Satori
"In education, as elsewhere, the broad primrose path leads to a nasty place."
-- Alfred North Whitehead, "The Aims of Education" (1916)
"My life has been one long series of mistakes."
-- Shunryu Suzuki
A couple of months ago, a seed was planted in my brain when Santo got all zen on me. Since then, I've had the growing sensation of something being fundamentally wrong without being able to put my finger on it. Last week I was shooting the shit with Dave (my stats prof), and he told me about a former colleague and stats wizard who went on sabbatical and then never came back -- on account of having spent his sabbatical making fuck-you money by developing techniques for analyzing molecular imaging data. And in a flash, Shoshin was enlightened.
I chose to enroll in a neuroscience degree program because the subject sits at the nexus of many of my interests and because it seemed like the best leverage point from which to do good in the world. I now realize this was premature optimization: both of these things are true, but it doesn't follow from them that I should have enrolled in the neuroscience program. What made that decision seem reasonable was my implicit assumption that the training I'd receive in the program would equip me best for working on the sorts of problems that excite me.
Rookie mistake. What it trains you for is doing "normal science" -- chipping away at solving puzzles that have already been defined for you by other people. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's just not my bag, and the slow-burning realization of this has been a latent source of recent anxiety. What I mistook as an escape from specialization was in fact nothing of the sort. Ever since this dawned on me a few other things have started to make more sense, and I've felt a lot more at peace.
When you're cobbling together a complex system (e.g. a life), the things to optimize are adaptability at the macro scale and elegance at the micro scale -- each elementary action should be as graceful as possible, and the overall structure should be designed for long-term learning and change. Optimizing things in the middle range between those two is actually very risky because we don't know what new information and demands the opaque future will throw at us. There are all kinds of institutional forces that try to make you focus on mid-range goals because that's the zone where middlemen live (it's their reason for existing), but it's a trap -- if you ever want to accomplish anything significant, you have to ignore them. As long as you've got the small stuff and the big stuff sorted, the rest tends to work out okay.
With an eye to the long-term, what I should be doing is acquiring skills that will be valuable in a wide range of possible problems; if we're talking about scientific training specifically, that means math and other highly theoretical sciences. With a view to the short-term, I should be doing things that don't involve fighting myself; mirabile dictu, that happens to mean the same thing -- the only courses I never have mixed feelings about are the ones where I'm being equipped and trained with new ways of thinking rather than merely given a laundry list of things to do and know. (I've already learned how to vacuum up information just fine on my own, and frankly I'm more efficient at it when left to my own devices than in a curriculum.) I still like all the same stuff today that I did before, but now I know that if I want to escape the risks associated with specialization and my love-hate cycle with higher education, math and physics are what I should set my mind to.
After having polled some people in a position to know, it seems like I have little to lose by switching to a combined math and physics major. Of course it's going to set me back at least another year and quite a bit of cash, which is very inconvenient, but at this point that's a sunk cost -- there's no sense in persisting in error, and the extra time will be well spent.
-- Alfred North Whitehead, "The Aims of Education" (1916)
"My life has been one long series of mistakes."
-- Shunryu Suzuki
A couple of months ago, a seed was planted in my brain when Santo got all zen on me. Since then, I've had the growing sensation of something being fundamentally wrong without being able to put my finger on it. Last week I was shooting the shit with Dave (my stats prof), and he told me about a former colleague and stats wizard who went on sabbatical and then never came back -- on account of having spent his sabbatical making fuck-you money by developing techniques for analyzing molecular imaging data. And in a flash, Shoshin was enlightened.
I chose to enroll in a neuroscience degree program because the subject sits at the nexus of many of my interests and because it seemed like the best leverage point from which to do good in the world. I now realize this was premature optimization: both of these things are true, but it doesn't follow from them that I should have enrolled in the neuroscience program. What made that decision seem reasonable was my implicit assumption that the training I'd receive in the program would equip me best for working on the sorts of problems that excite me.
Rookie mistake. What it trains you for is doing "normal science" -- chipping away at solving puzzles that have already been defined for you by other people. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's just not my bag, and the slow-burning realization of this has been a latent source of recent anxiety. What I mistook as an escape from specialization was in fact nothing of the sort. Ever since this dawned on me a few other things have started to make more sense, and I've felt a lot more at peace.
When you're cobbling together a complex system (e.g. a life), the things to optimize are adaptability at the macro scale and elegance at the micro scale -- each elementary action should be as graceful as possible, and the overall structure should be designed for long-term learning and change. Optimizing things in the middle range between those two is actually very risky because we don't know what new information and demands the opaque future will throw at us. There are all kinds of institutional forces that try to make you focus on mid-range goals because that's the zone where middlemen live (it's their reason for existing), but it's a trap -- if you ever want to accomplish anything significant, you have to ignore them. As long as you've got the small stuff and the big stuff sorted, the rest tends to work out okay.
With an eye to the long-term, what I should be doing is acquiring skills that will be valuable in a wide range of possible problems; if we're talking about scientific training specifically, that means math and other highly theoretical sciences. With a view to the short-term, I should be doing things that don't involve fighting myself; mirabile dictu, that happens to mean the same thing -- the only courses I never have mixed feelings about are the ones where I'm being equipped and trained with new ways of thinking rather than merely given a laundry list of things to do and know. (I've already learned how to vacuum up information just fine on my own, and frankly I'm more efficient at it when left to my own devices than in a curriculum.) I still like all the same stuff today that I did before, but now I know that if I want to escape the risks associated with specialization and my love-hate cycle with higher education, math and physics are what I should set my mind to.
After having polled some people in a position to know, it seems like I have little to lose by switching to a combined math and physics major. Of course it's going to set me back at least another year and quite a bit of cash, which is very inconvenient, but at this point that's a sunk cost -- there's no sense in persisting in error, and the extra time will be well spent.