Is protecting yourself from your own biases self-defeating?
I graduated from high school and wish to further my education formally by studying for a bachelor’s degree in order to become a medical researcher. I could, for instance, take two different academic paths:
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Study Medicine at undergraduate level and then do a postdoctoral fellowship.
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Study Biochemistry at undergraduate level, then study for a PhD at graduate level, and finally do a postdoctoral fellowship.
Since I will do these studies in Europe, they each take approximately the same amount of time, namely 6 to 8 years.
Do I want to do treat patients? No, I do not. But I am considering Medicine because it can be a buffer against my own mediocrity: in case I turn out to be a below average scientist, I will be screwed royally. From my personal job shadowing experience, Medicine, on the other hand, requires mere basic intellectual traits, primarily the ability to memorize heaps of information. And those I think I have. To do world-class research though I’d have to be an intellectual heavyweight, and of that I’m not so sure.
How do I decide what path to follow?
The reason I’m asking you strangers for advice is because I evidently have biases, such as the pessimism/optimism bias or the Dunning–Kruger effect, that impair my ability to reason clearly; and people who know me personally are likewise prone to make errors in advising me because of biases like, say, the Halo effect. (Come to think of it, thinking that I can’t become an above average scientist is in itself a self-defeating prophecy!)
Do you think that one ought to always seek advice from total strangers in order to be safeguarded from his/her own biases?
PS: I apologize if I should have written this in a specific thread. I’ll delete my article if that’s necessary.
Total strangers are, of course, going to have their own biases, e.g. the availability heuristic. They also may not be domain experts in the relevant domains.
I think the title of your post does not connect very well to its body. Protecting yourself from your own biases is great, but it’s hard, and substituting other people’s biases is not a solution.
The bias I’d worry about most, in your situation, would be the planning fallacy. What you want to do after graduating high school is a pretty weak predictor of what you’ll want to do six to eight years from now. Deciding which path to follow sounds premature, I think. To the extent that it’s possible, I’d suggest choosing a path that leaves both options open. (I suspect there’s a lot of overlap between medicine and biochem courses at the undergraduate level.) Assuming your preferences stay the same, you’d be able to choose where to specialize in a year or two, when you have more information about how good you are.
How would you feel about doing research that is merely pretty good? Is that a better or worse outcome than going into medicine?
Having the advice is better than not having it, so long as you’re willing to ignore bad advice. The disadvantage is that you don’t know which strangers are competent. If you can get advice from domain experts who aren’t extremely close to you (i.e. family friends, boss’s coworkers, and everyone else you might meet when “networking”), that gets you both reliability and impartiality.
I wish to cure aging. I’d need to do stellar research to that end, unfortunately. It’d still be preferable to practicing Medicine for the rest of my life though.
Another option is to go in to medicine, then donate money to groups that are working on life extension. If people working on life extension are funding-limited (as opposed to researcher-limited, where they have the funds and they just need researchers to grant them to), then this would seem to be a better choice. (Dunno how much funding is available for life extension research from mainstream academic funding channels.)
It is extremely unlikely that you will cure aging by yourself. What happens if you frame it as “I want to make a significant contribution to curing aging”?
I still don’t know whether I’m up for it. I wish I could shadow some scientist in a lab or something along those lines but this ain’t possible.
I guess I’ll have to stick with Medicine, just in case I end up being not a great researcher.
I would say that it is better to try and fail to become “the best possible you” than to live life in mediocrity. I would definitely not choose the safest option instead of the best while still in university. (In fact I was so fortunate as to have a compromise available.) The time to work for your dreams is now. You (hopefully) don’t have burdens like kids, debt, huge possessions (house, car) etc. to care for so make mistakes and learn from them. Me stealing/paraphrasing: “Try and you can fail, try not and you have already failed!” Of course I might just be someone giving bad advice, but I think not. (obviously) You won’t waste your time if you fail becoming a researcher, so definitely try it.
This sounds like an excellent idea, if it’s possible. Did you try asking one?
Haven’t found any. As a side note, I live in a country where the gov’t spends more money on churches than on health care, science or education.
How much time did you spend searching?
This seems like a fairly important task, you shouldn’t give up easily. Which country are you in, anyway?
Mind sharing which country you are from? Based on your name, I’d guess you are of either German or Danish ancestry.
Are there any obvious bad consequences of turning out to be a not-great researcher? Are there any specific ones you are trying to avoid? It might turn out that they aren’t consequences at all or can be avoided by other means.
The worst one: I would eventually die. Immortality is my long-term goal. See: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/02/write-your-hypothetical-apostasy.html.
As for specific ones, I guess being broke, unemployed is my main concern.
You second part sound like a bit of all-or-nothing thinking. You don’t necessarily have to be a great researcher to remain employed and not broke. Do you have a rough idea of what wages you would require for your living expenses?
I guess somewhere around 20-30k USD per year would suffice.
How many scientists did you ask before you concluded that isn’t possible? If you know nobody personally, LinkedIn, Xing or Facebook provide easy ways.
Hello there,
I’m a member of 80 000 hours, a community dedicated optimal career choice. I suspect they are your best bet for trying to answer this question. [Further disclaimer: the subsequent text should not be considered the 80k party line.]
I’m also a final year medical student in the UK, and my hunch is going for medicine is a better strategy, especially if you are trying to hedge against not being an elite scientist. If you go into medicine but it turns out you really are elite at science, transferring to a pure research career is doable (two of the people who taught me at Uni transferred from medical careers to being principal investigators at the LMB). If not, one still tends to make a lot of money, so one can fund other researchers etc. If you lose the gamble as an academic, things are unlikely to turn out so well.
The one big counterveiling factor is motivation. Going through medical school is not easy if you aren’t interested in treating patients. If you dislike/have difficulty with communicating with people, you will likely have trouble getting through the exams. Providing that is okay, though, it should be feasible.
Relevant image link.
I’d recommend doing something more general for undergrad (biochemistry over medicine), and when you complete that program, you’ll be in a much better position to decide what you want to do, and hopefully gained some exposure and insights as to possible career options.
The downside to studying Biochemistry at undergrad level and then Medicine would be that I’d waste time and money, since I can study Medicine too at undergrad level. And I’m bordering on poverty, so Biochemistry > Medicine would be a huge financial gamble.
In my experience (perhaps limited since I only have an undergrad degree), I suspect that people change disciplines, both in academia and careers, much more than you’re estimating, even between completely unrelated fields. (Exercise which I don’t have time to do right now: Look up lists of faculty at various universities/research companies, and note their credentials.) Also, note that having a PhD more or less completely overshadows whatever you did in undergrad.
How much overlap is there between required courses for biochem and medicine? It’s plausible that you could do a double major, depending on that.
One cannot ‘major’ in two disciplines in the country where I’m going to study.
Have you considered studying in a different country? Based on your other comments it sounds like you might not finically be able to do this, but it also sounds like your country is not a very good place for a prospective scientist.
I was actually admitted at a few universities in the UK and the USA, but I can’t afford to attend.
Another almost physician here. I have considered the research path myself but chose to do just medicine instead.
What is your true motivation? I had similarly good sounding high utility goals in mind when I considered research. In retrospection I think my true motivation was that I thought research would be fun. Oh how wrong I turned out to be...
Research will not be just research. There will be a lot of bureaucratic wrestling and this will be the main fun limiting factor. If you want to be a professor (will get more money to do research) there will be even more of it. To be a stellar researcher you probably have to be good at marketing yourself. Research might be a lot more social than you think.
How much stellar (life extension) research comes from your country? Compare this to the US. You’ll probably have to move, being an intellectual heavyweight without support gets you nowhere.
Why don’t you want to treat patients? Some of the possible reasons are circumventable, but some are not. There are lots of different specialties with varied amount of patient contact.
You don’t have to be an intellectual heavyweight to be a good doctor, but you have to be motivated. Otherwise the mindless grinding of those heaps of facts will seriously wear you down. If you become a doctor, you better have at least average social skills. Otherwise you will probably not enjoy the job.
You will probably have a much better quality of life as a bad doctor than a pretty good researcher.
You can be a doctor and a part time researcher. This might alleviate the dealing with patients thing.
Does option 1 even exist? I mean, undergrad → postdoc seems to be skipping a required step, that being: be a doctor. Hence the name ‘postdoc’.
After completing an undergraduate degree in medicine, are you really a doctor?
Sort of. You can be an almost-family doctor; that is, you’ll have most responsabilities one has. If you want to become a full-family doctor, you do your residency. If, however, you plan on becoming a specialist, you must do a residency.
So to actually practice, you do a residency, but even without one you’re a doctor who really shouldn’t be practicing?
As I said, you can practice without doing a residency but you’ll only be able to do some family medicine stuff.
Yes, in the UK at least you study for 6 years doing basically your undergraduate, though you can leave after 3.