more interesting than playing in others worlds.
I never really quit gaming. I just didn't identify as someone who played games any longer.
In my observation, especially as you get out of your 20s, single guys are… kinda phone it in for various reasons. Even moderate effort makes a dude a rockstar.
No, reading "come as you are" or any of the shit bell hooks writes doesn't just fix issues for people like the OP. Telling them then that they have a "bad personality" is so fucked up. Personality is subjective, and most people on earth can find others who believe that their own personality is "perfect".
Someone not being successful in the dating market does not necessarily imply that their personality is bad. Saying they have no game and implying that this speaks about their personality is really hurtful. Women's sexual selection is not the arbiter of a good personality - and indeed, given what we know about how seductive dark triad traits are, it may in fact be a signal of a bad personality.
It's pretty bad when you straight up recommend "woo" to people, and effectively say "all roads lead to rome... EXCEPT THE RED PILL!"
The reality is that no matter how garbage Tate et all are, the alternative explanations for why increasingly large amounts of men have no game are so bad that huge swaths of men get seduced by tate's bullshit.
Your kind of response only takes impressionable men who would fall for it and further entrenches their beliefs that the red pill is the "subversive", "real" way that alpha men are ending up with harems while billy the beta ends up making another HN post about typescript
To be clear, I didn't tell OP that he has a bad personality. I don't know OP, how could I know that? What I told him, and do know, is that in my set of experiences this is usually the problem. And I include myself in that set of experiences, to be clear.
I completely agree with you that "women's sexual selection is not the arbiter of a good personality". Women are not immune to having terrible personalities. Women, like men, are highly flawed beings. We are all human. We all have to work on ourselves. What I will say is that if you have a good personality, you are more likely to attract a partner that you can be happy with for the long term. This is precisely how you avoid dark triad people, by being self-confident, by knowing who you are, by not needing constant external validation, by not being so influenced by what other people thing of you, by being empathic but not a people pleaser.
You talk about "game". Game is transactional. Thinking in those terms attracts people with transactional mindsets. That is precisely the problem with the red pill, it guides you towards that world. It is self-reinforcing. It leads to depression and despair, because it guarantees to make you more and more aligned with the sort of people that you should avoid. It thrives on the funhouse mirror that is social media, where if you don't make a million a year and are more than 6 feet tall you might as well shoot yourself in the head, unless you use "game" (i.e. deceive people). It's a path to hell.
I did not "straight up recommend woo". What I talked about is "things that sound like woo". Which is another way to say, have an open mind to things that might seem mushy to your male brain, that are not necessarily supported by peer-reviewed studies. Be less mentally rigid, is what I am saying. Men tend to fall very easily in this trap, again me included.
I love subversive stuff. I was a teenager in the 90s, we were all edge lords back then. I miss the time when conspiracy theories were fun. We are not in that time anymore. Tate is vile. He is an abuser of men and women, and he is the one selling impressionable men on lies that will destroy their lives.
You are probably quite young or inexperienced yourself if you think that having and harem will make you happy. The idea makes me shudder. Is it possible to have an "harem"? Sure. You will be surrounded by dark triad women, or by victims who need your money. None of them will love you. Why would you want that?
The advice is "find out why" and "work on yourself." I wasn't aware these were at all controversial, even within red-pill spheres.
You seem to be rejecting personality as something to be addressed at all, which is frankly shocking. I'm fascinated to know what alternatives you suggest, as your comment contains no actionable advice.
More than 90% of dating advice is overfitting. It’s high stakes and there is plenty of signal to glean, but once you know the basics of the situation the rest is up to chance. Which means if you’re being picky (and I think to should be if you can) success can take a while. In the meantime you could end up desperately pulling apart facts like a conspiracy theorist. The best advice, at least for people that aren’t super lucky, is to stop trying, do the obvious things (be healthy, happy, financially comfortable) and live a life that puts you in contact with women.
> The consensus? He has tons of "red flags" for basically being "billy the beta" who won't excite the women who would come into contact with him. Hardly anyone is surprised that he can't get dates. Quoting one of the top comments: "his persona reads to be like a human representation of mashed potatoes with no seasoning, bland. "
There's a couple people in that thread who used the term "beta" but I wouldn't call it the consensus. There's some calling him "boring", but there's also a bunch of ladies saying "maybe if I were single", and a bunch more saying "wanting kids is a dealbreaker".
And in any case things seem to have worked out for him: "This profile was published in August 2022; I'm no longer single, but wanted to leave it up since it was an important document for me." (https://colah.github.io/personal/dating/)
> The reality is that being a SWE or related is a massive net negative to your "SMV". We software people trade our game for our money. It's sad but it is what it is. I blame the widespread normalization of "nerds" being bullied by "jocks" in TV from the 1980s on. The cultural damage this has done is unreal.
I don't think this is true at all.
> Seriously - the most unrealistic thing about the movie "wargames" is the idea that a kid who looked like that doing a bunch of command line shit would have a girl who looked like that interested in him (and his computer!).
Matthew Broderick ended up marrying Sarah Jessica Parker.
Everything is a function of the self-effort place into self-growth.
Because everyone's special, and therefore no one is special, there is someone just like you who you will be very compatible with, both in the beginning and growing through the seasons of life together.
It just begins with deciding how you want to look at possibility, or not. Our minds go how and where we focus.
You’ve got significant foundational work to do. I’d start with Healthy Gamer GG’s channel[] and also pick up the book How to Win Friends and Influence People.
You don't know that this person has lots of work to do on themselves. These things are partially a matter of compatibility, putting yourself out there (which is a thing you do rather than a thing you become), and yes, unfortunately, pure dumb luck.
I do know, because “what if women aren’t interested in you” is a question you don’t ask after a certain degree of development.
I don’t know how long it will take to do this work. With a foundation of personal development and the right attitude, I bet you can go from “what if women aren’t interested in me” to successfully dating in under 6 weeks.
If you need to learn how to develop yourself, it could take 6 months or more before you’re able to internalize the needed lessons.
Been through it. Never really could take any of this stuff all that seriously. Especially after the woman I ended up closest to passed away. I’m mostly wondering how the people who recommend marriage as a solution to a lot of ills (and I think it’s an issue worth exploring but I also think there’s a lot of correlation/causation mixups here) expect people to take action on that.
Loved one is probably overselling it - she cut me loose for the man she would eventually marry and then passed away a few years later, but it certainly made it all seem even more pointless than before.
I’m mostly responding to all the advice I see about the benefits of marriage. My response tends to be something like, “so…?”. It occurs to me that no one of these people really talks about the benefits of dating, which seems like a pretty significant prerequisite. And again, I suspect there’s a lot of selection effects going into that data as well.
Generally it seems both are grad students, or at the very least, met in school and the relationship has an academic foundation.
Imagine having a partner to wade through such an experience who can relate, is pushing you, helping you see your blind spots, quelling your doubts/fears, and in general cheering for your success.
And then the clarity you get for doing the same for them.
There's also the extra level of responsibility that marriage entails, that forces one to 'grow up', for want of a better expression.
If that's true, the future doesn't look good for male. Honestly though, marriage and having children come with financial stability and good life balance.
I've often felt that there is something inherently unwholesome about PhDs and the modern academic effort. As if we could create research factories, and that the quality and quantity of discoveries would scale with input (money). I'm not a historian of science, but I do know that many of our greatest scientists were not professional researchers, doing the work essentially in their spare time on the side (Einstein, Newton) or more typically, because of the support of a wealthy patron. Contributors self-selected for passion and talent mixed with a juicy problem. It makes sense to park people with passion and talent but NOT a juicy problem into a teaching position until that problem ripens. But instead you get careerist, low-impact papers - even negative-impact papers if you taken into account the impact on signal-to-noise ratio such papers have.
Consider that one of the more important papers in CS in the last 20 years was "Attention is all you need", which was a side-effect of the authors day jobs. Or the many contributions of open-source which are 99% hobbyists. There is some sort of perversion that happens when you "fund research" - it removes the spontaneity and changes the selection criteria from something "natural" (passion and time and results) to something "synthetic" (grant application). It would seem to me a more sensible approach to become a car mechanic or programmer and do your original science on the side.
It’s telling that your examples are theoretical physics, math, and computer science.
You should visit a lab that does actual experiments. I don’t think anyone is doing cryo electron microscopy in their spare time. Most science just takes a lot of time and money. No way around it.
Also, most research is incremental, and thats’s totally fine. People lionize the “great men” like Einstein who have these earth-shattering discoveries, but those aren’t really worth anything without the decades of exploration and hundreds of scientists testing theories and figuring out their consequences and implications.
I mean option one is always going to be there. I'm sure there are plenty of neo-aristocrats who can do science if they want.
The problem, honestly, is an ancient one. In plato's republic he complains about a lack of state funding for geometry :
" Then take a step backward, for we are out of order, and insert the third dimension which is of solids, after the second which is of planes, and then you may proceed to solids in motion. But solid geometry is not popular and has not the patronage of the State, nor is the use of it fully recognized; the difficulty is great, and the votaries of the study are conceited and impatient. Still the charm of the pursuit wins upon men, and, if government would lend a little assistance, there might be great progress made. "
I read the book "Getting what you came for" before starting my PhD and took that to heart for graduating. It basically argued one does not need to do their best work during their PhD as that's the start of one's career. What made me sad was after I realized my area wasn't one anyone was hiring for faculty for (deep learning and AI by around 2011), and that the people who did get interviews had an astronomical number of papers (in AI generally but nobody cared about neural networks). I fortunately got a faculty job after applying to 30 universities in 2013 where I got one offer and was their third choice. I got lucky, deep learning exploded, and my career took off. Many people tried to steer me away from AI and especially neural nets, including some of my committee members for the latter.
Regardless, another factor in my success was having a somewhat crazy officemate who would work 30 hours straight and then sleep 13 hours, 7 days per week (we are still good friends and he is now a well known deep learning theory professor). I couldn't do that, but the zeal with which he pushed himself motivated me a lot (although he also gave me imposter syndrome since we took some proof heavy courses where he would be done in a couple hours what would take me days to do the same assignments).
I definitely don't recommend having kids during a PhD, as I've seen many students and peers struggle tremendously. A partner is great, especially if they are equally busy (mine was in medical school across the country), because one isn't going to really get a lot of nights and weekends if you are really pushing yourself. My advisor never pushed me, but I pushed myself very hard.
Still, if one just wants a PhD, what one needs is a good advisor who can steer one towards problems that are tractable given the student's abilities, stable funding (most programs worth doing are reasonably stable), and not trying to think one must do the most amazing work of their lives during their PhDs. It is a lot of work, but a career in research and the privilege of cultivating the next generation is really what makes me feel self-actualized.
I try to find low-hanging fruit research projects for my PhD students in their first few years to build up their confidence and then have them pursue harder problems, where if the harder ones don't work out they still hopefully have enough stuff to form a dissertation. I often find myself needing to be more of a cheerleader for my students nowadays, though, since my field exploded and reviewers seem much less competent. Rejected papers for good work hurts mental health.
As a counter example, I will offer my own experience in graduate school. I was one of the few married students and observed that nearly all the successful graduates students had the following in common:
1. They had competent PhD advisors
2. The advisors had stable funding sources
3. They were single
Of those three, #1 and #2 were by far the most important. Certain professors just knew how to run a good lab and were able to shepherd their students through the program efficiently.
As for the impact of #3, I found as a married student I had to balance my research and teaching responsibilities with the needs of my spouse. It added a level of mental and emotional stress my single colleagues didn’t have to deal with.
Ultimately, my balancing act was unsuccessful. I eventually dropped out of my PhD program and ended up divorced.
So yeah, based on my anecdotal (N=1) experience, being married doesn’t not help you to be successful in graduate school.
To be honest, I found the exact opposite to be true. I agree with the author regarding the happiness during grad school being directly related to being married.
As a matter of fact, I don't think I would have finished my PhD had my wife not supported me mentally, economically, and in spirit. I've observed our single students struggle, complaining about having to do chores after classes, clean, cook, look after themselves. Whereas my spouse was supportive and understanding, she took a colossal load off my shoulders - I could concentrate on my studies and had little to no worries outside of school. We both worked, but she worked full time to support us and got a master's degree, so she knew all too well that grad school isn't peanuts.
I think it's more so about having a good spouse who is understanding and supportive, who can meet you halfway.
I wrote my response while you posted, but it basically supports what I was saying.
> I think it's more so about having a good spouse
I wouldn't say it's about a "good" spouse. It's tough, and if it's too much for the spouse, maybe the grad student should consider dropping out. Nobody knows how it's going to work until they do it. This is especially true if they moved far from home for grad school.
I'd say fit is very important. Some advisors will provide students with feedback, give them direction, and wait for the students to come back with output. Other advisors will micromanage students, give them tight deadlines, get upset if they don't strictly follow everything they say and every deadline, and generally give the student no freedom to do anything on their own.
The thing to keep in mind is that grad students usually work well in one of those environments, but few students will thrive in both.
> as a married student I had to balance my research and teaching responsibilities with the needs of my spouse. It added a level of mental and emotional stress my single colleagues didn’t have to deal with.
This can go in several directions. Your experience is obviously the most common. In some cases the spouse is counting on the grad student to finish and get a high-paying job. They take care of everything like paying bills, shopping, cooking, etc. I've also seen cases where the spouse sacrificed so the grad student could finish (so they could have a higher income and start a family) and it put so much pressure on the grad student that they were breaking down.
Most researchers do not do their best work during their PhD, but after it. The PhD is simply the training you need for a research career. It's an easy path to disillusionment when PhD students don't realize this (often because advisors don't do a good job helping the students set reasonable expectations and goals).
It's good to be ambitious in problem selection. But a huge part of the training is to learn how to break down hard problems into reasonable increments that you can attempt to solve, one at a time.
A problem with marriage during the Phd is the inevitable two body problem. Academia privileges being itinerant. One reason I quit my PhD program for industry was because I saw how those ahead of me who wanted to stay in the same region were seen as failures or not serious.
I was excited for my friend who got a postdoc in another prof's lab in the same department, who didn't have to move across the country with his wife and newborn child. And my advisor taught me to pity him instead, "he could have gone to MIT if he applied, but now everyone will assume he couldn't get a postdoc anywhere else". If you "win" then you have to move for a postdoc, then to "win" again means moving again for a faculty position.
That kind of thinking is such self-defeating misery. If you have something to contribute, it doesn't matter where you go. You go to the University of Nowhere In Particular and make it a center of the new hot subject in research. If you can't do that, then it doesn't matter if you go to MIT or TIM or whatever, because that's just a way to earn renown from the work of others, rather than your own.
Most people become closer to the average of their colleagues. Very very few people are so strong by themselves that they can raise the level of a place just by being there individually.
I did a phd and really enjoyed it, a lot of my friends did as well and hated it. Here are some of my thoughts on the matter:
Note this advice is only if you're average or feel average. If you're a superstar and you know it please disregard (but in that case you're probably not reading this anyway).
1) I had a professor who was very strong in the field and could point me to high impact work and steer me clear of useless activities.
2) I got a good stipend. I do not recommend borrowing money or living wretchedly for a phd.
3) My professor hit a good balance between pushing me to work harder and puling back when I felt I was going to hard.
4) I avoided doing much work as a TA as much as possible. I did the minimum amount that delivered reasonable value to the class and the students.
5) I avoided working weekends and the evenings. Conversely I put a lot of pressure on myself to do work during work hours.
6) I would occasionally work holidays and weekends (this only applies to European phds which get 5+ weeks of vacation. Do not go below three weeks vacation. )
7) I did not try to be "a hero " I didn't do crazy ideas without discussing with my professor first. I didn't take more than the minimum amount of classes and select material that seemed extremely relevant.
8) I worked a job first (2 years). This made me really appreciate my phd a lot more and gave me a lot of much needed time management and interpersonal work skills.
9) i avoided reinventing the wheel at all costs.
10) I learned to say no and said no often
11) I always yes to social activities
12) I did hiking on the weekend and running during the week.
13) I prepared for a non academic career often.
14) on special occasions I would disregard all the above and work really hard on something. I cannot say how often this happens and it's kind of a spiritual question. Probably no more then 3-4 times a year is sustainable and sometimes not even every year.
My goal the whole time was to be a 'forgettable' student. Forgettable in that I tried to avoid being memorably good and avoided being memorably bad.
Of course there were genius peers I worked with and worked the weekends and evenings. I think this was right for them as the act gave them joy and they were producing great results. Conversely some people ground too hard and still didn't have very much to show.
If in doubt and you're freaking out do less. If you're not in doubt and you're getting complacent do more.
15) I made time to do whatever impulsive thing my mind felt like doing in my free time. I love video games and after a decade avoiding them because I felt like they were a waste of time, I got back into them.
16) I still had total freak outs from time to time. I vividly remember googling plumbing classes at community College. (Nothing wrong with plumbing! I bet for 10% of readers the right answer is to drop out of your phd and go into trades)
17) try not to get drunk too often or high too often. A bit on Friday is ok (you need to self monitor)
>I worked a job first (2 years). This made me really appreciate my phd a lot more and gave me a lot of much needed time management and interpersonal work skills.
I went back to school after a few years to get an MBA. I've never actually managed anyone to this day but it was sort of a prereq for a lot of the types of jobs I was interested in at the time.
It helped that the coursework was easier for me than the engineering degrees I had. But I think there was also discipline and process that came from having been in the working world that definitely helped me do really well in the program.
It can probably also help with consciously deciding you want to spend a few more years in academia as opposed to just naturally sliding into spending a bunch more years in school as the path of least resistance.
I’m finishing a phd now and this is very good advice, especially point number 1.
There are a lot of good, technically fascinating ideas out there. Only a subset of those are interesting to other researchers in your field. As an early career researcher, the first priority is finding projects that other people will care about. It’s very very important to find an advisor who knows what others care about. Science is inherently social.
A PhD program is an investment of years of your life with an uncertain outcome - and as with other investments, due diligence matters. Researching the program you're entering and the PI you'll be working for (not 'with', for) are critically important steps. When interviewing for a lab, pay particular attention to their anti-fraud procedures (data retention, lab notebook policy, etc.). Read everything they've published - is it coherent, or obfuscated?
Secondly, you have to have an income, meaning a stipend that allows you to lead a normal-ish life, and if the only way you can get paid is to teach classes, then your time for doing research will be cut in half. Likewise a decent PI will be looking for certain characteristics that make investing in you a good idea - intelligence, diligence, tenacity, etc.
The vast majority of grad students won't publish anything very significant as a grad student, so don't worry about that so much. Something like 75% of published papers don't get a citation count > 10, and that's often just the PI citing their own umbrella of work. This may appear like wasteful use of resources, but the significant research can be so valuable to society and industry that even a 5% success rate is worth the societal investment.
As far as careers, social networking is the academic game, but skill development is what counts more in industry, and most grad students don't go into academic research careers (as production of PhDs >> open academic positions). Teaching skills are undervalued in the USA, incidentally.
P.S. being happy half the time is good enough; trying to be happy all the time tends towards manic behavior, and often eventual nervous breakdown.
I have a friend who coaches all kinds of postgrads through their theses/treatises (masters all the way to postdoc) - the number one thing that keeps her in business is shitty supervisors and the soul crushing grind of academia. PhDs (and masters theses) are primarily about project management, with time, money and morale being the primary resources dealt with. Almost invariably, morale runs out first, and then time, because the work isn't being done. Managing morale is as important as managing your time and money, and supervisors almost never impart that skill.
Go get a PhD and then spend your prime years of family making as a post doc with a $60k salary. It’s ludicrous and the system only works if your family is wealthy or your spouse has a better paying job.
phd and academia is a terrible career choice of you want to be wealthy. even most "rich professors" could make much more in industry. this career only makes sense once you factor in the value of working on your own interesting and diverse problems, being surrounded by curious and intelligent people, while enjoying the freedom of developing your research into whatever direction you please. and this starts as a phd student. if, as an academic, you ever feel like you don't have most of these benefits, while not making enough money to get by, you should leave.
Yeah, that’s a nice load of bibble babble “we punish you for doing things you find interesting” crap. I didn’t say “make them rich” I am arguing that we need to make this financially viable if we expect our objective best to pursue it. $80k? $90k? Those would be a good start.
I had no hope during mine and completely changed research area in my final year. All my publications became irrelevant and I did a complete rewrite of my already mostly written thesis. My thinking was that I have nothing to lose since I'm going to fail anyway. That freedom allowed me to put together something good that I actually care about in a short time and pass my viva very easily, despite none of my new work being published.
I wrote about this here https://yousefamar.com/memo/notes/my/views/phds/ My number one bit of advice would be to stop listening to your advisors and do what you think is right. They're the ones that led you to the point of no hope despite your efforts.
If I could go back in time, I would go straight to founding instead of wasting some of my sharpest years on a PhD, but I would never have known that had I not done it.
Just want to put out here that being neurodivergent is an easy route to lose hope. Most people / professors are neurotypical and they guide you through their neurotypical lens, as they have previously found success doing.
I love this advice for activities outside academia as well. Solve the problems in front of you that you can make progress on. Don’t spend time trying to weigh the value of the problem based on perceived prestige.
Like everything else, it’s a journey of exploration combining idealism and pragmatism with curiosity at the core. As some of the humble examples Feynman provided, when one digs into them, one would see the connection, intrigued and enlightened … and it would become an enjoyable and fruitful journey …
> The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to. A problem is grand in science if it lies before us unsolved and we see some way for us to make some headway into it.
I'll just add one more comment: it's entirely possible to feel like everything you're doing is worthless, when in fact you are on the brink of accomplishing something worthwhile. That's not to say that every research project is worthwhile, but "how I feel right now" is maybe not the best indicator of how you are actually doing.
Depends on the faculty, but in most cases you are still indentured unless fully sponsored with a grant or bursary. Most people project their own esoteric interests on what they think the world should care about, but almost all are wrong most of the time.
Research institutions are like hermit-crab populations, and "science advances one funeral at a time" as some observed... One finds competitive sociopaths tend to do very well in such political climates.
Ones instincts likely tell you my opinions must be ill informed, but that was also predictable given the decades of training. ;-)
When I started my PhD I read this text as well. Of course I was very motivated of doing only important research. After some time I even found a nice research topic and worked on it for over two years. Even my advisor pointed out that it was a very novel and foundational idea.
At the same time, a colleague published three papers in top conferences. Their approach was basically to look at publications from the previous conference, apply some delta that they had an advantage over other teams and publish this in the next round.
Reviewers were happy because their publications already got cited and they understood the topic well.
Whereas my topic used an algorithm from the seventies that reviewers had to revisit. My topic didn't fit so well into the overall conference trend and so I still have way less citations than those incremental works.
When someone asks me if it's worth doing a PhD I tend to say that you need to like the direction in which science is going. If you don't like it and are rather rebellious, it's better to start a company.