Thread by @alexeyguzey

1/ this essay is brilliant

"I’ve been a graduate student in physics for almost three years, but I only recently figured out why."

some highlights:

https://twitter.com/briantimar/status/1130214852171931648

2/ "I ended up in physics through stubbornness, and an unusual willingness to suffer for the sake of grades. ... I swapped an absolute goal (figuring out how bits of nature work) with a relative one (scoring higher on tests than my classmates)"

3/ "a positive feedback loop that encouraged me to spend ever-increasing amounts of time on my work ... As my desire to excel academically grew, I spent greater amounts of time in and around the physics department. The more time I spent there, the greater my desire to excel."

4/ "once I was surrounded by other physics students, competing for the same pool of grades and research positions, I could think of little else. This inherited desire was unchecked because I had no life outside of academics — no fixed reference point."

5/ "Although quitting would have made me happier, I felt like I had nowhere to quit to. My tunnel vision left me with few concrete notions of alternative pursuits, and without a destination, I could not seriously contemplate leaving."

6/ THIS SO MUCH: "Plans are never plausible until they contain specifics, and implausible plans tend to be discarded. ... The result was a reality distortion field — quitting was not just painful, but unimaginable, unthinkable."

7/ "I ended up in graduate school not because I wanted to toe the bleeding edge of natural science, but because I simply couldn’t imagine doing anything else."

8/ "the mimetic trap in a nutshell: it hurts to leave, and there’s nowhere to go. It decouples the social reward signal from the rest of objective reality — you can spend years ascending ranks in a hierarchy without producing anything that the rest of humanity finds valuable"

9/ "Cowardice kept me from acting on this, and after a while I came to believe I had to succeed in this field I’d fallen into essentially by chance."

10/ "I suspect I’m not the only one who’s felt this trapping effect in physics. ... Among experimentalists, it’s not hard to find graduate students who can tell you every detail about how a particular machine operates, and almost nothing about why it should be built."

11/ "Graduate programs select for intensely competitive individuals with highly specific skills .. The activation energy required for quitting is famously high, in part because the glow from the genuine intellectual lights in any field make outside jobs seem [pale] in comparison"

12/ "The number of academic positions in any sub-field is typically small and static, leading to zero-sum competition for titles."

13/ "Salary gradations are useful for disrupting mimetic effects because they tie effort expended directly to units of universal economic value .. [w/o them] the goals of a peer group are easily decoupled from the outside world, making it easy to drift into time-wasting pursuits"

14/ "“Why does this matter?” is an excellent way to gauge if you’ve drifted into a mimetic trap. If you find this question impossible to answer honestly, you’re probably wasting your time."

15/ "Mimetic environments are a serious problem only if you fall into one where you can’t enjoy the process. They’re a tool for amplifying ambition and diligence, and it’s up to you to apply this tool to yourself wisely."

16/ "By stocking a bookshelf judiciously, you can express a preference over preferences — “what should I value?" ... This .. is safe: most authors exert their influence slowly, over hundreds of pages, and if the effect turns out to be undesirable, you need only put the book down"

17/ "Don’t force yourself to do anything you hate. If you get too good at this, you won’t be able to figure out when to quit."

fin/
whoops, I accidentally ended up highlighting the entire post........ oh well

disclosure: I had the luck of helping to edit this essay

@ejlflop

https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1096109331731247104