An actual suggestion, before I continue interrogating you for my own curiosity: Have you tried mathoverflow as a way of acquiring a community that promotes the status you want?
people who were less happy about it (i.e. math classmates who weren’t going to grad school and felt like I was being a smart ass) have had more influence.
How do they have more influence in grad school than they had in undergrad? Did they only start being negative when your paths diverged? Or did you not need to study in undergrad and so you didn’t notice that you were losing this ability? But if that’s the case, how do you know it’s status and not just being out of practice studying?
You explained what you mean by status, but you didn’t really answer how you know. I’m skeptical of your introspection.
I spent time with students who didn’t study math while I was an undergrad, so I wasn’t in direct academic competition with them. Also many of them were good students, so grades could be social status markers, whereas the graduate school I’m in is not hugely prestigious, and I am the youngest student in the program. Also I the friends that I have gotten to know better recently have told me these feelings explicitly which they had not before.
I also had somewhat poor study skills, but my introspection springs from the fact that I learned about the singularity (read Kurzweil for the first time), failed my first math class, and experienced depression for the first time within a few months of each other. In the past, I sometimes felt that I could achieve figurative immortality and value by being a great mathematician because I could always succeed, now figurative immortality seems bitter and abstract math seems like fruit that hangs high relative to future changes in mental architecture (I think uploads or AI will easily advance mathematics beyond what I can accomplish.)
I’m being stingier with the details than I could be because the whole thing is somewhat personal.
An actual suggestion, before I continue interrogating you for my own curiosity:
Have you tried mathoverflow as a way of acquiring a community that promotes the status you want?
How do they have more influence in grad school than they had in undergrad? Did they only start being negative when your paths diverged? Or did you not need to study in undergrad and so you didn’t notice that you were losing this ability? But if that’s the case, how do you know it’s status and not just being out of practice studying?
You explained what you mean by status, but you didn’t really answer how you know. I’m skeptical of your introspection.
I spent time with students who didn’t study math while I was an undergrad, so I wasn’t in direct academic competition with them. Also many of them were good students, so grades could be social status markers, whereas the graduate school I’m in is not hugely prestigious, and I am the youngest student in the program. Also I the friends that I have gotten to know better recently have told me these feelings explicitly which they had not before.
I also had somewhat poor study skills, but my introspection springs from the fact that I learned about the singularity (read Kurzweil for the first time), failed my first math class, and experienced depression for the first time within a few months of each other. In the past, I sometimes felt that I could achieve figurative immortality and value by being a great mathematician because I could always succeed, now figurative immortality seems bitter and abstract math seems like fruit that hangs high relative to future changes in mental architecture (I think uploads or AI will easily advance mathematics beyond what I can accomplish.)
I’m being stingier with the details than I could be because the whole thing is somewhat personal.