Mourning and moving on: rituals for leaving a career (2014)

This is important, and not to be brushed off.

During my PhD, my program had what’s called a “white coat ceremony”. This is typically a medical school ceremony, but my grad program does it after the second year of study to recognize the transition from being a graduate “student” to a graduate “research assistant”.

I was a very isolated and focused student, spending the majority of my waking time in lab from day one of school. By the end of year two, I already viewed myself as being fully immersed in research. So, the ceremony felt trivial to me, and I didn’t plan to attend.

However, at the last minute, my advisor told me he wanted me to attend despite my protest.

Due to the last minute change, I didn’t invite my parents to the ceremony, as they lived several hours away and I didn’t want them to feel obligated to travel on short notice.

As the ceremony started, I immediately realized that it was just as much for the parents as it was for the students. So many parents were there, with clear pride at their children’s growth and success (even though most had no clue what their kids were even studying).

I immediately and deeply regretted not telling my parents about the ceremony. I realized I had made a unilateral decision for them, and that my behavior was very self-oriented and inconsiderate of their desire to see me succeed.

They were disappointed when I told them about it, and I apologized for not inviting them and acknowledged that it was a selfish thing. They’re chill people and didn’t make a fuss over it, but it was a closed door that could never be reopened.

Two years later when I defended my dissertation, that was the moment I wanted my parents to be present, and of course they were. We had a blast celebrating afterwards, so all’s well that ends well.

I strongly believe “maturation” happens in discrete moments, and the start of that white coat ceremony was one of those moments for me. I grew up a lot that day.

Limiting negative stimuli isn't enough for people to automatically replace it with good stimuli. It's the same struggle as leaving an abusive relationship or toxic job. People can know something is bad, but they're much less likely to leave a bad situation if they can't imagine what the better alternative is.

For example, my Dad is terrible at making friends. His co-workers and acquaintances like him, but most of the time his only significant relationship is with his spouse and his kids. My mom was great at making friends and finding community, but her ways of relating to people seemed inaccessible and indecipherable to me as a guy.

I did and do go to clubs of various sorts, but it's a real struggle to figure out how to turn those casual acquaintances into meaningful, reciprocal friendships. As soon as I had my own struggles or wasn't obsessively invested in the club, those friendships vanished overnight. I don't know any good books or resources to learn the skill of making friends. I can definitely see how someone who had more mental health struggles or was less extroverted than I who struggled to make friends in these situations would give up on trying.

It’s viewed as alternative medicine here in New Zealand, in a similar ballpark to homeopathy, though perhaps a bit closer to conventional medicine.

It's bizarrely parochial to suppose that every single photon is magically correlated with the experimenter's future measurement choices in a way that will exactly violate Bell's Theorem.

Another way to put it:

> If such a theory did exist, it would require a grand conspiracy of causal relationships leading to results in precise agreement with quantum mechanics, even though the theory itself would bear no resemblance to quantum mechanics. Moreover, it is hard to imagine why it should only be in Bell experiments that free choices would be significantly influenced by causes relevant also to the observed outcomes; rather, every conclusion based upon observed correlations, scientific or casual, would be meaningless because the observers’s method would always be suspect. It seems to us that any such theory would be about as plausible, and appealing, as, belief in ubiquitous alien mind-control.

Causarum Investigatio and the Two Bell's Theorems of John Bell, Wiseman & Cavalcanti, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.06413

I would like to add that Sabine's video on her academic experience was quite a tragic thing to watch. If her allegations are true then the behavior of her PhD supervisor was completely outrageous.

She also did seem a bit too dreamy-eyed about academia. Sure you can criticize everything you want, but she never seemed to have understood that tone of voice still matters. Academics are busy people with emotions, and not likely to engage with someone whose claims appear to have more loudness than substance.

On the latter, her beef is not that HEP has not made signficant discoveries in the past, rather that the costs going forward can no longer be justified and starve many, many other areas of physics of needed funding. Compounding her disdain for future projects are the increaingly lofty claims of what will be discovered since inception of LHC. Do you really think she is alone on this?

On the former, who is the crank here? The person with the advanced degree calling out the failure of a 50 year old theory to make one scientifically provable and confirmed prediction? (I could say 80 years if going back to the beginnings with S-matrix theory)

I'll grant that some maths have been developed that may be tangentally useful but other than enriching the publishing industry, what has string theory brought? Zilch. It seems that the more public this becomes, the louder the cries of those with deeply vested interests. I can think of no other large theory that has gone for so long with no experimental confirmations at all and is not likely to in mankinds future either.

As to MOND like theory, Sabine has had varying degrees of support over the past twenty years as data has come in and theory has changed. Very frankly, the reason to give a degree of trust to her on other subjects too is because she is willing to be objective and call people out on their BS.

I am asking this because HN neems to be so much more negative of academia than what I am seeing around me.

More generally I think it is worth stressing that any site like this can be a terrible echo chamber at times. Generally there are smart people here, but on some topics I suspect that the consensus could be completely misguided.

This sounds awfully similar to the “do your own research” defense that is often used as a cop-out disclaimer for quackery topics.

When someone presents themselves as an expert on a topic and invests a lot of time into making convincing videos about their beliefs, defending them with a “do your own research” feels like a tacit admission that they’re not actually the expert they present themselves as.

This feels somewhat like the high-brow intellectual equivalent of Joe Rogan making confident statements about COVID and then defending himself with “I’m just a comedian, do your own research”. You can’t have it both ways.

Someone speaking provocatively and authoritatively on topics they don’t have credibility in is where you should think critically and turn it off.

> Almost all human values have been expunged and replaced by a puppet show of performative theatrics, led by MBA educated impostors and career administrators.

Not just academia.

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

That is, I think it's relatively easy to dismiss your career as not that important if you have a normal job. But I think it's inherently much harder if you are an academic for many reasons.

Not that other jobs aren't making a change in the world, but you know what I mean. It's one thing to be a knowingly replaceable cog in a team that tries to offer more effective ads, and it's quite another to singularly, completely in isolation, try to devote your life trying to invent the MRI, where if you fail the MRI may never come to exist. So yes, a lot of people in academia traditionally do ascribe a big part of their identity to their jobs, but I think this goes beyond the superficial sense you describe (i.e. I'm so boring and soulless that my work defines me).

Which is also why it's such a big deal when some academics are found to be 'cheating' the system (again, see monasteries). Traditionally, the whole edifice has been based on 'honor', but the tide seems to be changing; the rampant corporatisation of academia has been a very recent phenomenon, and now that the inevitable shills and snake-oil merchants have entered the game, we don't quite know how to handle them.

"Career" means to move haphazardly. It replaced the more stable notions of "vocation" and "calling". Today you might spend a year in hospitality, a few years in sales, then do a diploma in programming, move to California, get into media design, and then open a juice bar on the beach... Everyone is at the mercy of ever swirling markets and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, layoffs and takeovers, new trends. Who here didn't "get into AI" in the last 2 years?

In a way that's a richer better life. It's more challenging. It is also shallower. There are less places to put down roots and grow anything worthwhile. People with active minds and a lust for life naturally outgrow scenes, groups and institutions. Moving on should be an exciting joy. What I see of America and UK now (at least here on HN) is that people are held in place by fear. We've regressed to 19th century ideas about work and life, minus the positive 'belonging'.

What I think people sometimes "grieve" is the sunk-cost spiritual investment in what they thought an institution represented. Or they found themselves in an career that is in decline. or in institutions that have decayed - and it's painful to move on. Those reasons may be emotionally noble; loyalty, fidelity to values etc. You can let go of values and of a dream. Or you can take them with you, by realising that they never belonged to any "institution" in the first place. They're yours.

Academia is definitely that place in 2024. The reality of academic life is the antithesis of human values we traditionally associate it with. If the institutions we inhabit are inflexible, ineffectual, and less than our ambitions then it's time to move on. The problem is not so much that people identify with what they "do", but where and with whom they do it. It's a strong and valuable kind of person who keeps their calling/purpose separate from their employment identity.

If you're not on this career path, there is basically no alternative in most institutions. You can be an adjunct, or lab assistant, or other low-level employee forever but this will lead nowhere. This is particularly a problem in the US, where the tenure track system gives you seven years of grind to achieve tenure, and if you fail your academic career is basically over.

(Things are changing. Some institutions have, for example, teaching track positions.)

Second, it's very difficult to get back in anyway, you will have a publication gap and with the extreme increase in publish and perish it's hard to imagine it being a good choice. Here in Germany, getting any permanent academic position is a pipe dream even for the extremely motivated. This ties back into the first point.

Being 'out of the game' for a couple of years means you have not published or applied to grants within that time. At best, you might be looking at restarting at the bottom of the ladder until you've reasonably caught up in numbers to climb back up again.

And it's not even just a case of "computer says no" because of automated metrics. In the UK at least, government initiatives like the REF mean that the university will actively avoid hiring you because by definition you would be costing the university money. (and conversely, you have an advantage for being hired if you demonstrate the right REFfable metrics, even if you weren't the most suitable candidate at the interview, because this automatically brings a university money that is directly linked to your recent REF outputs).

I don't know what the situation is like in the US, but I'm fairly sure similar exercises exist with effectively the same effect.

I think I would have done far better if I were simply fired.