Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
asc.ohio-state.edu
asc.ohio-state.edu
I’ve thought about leaving the research life for a regular job, but it’s not obvious to me that would help. First, there’s not really other jobs I’d rather do. Second, the burnout has penetrated so many facets of my life (various hobbies, etc.) I’m not sure if it even is burnout or a deeper issue.
Therapy and medication has only been marginally helpful. I’m really not sure what to do at this point.
That worked for me when i felt like you describe.
I have thought about it lately, though. Maybe having that responsibility will cause other things to click into place? However, I’m worried about it not working and impacting a life beyond my own.
Also, if the dog is fond of walks and hikes etc, that’s possibly super healthy for a break from sitting and working. As the joke goes, "Ask me how I know." :)
Now I'm just pigeon-holed into some boring bureaucratic IT admin gig with just enough perks to keep me around, and big enough dollar signs to prevent me from starting over in a junior capacity. Then I see all of the discussions from people that don't enjoy development after just a short time, get laid off, etc - and it makes the reality that I'm just destined to rot bored to death for 40hrs a week for the next 25+ years all the more real.
I also realize I am extremely fortunate compared to plenty of others, but that "tug" telling me I was destined for much more gets stronger the older I get.
I think about this quote a lot:
"i keep re-encountering with a shock the way that most people do not know, at all, that the problem the entire universe is devoted to, that it crashes us into walls, throws us off cliffs, tortures and murders us to try to solve, is that of escaping local maxima"
- https://twitter.com/chaosprime/status/1248861223501942784?re...
Thus, I'd implore you to stick with the feeling and use it as impetus to change for something new.
I've always been interested in the intersection of AI and interactive storytelling. Worked in the game industry for a while, then came back for a PhD when ML really started taking off.
With the current frenzied climate in NLP research, I just feel demotivated. Mainly because I think my research outlook is very different from the mainstream, so I feel my work gets undervalued or ignored entirely.
I spent over a year and a half on my last published research project [1], and it's been largely ignored. Despite having strong reviews after rebuttal, the paper was relegated to the Findings of EMNLP, likely because my research was video game related.
I'm usually the kind of person that focuses on things because I care about them, rather than because others do, but the reality is that hiring decisions in academia (or even industry) require that others value your work. If I truly thought I could do research I cared about and get paid a living, without having to worry about whether others accepted it, I think I'd be much more motivated.
My site is a static site hosted on sourcehut, which is having an outage. If it's still down, try https://web.archive.org/web/20240110040908/https://pl.aiwrig...
I also have kind of esoteric interests in my field but it mostly hasn’t bothered me. It certainly doesn’t help with matters though when sometimes I’m trying to motivate myself and go “what’s the point?”
I will say that one thing I’ve learned as a researcher is that it’s hard to know what people will and will not like. I’ve received compliments on some of my least favorite papers I’ve written. My advisor always told this story about how, as a student, he won a best paper award for a paper that almost decided not to publish because they thought the results weren’t strong enough.
You're not alone.
One of my first papers was in normalizing flows and I focused on a niche area in there (if I said, I'd dox myself. Even this limits the search a lot). Reviewers came back and asked why my images weren't as good as SOTA GANs and just rejected. Half my experiments were on density estimation... The other reviews said I should be applying my methods to GANs instead, but that wasn't even possible because I was explicitly exploiting the distributional properties at each flow step.
My most cited paper is unpublished and the reviews I got back were about why someone would want to train from scratch instead of tuning a large model. Why we cared about such things as small number of parameters or how to quickly train models without overfitting because "bigger models generalize better."
Fwiw, I'd have no issue accepting your work. It looks useful, it advances domain knowledge, and is clearly written. I think a lot of people lose sight that experiments are proxies and that the tools we are working with are more general than the specific applications we demonstrate.
Your lack of imagination as to another job is part of the trap. Work can be enjoyable, pay well, and you can still have a personal life, but academia sells itself as the only possible trajectory for a certain type of person. Most people leave academia and many of them find meaningful work outside of that.
Some fields are more prone to this kind of behavior and power structures than others. Plus, in the past, it was much easier for recent PhD graduates to progress to tenure-track positions, without needing to do a postdoc (or many!) in between.
Actually, some countries have established regulations to try to prevent postdoc abuse, as faculty is typically interested in getting them to do all work, giving them little credit, etc. Some of my postdoc friends were supervising students, designing studies, and writing grants but their names were never officially on paper! Their PI used this as a way to getting them trapped. Without e.g. supervision experience, they would not be able to move to tenure-track positions, thereby getting stuck with him (as cheap labor) forever.
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.
As such, it's a mess that literally can't be solved from within, it needs to be solved by the administration, and the boards who appoint them. The tenure system means it'll take generations to resolve.
Academia in the U.S. has seen systemic issues like this in the past (see: eugenics). Unfortunately the implication is that it'll continue to get worse until it's mostly made better by people retiring.
I guess the pendulum always swings to the extreme other direction. Today, the more disadvantaged your intersectional identity, the better your prospects in academia.
As an example I'm familiar with, the first generations of academics at Stanford University were socially-active eugenicists (see the founding President, David Starr Jordan, who hired people like Ellwood Cubberley and Lewis Terman).
Many buildings, awards, dorms, department chairs are still named after these people.
And good ideas have the element of play. If academics have to retreat to complexity, nobody will be able to follow…
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).
Research is my absolute favorite thing to do but everything else surrounding it I just absolutely hate and it feels draining and worthless. Ideas get dismissed without explanations (even after asking), publication process is incredibly noisy and when you get a nonsensical review (I can share) people just say "shit happens" or "weird" and then it happens again and again, and advisors and managers want weekly updates but visible progress in a project goes through wild cycles of lots of work with little to nothing to show vs low work where it looks like lots of progress is made (e.g. tuning models). It just feels like hell. I'm always thinking about my projects because they sincerely interest and captivate me but I feel like the systems we have built around what is entirely a creative process is structured for routine work. I'm being asked to do things that have never been done before -- and I love this, it is the ultimate puzzle -- but how the fuck do you expect me to give accurate ETAs and to do this 3-5 times a year and launch ground breaking work with some 2080Ti nodes and maybe one A100 node? How ground breaking of work can it be if it is done in a few months? I am supposed to do this by myself and compete against a team of Google engineers? This publish or perish paradigm is absolute bullshit and we're at a point where fucking Nvidia asked for a new PhD to have 8 top conference 1st author publications.
Therapy and medication definitely help, and I were I not to start them I, without a doubt, would have dropped out. But I think we need to have a very serious discussion about the systems that we have in place and how we're continually shooting ourselves in the foot with this fucking rat race. Maybe I'm just a bad researcher, because it does seem that there are a lot of highly successful people. But if I'm being honest, when I talk to those people I can't see anything that they are doing different other than opportunities/resources and possibly better mentoring. There are of course people that stand out and I can definitely see their genius when talking to them, but for the vast majority of researchers I really can't tell what makes the difference between making it and breaking it. I can't tell what makes a paper work and not work.
I really just want to spend my days reading math books, hacking away at ML systems, and trying to understand what this whole thing around consciousness, intelligence, and sentience is. But I don't know how to make this life. It isn't academia and it isn't industry. So how do I be born rich? Can we get to post scarcity yet?
Life on the outside is different. Having been gone over a decade, there are some things I miss and that are definitely hard to find in other environments. On the other hand, I feel immeasurably better about myself not having to beg to toil away on projects of questionable significance that happen to have funding and be stuck in the precarity of borderline poverty in the service of supposedly higher ideals.
Academia is definitely not for everyone, but when I weighed my options I am happy I did my PhD regardless of how I feel at the moment. It’s a peculiar thing for peculiar people and the attraction does not correlate with intelligence.
I think having done it is important, otherwise you just have the regret, but people with experience in academia already, never seem to long for those days after moving to industry.
At least I haven’t heard of any.
I do have burn-out certainly that appeared after I had a faculty job for a few years. That mostly has affected my overtime research work, which previously would take most of my free-time, but now I try to spend more of my free time on hobbies.
My advice is that unless you can overcome burnout somehow, not to try tenure positions in the states, because there you'll have to work really hard to get to tenure. I think positions in Europe tend to be often tenured from the beginning (i.e. UK) so it may be easier.
(throwaway account)
I guess the tricky thing (maybe it suggests it’s not burnout but some other source of depression) is that I haven’t been motivated by my hobbies either. It’s been hard to find much joy in anything as of late.
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 papers and thinking about the new advances I would make.
Why the change of mind and career? First, it seemed that my time as a researcher had passed, and that I was becoming an old postdoc with little appeal to universities and research institutions. Second, I was growing tired of earning little money. Third, it was beginning to look like I was doing similar research to what I was doing 5 years earlier, and I had a feeling that it would be the same research I would be doing 5 years down the road.
I started interviewing for positions in (tech) industry, got a monetary offer 5 times what I was making as a senior postdoc, started a new career, and never looked back. The last part is not entirely true. At times, I look back and regret the last 5 years I spent in academia. I could have had a faster career in tech, earned much more money, and would have met bright and motivated people sooner. The world is full of interesting technical problems that need to be solved.
"They (the research/partner) are all I have loved in my life," "I can't imagine myself with anyone else/with any other job." The arguments were remarkably similar and equally frustrating to deal with.
People invest heavily, are encouraged to believe by the power structure, and suffer as they slowly begin to see that they have been beguiled (scammed).
The only other gig I can think of that would excite me is being a statistical analyst for a baseball team. I know more than one person who made that transition after getting their PhD. Something else is probably out there, too, but I haven’t discovered it for myself yet.
My comment is not meant to be advice-column material, but I get the impression that as long as you think that “[there are] very few [jobs] that I’ve thought would give me the internal satisfaction of what academia used to give me," you are unlikely to resolve or leave behind your current frustration. This is not an invitation to try all the jobs for which you might be qualified, but until you have tried some of them, you cannot know.
Before I left academia, although I was a fairly well-rounded person in general, looking back at what I thought at the time, I didn't have a clue about the tech industry, the private sector, the tools used, the money I could make, the weekends spent doing things that weren't trying again to run a simulation model that no one was interested in anyway.
But, as I said in another comment, it's like listening to someone say "I'll never find a man like him again" while you think that that man, who you know, is for you in the bottom 15% of men with IQ>70. You are incredulous, you can't understand how someone could say that, but here we are. She has to broaden her perspective to understand what you now know, and all the words said in the meantime will be forgotten, like wind in the pines.
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 will be) positions available. And this is not just an academia problem: the same mismatch between supply and demand is found in many other creative and aspirational careers, think actors, singers, sports. Only a small percentage of those who want that life can get it, and those who are left out are often frustrated by the perceived unfairness of life. But that does not change the fact that many aspiring creatives, because of that massive mismatch between supply and demand, will not be able to pursue those careers.
Sure, more permanent research positions could be thought of instead of forcing careers through the very narrow bottleneck of tenure track positions, but the vast majority of PhDs with academic ambitions (at least 8 out 10) will not have the opportunity to make that career, and they are (or are themselves) being bread-crumbed for years and years hoping that their dreams will, one day, come true. But they won't come true. And, as soon as they find another fulfilling occupation, they will find out it was not a real dream anyway, just a dream they thought they had.
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 inside and often nuanced and problems that are invisible to outside.
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.
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.
We have to keep in mind that those incentives, targets, and metrics were set up by the academics themselves. It is the same in funding agencies and departments.
I'd specify that the metrics were setup by the bureaucrats, which does include overlap between administrators and researchers. I'd also add that just because the metrics were made up by these groups doesn't mean they can't decide to move past them. In fact, it even makes the case of internally solving the problem stronger because we did it before so we can do it again.
I disagree: just found an edtech startup for tertiary education or (post-)graduate level research.
Do an MVP in your spare time.
I guess if you have a normal programming job in most countries (even in countries where programmers are not paid that well), you will likely be able to pay the bills for, say, server renting, domains, ...
For things that you will do likely badly by yourself like design drafts (if you are bad at visual design), ask some friends whether they would be willing to do it for you in exchange for something that you could do for them (so that you don't have to spend money).
Start with kinds of research that can be done with little money, but have a possible insanely high impact.
Iterate until your platform cannot be ignored anymore.
I think you gravely misread my comment if this is your first suggestion. I am essentially saying that what I would want to do is closer to starting something akin to DeepMind or what OpenAI looked like in the beginning. There is no clear minimal viable product because the goal is to create general intelligence. There are many demonstrations of narrow cases of generalizability and I even have work that demonstrates this, but the stronger sense and actually trying to build sentient machines.
I would make the argument that there is an advantage in what I'm proposing. Since the existing labs that are trying to perform a similar goal are all following similar paths. The chance of beating them using similar methods is quite low. But if you believe (as many researchers do) that the conventional approach is not correct or not efficient, then it reasons that you should take an unconventional approach. I'd also say that my preferred method can be great publicity for them if we do allow for a fully open research platform (open training/models/communication) and given the goals the computational costs are not quite what they are for OpenAI nor DeepMind. As I believe I could do a lot of work with a small team with only a handful of A100 or H100 nodes. That's pocket change to the Musk types and especially if split between multiple entities. It is a high risk high reward situation but I think also low cost.
Then set the MVP to some project that partially solves some small aspect of what you general intelligence is and proves that your approach is so much better than what other labs are doing.
If you succeed on this, you can iterate.
> if we do allow for a fully open research platform (open training/models/communication) and given the goals the computational costs are not quite what they are for OpenAI nor DeepMind.
Then work on a way to decrease these computational costs by magnitudes. Or find a way how even volunteers with "skinny" GPUs in their computers can still support your computations via crowdcomputing.
Perhaps this is even the more important problem to solve ...
How is an edtech startup going to solve post-graduate research, an enterprise that involves millions of people around the world working on all fields under the sun, and is, by its very nature, unprofitable?
Well, I have two ideas:
1. Concentrate on academic disciplines where research is "less unprofitable" than others, and by using well-known methods of business administration make it profitable.
2. I know quite a lot of people who were previously in academic research, and now (because of job perspectives in the academic job market) work somewhere else in some industry. Because they still love research, they spend quite some money on post-graduate level textbooks and similar things. People who might not be rich, but love spending money on learning does not sound like the worst foundation for a business modell ... ;-)
I don't often hear people complaining that sports, music, theatre are broken because of this supply/demand mismatch. (People certainly complain about other problems, e.g. streaming music royalties). It's generally accepted that it's a rare and special thing to make a good living in those industries. Why do we view academia differently? Is it because it seems more like "work"?
"How can you not want me to work on this enzyme pathway that can explain how this very rare and aggressive form of cancer develops?" sounds different from "How can you not want me to star in this silly sitcom?". I used extreme examples, but still.
But it is the same when we talk about surgeons and teachers, who, in the collective subconscious, are seen as saintly figures, people who have dedicated themselves to the betterment of society. But the vast majority of surgeons and teachers love to be surgeons and teachers, love to cut and repair and explain things to young people. In fact, people who teach, for example, sales to employees of a company basically do the same job as high school teachers, but we do not consider them as worthy of our admiration.
And as for the price paid by society for research, the public knows approximately nothing about research. And when they think about scientists they think about Albert Einstein, people of genius frequently lost in their thoughts solving equations. But if they knew the reality of most universities, departments, and research groups, they would be willing to pay way less than the state/government is paying scientists and other researchers for their, I dare to say, often meaningless investigations.
A post doc position wants me to move across the country, into a major city, and pay me $50k/yr for a position with low growth opportunities and where I will have to move again in another few years? No thanks.
If it is work that some industry is highly interested in, and this industry has deep pockets, it is very hard to compete with it in academia. Look for more fundamental questions to research (there exist insanely many, just don't follow the hype) that can be investigated with a lot less ressources.
If enough post-docs leave, it will reduce the demand for tenure-track positions. Eventually fewer PhDs will become post-docs, further decreasing demand.
The problem with academia is basic mathematics. In a system where there are a fixed number of tenured professorships, where each tenured professor has the job for life, each professor should produce only a single tenure-track PhD student in their entire career.
OK, so to deal with attrition and other unforeseen circumstances, perhaps 10 tenured professors should produce 11 tenure-track PhD students. But definitely not the situation we have now, where each professor produces dozens of PhD students in the course of their career who go on to attempt to get tenure.
The people trying to get tenure don't want to admit the system is broken, because that would be to admit they just weren't good enough to get tenure.
The people who have tenure have every incentive to keep it going, because it means they have an army of highly-skilled and highly-motivated postdocs willing to work long hours for peanuts for a decade or two.
I think you're exactly right about the reasons people keep quiet. But this is not helpful to anyone, especially the universities. They are certainly losing a lot of money and even prestige from all of this. You don't make Nobel laureates with publish or perish. But no one wants to shake things up, which is weird because academia is __explicitly__ supposed to be the place where you can focus on things that aren't profit driven. Or at least short ROI. It is a loss for the country too, as it means a lot of academics move away from low risky TRL research and follow a model much closer to industry research (which is profit driven) Historically industry has (generally) relied on academic research doing low TRL and then they bring it to mid and high TRL.
We've lost sight of what we're trying to accomplish.
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.
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.
Hello, I'm in a similar sort of transition position. May I ask where you applied (US/UK/EU-based?) and what your main experience was in adapting your academic CV to industry?
(Feel free to reach me by email or matrix too)
I came from a quantitative background and it was quite easy to repurpose my statistical and mathematical modeling into AI/ML. The best thing to do is to be agentic and assertive, which in this case means contacting people at the companies where you would like to work (you may or may not know them personally, the former is obviously preferred) and where your skills can be put to good use, and asking for a warm introduction to recruiters and managers.
I was fortunate enough to know a few techies (we used to train in the same gym) who put my CV on the recruiter's desk. Fifty percent of the interviews came from those warm introductions and the rest from sending the CV to job ads.
As you get older, you realize some doors not yet stepped through are now closed, and less doors are opened by others for you. Life can start to feel like a hallway with the investable at the end. While less doors are open now, life is still very free. You may now be able to see decades into your past, but you still cannot see into your future. There are many open doors still hidden, they just take a bit more searching. Good news, you are an adult with years of life experience, you can go find them.
Academia is a weird field, that, in my experience, is wonderful to have connections to, but for the most part is exhausting. Frankly I think things can be more exhausting when you love them enough to be consumed by them.
Even now, I have projects that I work on in my free time that I'm so engaged and miss sleep for, and while I'm proud of whatever is produced, it does often lead me feeling frustrated and burnt out. It helped me quite a bit to start setting boundaries for myself, as in: I'm going to work on this project until this time, and then I'm taking time to disconnect from it. Even though it can be frustrating to interrupt a flow state, it's still important to take care of ones own needs.
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.
1. Have fun. Limit productive activities to 2 hrs a day.
2. Go all out on a new idea. Succeed or fail.
If there is no risk of failure, you are really in mode 1. 2 is only possibly for short bursts, upto 1-2 weeks. if you feel burnt out, it’s time for zone 1 for sure.
to varying degrees, jobs are what you make of it rather than what it makes of you
When I got home from my trip around the world, I struggled to build anything meaningful - I'd get intensely bored after starting a new project, and move on to something else. The first project that I took to completion was reprogramming my Lifx smart bulbs. There was a noticeable delay between turning a light on/off in the iOS app, and the light actually changing its state. Sometimes the app and lightbulb would get their states out of sync, and I didn't like the idea of some light bulb company knowing my schedule. Even for first-world problems though, it was hardly worth solving.
I discovered there is a binary protocol to control the lights directly over the local network, so I developed an extensive TypeScript library to control the lights and build custom web interfaces to serve as light switches. I found a guy on the Lifx forums who built his own crude solution with Python scripts, and he became my first consulting client. That client's referral led me to a variety of interesting work opportunities over the past year. Noticing similarities across a variety of these projects led me to start a new company a few months ago to build a product to address them.
My point being, sometimes you just have to sit down and play.
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
I read it that way:
- Things become taxing when they stop being fun
- Doing fun things and playing around whatever interests you is the way to make things less taxing
- Sometimes things you play with are also useful to others
Although I am not sure if it is always possible to match what you are getting paid for to what you consider being fun. Feynman gives no answer for this.
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 that exact state of play that Feynman describes.
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?
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.
There is no #5 and #6. You can't predict what happens next.
The lesson is to let go of your ego and self-imposed, prescriptive ideas of 'importance' and realize that while important things do matter, they also simultaneously often don't matter at all (in the grand scheme of things)
This is a function of time; in the moment, stuff that feels intractable and overwhelming often can be seen in hindsight with enough clarity to realize that what you were feeling at the time and what was objective reality were two completely different things.
Anyways, not trying to get all "The Dude" about it, but in my experience, as long as you continue to show up, and be patient, present and available for opportunities, things you weren't even looking for have a way of finding you and lead to stuff that you could never have forced into existence through sheer willpower alone. If you can find a way to let all the baggage go and reboot to a place of genuine curiosity, you might be surprised where you eventually find yourself.
YMMV of course.
(and no, I'm not preaching "manifestation" / "law of attraction" bullshit -- just advocating for people who hit a wall creatively to consider stepping off the treadmill, releasing the pressure valve, and seeing where they end up)
My literal solution is to just say fuck it to the journal/publishing system and to the publish or perish paradigm. Papers are simply a means to communicate to other researchers, and we already know how to find one another on arxiv, semantic/google scholar, and so many other platforms. Research is ambiguous and you never know where leaps and bounds are going to come out of, even if you know the general direction. The devil is in the details because nuance is the essence of what makes things work, especially as we've advanced. We have all these admins at universities, why are they not doing all the bureaucratic bullshit that is draining to researchers and let the researchers focus on what they love and do best?
What Feynman is saying is that researchers are the other side of "fuck around and find out." So you want effective researchers? Let them fuck around and they will find things out.
1. Write down the problem
2. Think very hard
3. Write down the solution
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.
You can just as easily read it as stating that you should allow yourself to be led by what inspires you or interests you in your field of work, and not to try to produce notable results directly, but rather allow notable results follow from just passionately exploring.
It's important to not just do old style sweep it under the rug when it's serious, but I do think the current zeitgeist over indexes on being a good person equating to being hyper aware of all your struggles and anxieties and so on, and I don't see how all that extra pressure will help, specially for young people. Most times "it's not that big of a deal" is really the best thing I can tell myself. That being said, asking for help from someone that knows what they are talking about also seems like a good idea, if you can't overcome it on your own. The universe doesn't give you any extra points for doing it alone.
I agree there is probably a balance, and we are currently focusing too hard on it. I’ve had the same thought about the obsession about childhood trauma from people with average upbringings.
But both parents and work have heavy influences on how we live our lives, so who else are you going to blame? Yourself? Don’t be silly.
Surely You Must Be Joking does a great job of showing how he kept coming back to play throughout his life. Everything from lock picking at Los Alamos, to playing the bongo drums.
What Do You Care What Other People Think has an extended description of the creation of Appendix F about the shuttle disaster. See https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm for that. As someone who has been in the state, it is clear that he was in a state of hyperfocus. I've never matched what Feynman could do, but it comes as no surprise to me that he'd realize that he could get away with learning about a topic others didn't want him to learn, because he could do so quickly enough that they wouldn't believe that he'd possibly have learned it.
I highly recommend both books, Appendix F, and of course, https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm. (If psychologists had followed up what he said 50 years ago, the Replication Crisis would have been discovered 40 years earlier than it was. Oh well, missed opportunities.)
I’ve been feeling the exact same way about software lately.
It’s just no fun anymore. I should do something pointless like making a wayland compositor for myself or something.
I do think this is a good approach at work though. There’s always something I can investigate that I’m interested in at work that I can find enjoyment from. Even if it isn’t exactly what I’m ideally supposed to be working on, I’m able to help people and provide valuable insights that are beneficial for my team and company.
This is a much more satisfying situation than either spinning my wheels because I’m not interested in what I’m working on am too distracted by projects at home.
I think that the real difference between an activity being a hobby and it being a job is that a hobby activity is always optional. If I don't feel like working on a hobby project today (or ever again), I don't have to. On the job, I don't have that option. That makes a world of difference.
>I need to do this because I need to know that to pass my exams, get a good job to… etc
I feel for a lot of 30 and under people today it’s the same. I managed to capture the ‘playing around’ feeling very fleetingly earlier in my 20s but it doesn’t last long before some little productivity demon starts gnawing at you.
Even resting has its purpose: mentally recharge to work more, let muscles repair themselves to lift more.
https://www.amazon.com/What-Care-Other-People-Think/dp/03933...
I particularly liked it for the in depth discussion of how Appendix F came to be written.
Feynman's Nobel Ambition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31236758 - May 2022 (1 comment)
Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26931359 - April 2021 (276 comments)
Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10585890 - Nov 2015 (22 comments)
Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3874875 - April 2012 (66 comments)
It works on many hard disciplines, and it boils down to two steps:
1- Obsess
2- Let Go
Step two is the hardest one, but it's the most fruitful one and you really have to let go, no cheating.
Once you do, for some reason your mind will use everything from step one in the background to find the solution, in a weird moment, in an effortless manner.
But if you don't let go, it will never happen.
Feynman is my favourite physicist. Of course you could pick someone else, you could argue about the relative importance of each person's contribution to scientific knowledge, but it was his aimiability, playfulness and curiousity, combined with the fact that he _did_ break new frontiers in quantum physics that make him so inspiring for me. His famed series of lectures at Caltech were a great introduction to physics.
I was hoping to see more of his time at Los Alamos in the Oppenheimer biopic, but he doesn't even seem to be in it. There's supposedly someone playing him, but I don't see it; I assume the two-second silent shot of someone from behind playing the bongos was meant to be him.
[An army man is handing out welders glass to the observers. Feynman is in a car, Teller is next to him in a deckchair rubbing sun cream into his skin]
TELLER [to the army man while rubbing his hands]: On the leg, please
ARMY MAN: Feynman
FEYNMAN: No. The glass [knocks on car windshield] stops the UV
TELLER: And what stops the glass?
He also says something about building a cyclotron when they are constructing Los Alamos.
And he sits behind a window of a car or truck during the atomic test blast.
That's all I spotted
At the start, you can imagine all the cool things it does, once it's working you have to keep it working in the real world.
Some highlights:
- He takes a week long vacation every now and then to hack on a completely different game idea for fun, with the focus on it being short and fun
- Time for relaxation and unstructured thinking
- Walks / showers can produce amazing ideas
Just wish I could find a way to make that my paycheck...
Dancing T-handle in zero-g, HD
I mean orientation changes regarding the flip, not the obvious spinning motion.
But Derek Muller on the youtube channel Veritasium has a good video on this, where he mentions how, when asked one time, Feynman couldn't think of a simple way to describe how it works, and then Muller goes on to explain it in a way that I could see. Great stuff:
One of the least widely known psychological effects relative to its impact on people's lives.
A nefarious little bugger that's hard to evade too.
I'll always love coding. Stress can kill anything.
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?"
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.
The alternative would be to raise VC and work full-time on a half-baked idea. :cringe:
I need to return that that practice, as I find it harder and harder to interest myself in what I'm doing...
When quarterly results are the priority, innovation is stifled but what's insidious is that this only becomes evident over a long time span.
I like simple technologies like IRC. You don't need K8s clusters or deployment pipelines. String together everything with a smattering of bash because nothing is really at stake. It's easy to get started since the tech is as simple as it gets, and there's nothing actually on the line. You can practice using obscure languages never seen in industry. Do things because they make you laugh, not to build a portfolio or a product. At the least, I can still crank out a modest amount of code and actually enjoy the process, without tearing my hair out over whatever asinine enterprise-scale clusterfuck needs to be untangled now.
Still waiting for whatever is next.
All of this complex tooling gives devops the ability to say "sorry, no capacity, see you in two quarters".
It was fun to build totally new (and much simpler) tools, shortcutting quite literal man-years of work with each solution. Like rewriting half of some insanely expensive and over bloated million-dollar Oracle enterprise product into web app that we crunched out in a weekend over pizzas, and then demoed and validated with our clients before next week ended.
Over the years all this exciting new way of doing things has somehow evolved into what feels very much like the older dig-through-XML-schemas-for-hours world.
What I miss the most is the shared mindset of focusing on the problem, using simple tools that were build for purpose. That mindset was commonplace back then, at least in my circle. Maybe that's just a phase (cycle?) the industry goes through.