100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
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User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4hr ago
If you totally fail at BigLaw, where do you go? Or, where is it common to go? Small biz corporate attorney? In house counsel for something very process driven? Leave law altogether?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4hr ago
Where doing physics research requires being hired by one of a handful of institutions in the world, and if you don't meet their criteria or get unlucky early in your career, tant pis.
And your timing has to be close to perfect.
I was a young shithead in undergrad but, at the time, thought I was just going to go into the corporate world so my GPA didn't really matter. That .... turned out to be exactly true, but is beside the point! I've always wanted to go back and get a masters in something like computational linguistics, but I'd have to self-fund some sort of post-bac in math or other pseudo-re-bachelor-degree in order to be competitive for any non fly-by-night degree mill.
Academia, despite it's self-inflated perception as the "palace of ideas" is actually one of the most rigid "FOLLOW THE TRACK" career paths out there. The Marine Corps has far more flexibility in terms of self-determination.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4hr ago
There are fields where proper experiments are very hard, and usually the conclusions you can draw from the experiments they can do, are generally very limited.
Can you provide examples of such fields? I am genuinely curious as one of my current interests is trying to figure out where we've actually hit hard or very large limits in scientific discovery. The problem is that simply "reading the current research" is literally impossible for someone who doesn't have a graduate understanding of math/physics/hard sciences.
I think it produces locally maximally good results.
This is Hill Climbing problem and what a lot of people get right and wrong, simultaneously, about things like Private Equity and quarterly results in publicly traded companies.
The search for maximum grindy efficiency / performance for a given game or domain will result, through vicious competition, in maximally good results to the extent that the game / domain is well defined and bounded. "Get more people to click on the red button vs the blue button" is well bounded. "Figure out the best way to live life" is totally unbounded and also subjective - an optimization frontier can't really be defined let alone achieved.
The classic tech/business text on this is The Innovators Dilemma. Christensen's major point is that constantly iterating to optimize an existing product for an existing customer need opens you, the firm, up to disruption by a new product - not one that meets the current needs better, but one that creates a wholly new way of satisfying needs/meta needs. The classic example is Ford "inventing" the model-T when everyone "asked" for a better horse.
Meritocracy, especially in today's over metric'd and quantified world, is good at hitting these bounded local maxima, but not so good at plucking out the next Big Ideas. You need, sadly, a bunch of weirdos for that. The problem is that everyone loves to think of themselves as "that misunderstood genius." Most of the time, you're just fucking weird. One one millionth of the time, you're Jobs/Wozniak/Musk etc. (sorry to over index on tech, you can do this same thing with almost any field, however).
The preferable "third way" is something like N.N. Taleb's concept of anti-fragile systems; systems that acutally get stronger for less than optimal (or, more accurate, stressful) situations. In professional terms, you want the Physics department to have one or two loonies who don't shower and use words like "chinaman" if they actually help the more "professional" researchers deal with edge cases or whatever. You want a guy in the office who is a functioning alcoholic but can close to mega-deals but is also a walking cautionary tale to the rest of the sales team. Over HR-ification (of which the Gino example is probably somewhat an example of. This is why Ackman got himself involved, I think) doesn't let talented-but-awful weirdos do their thing, and we eject some of the useful "stress" from the system.
The good news is that anyone with eyes to see sees pretty early that the grindiest of grinder fields aren't worth it. It's literally a trope that BigLaw / Consulting / Banking partner are all twice divorced alcoholics who never see their kids or get to enjoy their million dollar pay packages. These are lizard people who thrive on preftige alone. For a while, BigTech was sorta-kinda the exception to the rule, but has since been revealed to be both more grindy that initially assumed and far more of a office-politics and social climber firefight.
The way to win is not to play. Let us take heed of this young bard;
I don't wanna be famous / I just wanna be rich
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