As someone who, isolated and unfunded, went on months-long excursions into the hard version of the pset multiple times and burned out each time, I felt extremely validated when you verbally told me a fragment of this post around a fire pit at illiad. The incentives section of this post is very grim, but very true. I know naive patches to the funding ecosystem would also be bad (easy for grifters, etc), but I feel very much like I and we were failed by funders. I could’ve been stronger etc, I could’ve been in berkeley during my attempts instead of philly, but “why not just be heroically poor and work between shifts at a waged job” is… idk man, maybe fine with the right infrastructure, but i didnt have that infrastructure. (Again, I don’t know a good way to have fixed the funding ecosystem, so funders reading this shouldn’t feel too attacked).
(Epistemic status: have given up on the hard pset, but i think I have a path to adding some layers of Swiss cheese)
As someone who, isolated and unfunded, went on months-long excursions into the hard version of the pset multiple times and burned out each time, I felt extremely validated when you verbally told me a fragment of this post around a fire pit at illiad. The incentives section of this post is very grim, but very true. I know naive patches to the funding ecosystem would also be bad (easy for grifters, etc), but I feel very much like I and we were failed by funders. I could’ve been stronger etc, I could’ve been in berkeley during my attempts instead of philly, but “why not just be heroically poor and work between shifts at a waged job” is… idk man, maybe fine with the right infrastructure, but i didnt have that infrastructure. (Again, I don’t know a good way to have fixed the funding ecosystem, so funders reading this shouldn’t feel too attacked).
(Epistemic status: have given up on the hard pset, but i think I have a path to adding some layers of Swiss cheese)