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Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

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Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#91

Post by marginalia_nu »

hathawsh wrote: post #16

While this passage is inspiring, it boils down to: 1. Get good at something 2. Get paid for doing it 3. Get burned out by doing it 4. Return to the fun way of doing it 5. ??? 6. Win a Nobel prize or similar How repeatable is that pattern? Is that one of the patterns we want to teach the next generation? Serious question. I don't know the answer. Feynman is obviously rather exceptional. Should we encourage people to f…

I we replace the Nobel prize part with some sort of accomplishment, this is largely the pattern that lead up to my own building an internet search engine.

Though I think it's pretty dodgy career advice. Existential crises are harrowing. It's a dark pit you fumble through for years. 1/5 stars on trip advisor.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#92

Post by mbm »

smugglerFlynn wrote: post #85
ryandv wrote: post #42

The pandemic burned me out pretty hard after a lifelong obsession with computers, tinkering around with technology back when it was more of a hobby than a commercial pursuit. It was nice to be able to parley my passion into a career, but contact with the world of business tends to corrupt what I always viewed as a form of play and artistic expression. I like simple technologies like IRC. You don't need K8s clusters o…

Just some random thoughts, but I've started during the era of J2EE monoliths still being on the rise, when Web 1.0 -> 2.0 was only starting its transition, Python still being niche etc. Amount of insanely boring and inefficient stuff like digging through all the XML APIs and CORBA was self-evident. It was fun to build totally new (and much simpler) tools, shortcutting quite literal man-years of work with each solutio…

This.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#93

Post by mbm »

oldandboring wrote: post #81
ryandv wrote: post #42

The pandemic burned me out pretty hard after a lifelong obsession with computers, tinkering around with technology back when it was more of a hobby than a commercial pursuit. It was nice to be able to parley my passion into a career, but contact with the world of business tends to corrupt what I always viewed as a form of play and artistic expression. I like simple technologies like IRC. You don't need K8s clusters o…

This is the closest comment I could find to how I experience my burnout. Nothing makes me more anxious than realizing that I fall further behind every day I'm not spending (unbillable) time becoming an expert in all the dev/ops tooling that somehow became indispensable the past 5-10 years. It's funny because I used to LOVE computers as a teenager because I loved setting up and configuring Unix systems. Now, as a deve…

The complexity has increased exponentially, but the user experience has not.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#94

Post by max_ »

thefaux wrote: post #55
tnecniv wrote: post #13

As a researcher, I’ve felt largely the same way lately. It’s been hard for me to even wrap up a project I was so excited about when I started it that I missed sleep because I was that engaged. Unfortunately, I don’t have a cozy tenure position at a major research institution to ride out the burnout until I feel inspired again. I’m just a lowly postdoc. I’ve thought about leaving the research life for a regular job, b…

Before I left academia, I felt that I would be a terrible failure. The people I was surrounded by looked at leaving the academy as a sad admission of defeat. In retrospect, I think this was largely a reflection of their own insecurity and lack of perspective because most had never been outside of the academic bubble. Life on the outside is different. Having been gone over a decade, there are some things I miss and th…

What things do you miss in academia that you didn't find in industry?

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#95

Post by TimPC »

tnecniv wrote: post #13

As a researcher, I’ve felt largely the same way lately. It’s been hard for me to even wrap up a project I was so excited about when I started it that I missed sleep because I was that engaged. Unfortunately, I don’t have a cozy tenure position at a major research institution to ride out the burnout until I feel inspired again. I’m just a lowly postdoc. I’ve thought about leaving the research life for a regular job, b…

As someone who initially started my career in academia I've been much happier since leaving. There are opportunities across industrial R&D that are far saner in terms of compensation and while they are slightly more restrictive in terms of what you work on there are still chances to do interesting research.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#96

Post by godelski »

nextos wrote: post #52
flatline wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Academia is a recipe for burnout. It’s like pro sports, unless you are the top 1% of the top 1% you may be able to keep eeking by but will never be in a comfortable position. There is always more to do and you do not get paid well for your time. You are surrounded by people who pour their lives into their work and it will be expected of you. The culture is extremely toxic and dysfunctional. Your lack of imagination a…

The problem in Academia is that its too crowded. With crowding, in many fields, the de facto way to progress has become to play corridor and department politics. I know completely clueless and incompetent researchers that made an effortless transition to faculty positions at top 10 universities, whereas some great postdocs were stuck forever, burnt out, and left. Ironically, some of said postdocs did the work the oth…

> I know completely clueless and incompetent researchers that made an effortless transition to faculty positions at top 10 universities, whereas some great postdocs were stuck forever, burnt out, and left. Ironically, some of said postdocs did the work the others took credit for in order to be promoted.

I've seen this, and it's happened to me. I'm at a much lower ranking uni and we partner with higher ranking unis and I can tell you that I know quite a number of people at top 5 universities that do not know what an expectation value, probability density, or covariance is. They get attached to my papers but I do not get attached to their papers, even if I put in more work than the reverse situation (I can't tell you what some of my coauthors did). I wrote an entire NSF grant, that we won, and my advisor told me I only played a small role. Even if true, that should be a red flag that the system is broken. Why is this so much about politics?

What we're seeing is the meritocracy-metric paradox. Where metrics are literally the biggest killers of any meritocracies. Every metric can be hacked and the more reliance you place upon them, the more they will be. The problem is people think metrics perfectly align with objectives and that this alignment is static throughout time. Neither of those is true and it is baffling to me that people either aren't willing to admit it or are willing to and then just continue as if it didn't. The world is fuzzy and metrics are just guides. I thought the difference between humans and machines was that we could generalize instructions to the intent and not the letter.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#97

Post by godelski »

TimPC wrote: post #95
tnecniv wrote: post #13

As a researcher, I’ve felt largely the same way lately. It’s been hard for me to even wrap up a project I was so excited about when I started it that I missed sleep because I was that engaged. Unfortunately, I don’t have a cozy tenure position at a major research institution to ride out the burnout until I feel inspired again. I’m just a lowly postdoc. I’ve thought about leaving the research life for a regular job, b…

As someone who initially started my career in academia I've been much happier since leaving. There are opportunities across industrial R&D that are far saner in terms of compensation and while they are slightly more restrictive in terms of what you work on there are still chances to do interesting research.

There definitely are, but to be honest, my passion is research at low TRL. Industry is saner, but they necessarily work at a higher TRL because they are not just profit motivated, but need to make profits from your research in 6 months to 3 years.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#98

Post by godelski »

bee_rider wrote: post #40
tnecniv wrote: post #13

As a researcher, I’ve felt largely the same way lately. It’s been hard for me to even wrap up a project I was so excited about when I started it that I missed sleep because I was that engaged. Unfortunately, I don’t have a cozy tenure position at a major research institution to ride out the burnout until I feel inspired again. I’m just a lowly postdoc. I’ve thought about leaving the research life for a regular job, b…

I think this is something… I dunno, it ought to be obvious, but maybe we miss it in the general public? The tenure system is partially there because it is actually good to give smart people the latitude to screw around and play with problems. And good ideas have the element of play. If academics have to retreat to complexity, nobody will be able to follow…

> The tenure system is partially there because it is actually good to give smart people the latitude to screw around and play with problems.

The tenure system doesn't work like most people think it does. It is not "I made it, now I can just do whatever I want without getting fired." You still have publication quotas and you end up having more bureaucratic work. Even with all the admins that schools have hired, there is just more work for professors.

> If academics have to retreat to complexity, nobody will be able to follow…

And? The world in complex. Simplicity is the goal, but it is the simplest description that also adequately explains the thing. That's not going to end up being very simple and there's a reason you see physicists learning very complex mathematics. It should absolutely make sense that complexity takes over as we advance our knowledge as a species because the simple things are easier to understand and are understood first. If things are not getting more complex over time, that's a sign that we are either really fucking dumb (having missed many simple things) or that we simply understand things with higher resolution. Simplicity is for the Luddites (this is literally a key part of that history).

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#99

Post by zackmorris »

Macro-scale example of magnetic locking by a spinning magnet analogous to bound states in subatomic particles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5FyFvgxUhE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bound_state

It reminds me of Feynman's wobble in the article. Which may relate to spin 1/2 particles and/or radioactive decay.

The strong force is empirically measured and I have yet to find a satisfactory explanation of its fundamental mechanism. But nucleons moving near the speed of light are held inside the nucleus by a force of several pounds! So the nuclear force acts like a gravity well but comes from electroweak effects somehow. Loosely that means that there's a centripetal force so strong that if we measure it over years, the odds of seeing a stable nucleus often approach or meet 100%.

I only bring this up because currently there's no way to modulate decay, electron capture, fission or fusion via simple means like temperature or charge. Ideally we should be able to add/remove electromagnetic energy and transmute elements by generating electron/positron pairs from photons (for example). Until we really understand how the strong force works, all the cool sci fi and Iron Man stuff will be confined to research labs.

I've spent my whole life working to make rent instead of working on important problems. What a waste for society to invest education dollars in me so I could subsist on what is largely custodial work. So I think the most important thing we can manifest is getting more leisure time, money and resources into the hands of dreamers.

The second most important thing we can do is pay our success forward. So I don't want to hear about any more billionaires and their pet projects. I want to see visionary goals, labor-saving devices to reduce suffering, automation, UBI, and most importantly people paying it forward by paying their fair share of taxes into democratic societies and having enough faith in the higher power of love to give the people the dignity and means to solve their problems and self-actualize. I mean, that's what the USA used to be until I watched it all fall apart after 9/11 to leave us with whatever all this is.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#100

Post by max_ »

There is a Richard Feynman documentary I saw where he talked about his darkest episode of depression (another depression episode).

It was after them testing one of the Atomic bombs when it had been developed.

He described it as follows, he would for example watch see someone building a bridge or doing maintainance, and he would think to himself, "Why is he doing this? Doesn't he know that he is wasting his time, that all this work he is doing is useless?"

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