“The really uncharitable reading is that the joy of first discovery is about status. Competition. Scarcity. Beating everyone else to the punch. It doesn’t matter whether you have a 3-room house or a 4-room house, what matters is having a bigger house than the Joneses. A 2-room house would be fine, if you could only ensure that the Joneses had even less.”
I’m afraid that I think this is the truth, and that it is an inescapable fact of human psychology that this is how all good human scientists work. I personally accept the fact that it’s really status that motivates me, and think to myself “it’s better to do the right thing for the wrong reasons than not to do the right thing at all!”. I think that if I attempted to do science without the underlying emotional motivation of the big status reward at the end, I would be much less motivated, and i probably wouldn’t get much done. Certainly not as much as if I work with my own psychology of status-reward.
“The really uncharitable reading is that the joy of first discovery is about status. Competition. Scarcity. Beating everyone else to the punch. It doesn’t matter whether you have a 3-room house or a 4-room house, what matters is having a bigger house than the Joneses. A 2-room house would be fine, if you could only ensure that the Joneses had even less.”
I’m afraid that I think this is the truth, and that it is an inescapable fact of human psychology that this is how all good human scientists work. I personally accept the fact that it’s really status that motivates me, and think to myself “it’s better to do the right thing for the wrong reasons than not to do the right thing at all!”. I think that if I attempted to do science without the underlying emotional motivation of the big status reward at the end, I would be much less motivated, and i probably wouldn’t get much done. Certainly not as much as if I work with my own psychology of status-reward.