I'm so burned out that the idea of even sitting at a desk with a screen in front of it, never mind coding or thinking or doing anything worthwhile, makes me feel sick to the stomach.
I'll always love coding. Stress can kill anything.
Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
141–150 of 189 posts
Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
> First, there’s not really other jobs I’d rather do. I suspect there are many jobs you would do, but you have to allow yourself to let go of the dreams, the ambitions, the identity you have built in academia. A few years ago, almost seven, I decided to leave academia, after a PhD and many years as a post doc, more than 50 journal papers published, awards and recognition in my field. I loved doing research, writing p…
This sounds like you're describing a system that is a failure but that the solution is not to fix the system but to give up and do something else. Can we not fix academia? Is the signal of so many people, especially in CS, abandoning academia for industry not as clear of a sign as you can get? I feel crazy because it feels like everyone either does not want to admit the system is broken or will admit it but not want…
> This sounds like you're describing a system that is a failure but that the solution is not to fix the system but to give up and do something else. Can we not fix academia? Is the signal of so many people, especially in CS, abandoning academia for industry not as clear of a sign as you can get?
Not enough people have left yet. Until enough people leave that academia has a hard time finding talent that it needs, as far as they're concerned there's no problem.
Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
#143I remember I used to kick-start myself into flow by doing "useless" things like rearranging code around, doing small renames for consistency, etc.
I need to return that that practice, as I find it harder and harder to interest myself in what I'm doing...
Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
To clarify, the Nobel prize comment is a reference to the last sentence of the passage: "The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate."
I understand. I just wanted to point out that pattern does not seem to have Nobel/etc reward built into it, neither it is a strategy to achieve something other than having fun and discovering random things that interest you. Everything else is coincidental. You might easily end up living on the street by applying that strategy. On the other hand, some of the best results I ever got professionally were coming from tha…
That would seem to be why they asked how repeatable the pattern was, in a tone heavily implying the answer was "not very".
Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds like you're describing a system that is a failure but that the solution is not to fix the system but to give up and do something else. Can we not fix academia? Is the signal of so many people, especially in CS, abandoning academia for industry not as clear of a sign as you can get? I feel crazy because it feels like everyone either does not want to admit the system is broken or will admit it but not want…
> This sounds like you're describing a system that is a failure but that the solution is not to fix the system but to give up and do something else. Can we not fix academia? Is the signal of so many people, especially in CS, abandoning academia for industry not as clear of a sign as you can get? Not enough people have left yet. Until enough people leave that academia has a hard time finding talent that it needs, as f…
> Until enough people leave that academia has a hard time finding talent
That's going to be a long time. If by talent you mean people who can do the job. But that doesn't fit the story that universities sell, which is about learning from the cream of the crop.
Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
#146As 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…
It’s quite telling that you never see people in industry long for their time in academia.
Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
First, a postdoc on the way out of academia is not going to fix academia. Second, how is the system broken? There are mismanaged resources, some nepotism (in the U.S., a lot of nepotism if we look at countries other than the U.S. or the like), some research questions that are (wrongly) favored, but it doesn't change the fact that many more PhDs with academic career ambitions are being produced than there are (and wil…
> Second, how is the system broken? I want to d my best to respond, but can you help me determine my audience? That way I can be clear? Are you coming from inside or outside academia? If inside, what field? If outside, have you gone through a graduate program? Which decade? No need to give highly specific answers, I'm just trying to get some additional context to best respond. There are problems more visible to those…
I was referring to "system broken" with respect to many PhDs with ambitions of an academic career having to leave academia because there are not enough tenure-track positions available. With respect to that problem, it would be equivalent to say that "Hollywood is broken" because many talented aspiring actors cannot find stable work in films and tv shows. It is a supply and demand mismatch problem.
I was not referring to the paper review and publication process, funding, grants, teaching etc.
Your audience is someone with a PhD in the biological sciences, with more than 10 years of postdoc experience (before leaving for greener pastures a few years ago, after having realized that I was not interested in tenure-track positions anymore and in any case no position had been offered to me) in Europe and in the US, who won grants, awards, competitive scholarships, and have dozens of first-author papers published in some of the most prestigious disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals.
Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
#148As 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’ve thought about leaving the research life for a regular job, but it’s not obvious to me that would help.
It might help a lot by giving you a break from thinking about the kinds of things you currently think about a lot. Seriously consider it. You don't know what you don't know. Perspective helps.
> First, there’s not really other jobs I’d rather do.
Not relevant -- you can come back to research later, and when you're burn out or depressed you inherently have a hard time imagining how new things could be fun
> I’m not sure if it even is burnout or a deeper issue.
Well, as a researcher you can appreciate that there is one way to find out -- experiment. But if it started with work and later spread, work probably had a lot to do with it. Besides, burnout is really common in academia.
Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Second, how is the system broken? I want to d my best to respond, but can you help me determine my audience? That way I can be clear? Are you coming from inside or outside academia? If inside, what field? If outside, have you gone through a graduate program? Which decade? No need to give highly specific answers, I'm just trying to get some additional context to best respond. There are problems more visible to those…
I was referring to "system broken" with respect to many PhDs with ambitions of an academic career having to leave academia because there are not enough tenure-track positions available. With respect to that problem, it would be equivalent to say that "Hollywood is broken" because many talented aspiring actors cannot find stable work in films and tv shows. It is a supply and demand mismatch problem. I was not referrin…
> I was referring to ... many PhDs with ambitions of an academic career having to leave academia...
I see. I don't think this makes the system broken and I don't think a large portion of people going into industry is a bad thing. At the end of the day, schooling, even at the PhD level, is training. I am not concerned that we do not have a high retention rate, though I am concerned that the retention is not targeting the best of the best (but that's a different conversation). I do not think this is what most academics are referring to when they mention a broken system.
My complaint about the system being broken is more about the incentive structures and metrics that are used within the academic setting. This is the more frequent usage of this phrasing that I see, so I was quite surprised at the mention of your background. The problem I am more concerned about is the entire existential question of academia. It is being treated like a business but academia is explicitly about not being subject to such things like a short term return on investment. I think an important aspect of academia is being able to do risky and low level research where the returns are going to be years or decades. So I think we have a broken system when we are trying to perform high pace output with high impact. I simply do not think you can be fast and revolutionary at the same time (at least consistently). It seems that h-index is of greater concern and this is a compounding metric that does not requisite the highest quality work but rather is more dependent upon frequency and highly influenced by publicity.
In my mind, the system is broken when the it is not encouraging academics to be the best scientists they can be. When the system encourages bad science and when a noisy process is held up as if it is the arbiter of truth (journals and conferences are even given the misnomer of "peer review" when this, as you know, takes place before and after venue publication and peers still review "preprint" works that never end up getting "published." The whole language is misleading when you break it down). I'm sure a lot of my feelings come from working in ML where the signal to noise ratio of venue publications is exceptionally low (nearly all CS domains target conferences rather than journals and so there is little to no rebuttal period. The number of submissions in each conference is well over 10k now and you cannot assume a reviewer has domain knowledge in your subfield), but I do believe that it still parallels other domains and that the problem is growing not shrinking. I think the system is broken when we discourage foundational research and the pursuit of knowledge for scientific value. Certainly something is broken when we hire a ton of administrative staff and the administrative tasks given to researchers only increases.
Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
#150While 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…
Most people aren’t Feynman and won’t get a Nobel prize whatever strategy they follow. Finding a fun way to do things does seem like it produces better solutions, though. I mean, if you dread reading about your solution, what do you expect from people who don’t even want to devote their life to it?
I often tell people that science is the rigurous version of "fuck around and find out." (Similar to Adam Savage's quote about science)
The point is to understand things, but it is easy to get trapped in needing to prove the value of that understanding. Sometimes this takes decades! I am not aware of how having a deeper understanding of any system has not been a net gain for humans in the long run. So many things overlap (I mean all physics uses the same laws) that it probably shouldn't be surprising that there ends up being a relationship to how plates spin and electrons orbit. But finding that connection is far easier said than done and far more obvious post hoc than a priori.
So why not encourage these people to play? Because it's clear that "fuck around and find out" is a very successful model. It's hard to measure and noisy, but I'm not convinced it's more noisy than the current system we use.