I believe that if I donate to charity, more will be donated to charity. If I do research in a field, more research will get done in that field. If I start a company, more companies will get started.
I agree on charity, but what if the funding for research in a field is limited, and there is someone who is better at doing research than you are, but worse at doing job interviews, so by deciding to go into that field, you take their place? Similarly for starting companies, if there’s a profitable niche, it will be filled by someone sooner or later, unless there’s some reason only you can see that niche.
I enjoy both thinking and deliberating in a very broad sense, and I could direct the time I spend on both in pretty arbitrary directions before it became unfun.
I found out that if I work in some field I’ll get bored after a time-frame of months to years, and this was not something I expected when I was in college. Luckily I’m in a position to easily change what to work on. Sometimes what became boring will be interesting again if I leave it for a while.
If you’re still in college, you’re probably not yet aware of how easily you get bored, so this may be something to keep in mind. (I wish I had more data about how easily people get bored. Most people seem to stay in one field their entire lives without complaining too much, but are they just going through the motions after a while?)
what if the funding for research in a field is limited, and there is someone who is better at doing research than you are, but worse at doing job interviews, so by deciding to go into that field, you take their place?
Even in the worst case, I suspect I am much better at doing research than the marginal person who would lose their job. Maybe there are some weird other issues with imperfect candidate selection, but I don’t see why those would have any effect on average.
In reality, I expect the situation to be much better, for two reasons. For one, even holding the total amount of research funding fixed, how do you think that the allocation between various fields or subfields is done? I believe the number of competent researchers/grant-writers working in a field effects the fraction of funding it captures. For two, most people in most fields pursue programs which are optimized for maintaining status, not for doing good. You shouldn’t expect the amount of socially optimal research to be conserved unless funding agencies are very good. In practice they actually seem to be astoundingly bad (at least for this way of evaluating good/bad). I guess these points are the same, but at different levels: working on the best programs within the best subfields of the best fields is important, and I don’t think the average person you statistically expect to replace is doing any of these.
if there’s a profitable niche, it will be filled by someone sooner or later
I believe this for a sufficiently generous notion of “later,” and for enterprises which create marketable value proportionate with the good they do. But I care about shorter timescales than niches generically get filled on, and my notion of value is quite different than most peoples. Evidence for the first point comes from the amount of money that goes to successful entrepreneurs. Evidence for the second comes from looking around at the world, or reasonable expectations of marketplaces.
In both cases, I think others’ remarks are essentially correct: markets work to distribute labor evenly in some sense, but my motives are different from my competitors’ and so I suspect I will displace people who are doing substantially different things.
I found out that if I work in some field I’ll get bored after a time-frame of months to years, and this was not something I expected when I was in college.
I guess I don’t know if this will be a problem. I have definitely gotten bored of particular problems, but at MIT at least there are a pretty wide variety of problems being worked on and it seems pretty easy to move around. Maybe it will become harder to move around (I imagine I can avoid this) or a higher level of meta-boredom will set in which would require a more disruptive change.
Right now this is not high on my list of reasons not to go into academia, though it would be good to know more before spending years getting a PhD.
Another thing to check is how much you like writing and publishing academic papers. I tried it once and found the process quite painful, both the writing and the publishing parts. (And that was one of the actual reasons I didn’t try to go into academia. I didn’t find out about the boredom issue until later.) I’m not sure if I’m being rational or just rationalizing, but it seems that I can spread my ideas (and get plenty of credit) just by writing about them informally on mailing lists and blogs.
I agree on charity, but what if the funding for research in a field is limited, and there is someone who is better at doing research than you are, but worse at doing job interviews, so by deciding to go into that field, you take their place? Similarly for starting companies, if there’s a profitable niche, it will be filled by someone sooner or later, unless there’s some reason only you can see that niche.
I found out that if I work in some field I’ll get bored after a time-frame of months to years, and this was not something I expected when I was in college. Luckily I’m in a position to easily change what to work on. Sometimes what became boring will be interesting again if I leave it for a while.
If you’re still in college, you’re probably not yet aware of how easily you get bored, so this may be something to keep in mind. (I wish I had more data about how easily people get bored. Most people seem to stay in one field their entire lives without complaining too much, but are they just going through the motions after a while?)
Even in the worst case, I suspect I am much better at doing research than the marginal person who would lose their job. Maybe there are some weird other issues with imperfect candidate selection, but I don’t see why those would have any effect on average.
In reality, I expect the situation to be much better, for two reasons. For one, even holding the total amount of research funding fixed, how do you think that the allocation between various fields or subfields is done? I believe the number of competent researchers/grant-writers working in a field effects the fraction of funding it captures. For two, most people in most fields pursue programs which are optimized for maintaining status, not for doing good. You shouldn’t expect the amount of socially optimal research to be conserved unless funding agencies are very good. In practice they actually seem to be astoundingly bad (at least for this way of evaluating good/bad). I guess these points are the same, but at different levels: working on the best programs within the best subfields of the best fields is important, and I don’t think the average person you statistically expect to replace is doing any of these.
I believe this for a sufficiently generous notion of “later,” and for enterprises which create marketable value proportionate with the good they do. But I care about shorter timescales than niches generically get filled on, and my notion of value is quite different than most peoples. Evidence for the first point comes from the amount of money that goes to successful entrepreneurs. Evidence for the second comes from looking around at the world, or reasonable expectations of marketplaces.
In both cases, I think others’ remarks are essentially correct: markets work to distribute labor evenly in some sense, but my motives are different from my competitors’ and so I suspect I will displace people who are doing substantially different things.
I guess I don’t know if this will be a problem. I have definitely gotten bored of particular problems, but at MIT at least there are a pretty wide variety of problems being worked on and it seems pretty easy to move around. Maybe it will become harder to move around (I imagine I can avoid this) or a higher level of meta-boredom will set in which would require a more disruptive change.
Right now this is not high on my list of reasons not to go into academia, though it would be good to know more before spending years getting a PhD.
Another thing to check is how much you like writing and publishing academic papers. I tried it once and found the process quite painful, both the writing and the publishing parts. (And that was one of the actual reasons I didn’t try to go into academia. I didn’t find out about the boredom issue until later.) I’m not sure if I’m being rational or just rationalizing, but it seems that I can spread my ideas (and get plenty of credit) just by writing about them informally on mailing lists and blogs.