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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   2383 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 4, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What was your dream job/career as a kid? Was it anything remotely realistic?

I remember I wanted to help terraform Mars at NASA because I was a massive sci-fi nerd. I even went into environmental science and wanted to go for that sort of thing, until I realized everyone in environmental science was a depressed dweeb who lied about their stats.

Anyway, now my big dream is to become a writer some day, even if not a great one.

Back when I was in elementary school, I distinctly recall answering this assignment with "I want to be a brave special forces soldier, fighting mutants to save humanity." What can I say, there was that one computer game I had really loved... My teacher responded with an angry note: "Don't kid around, give a serious answer." Well, that was my serious answer! Okay, humanity-threatening mutants might not exist, but that little detail aside, that was my dream job all the same.

As I grew older, I wanted to be a video game journalist. As far as I knew, they had the best job ever: they played awesome games all day, occasionally got up to hilarious banter with their fellow journalists, and had fans sending them letters and hanging on their every word. I even started a personal project to play every notable video game in history, so that I could rightfully claim the title of "the most historically knowledgeable gaming journalist ever!". Let's just say I grew out of this dream over time...

When I was a kid I wanted to be a fireman, because that's what every (male) kid wants to be in a certain age (or at least that was my impression back then). Well, that and a cosmonaut, but that wasn't really serious because everybody knew how hard it is to become a cosmonaut (for some reason, the same everybody had no information about whether or not it's hard to become a fireman). Then I learned about computers and never wanted to do anything else since.

  • superhero
  • superspy (think Spy Kids)
  • hacker
  • programmer

As a kid I had the vague impression that I wouldn't grow up. I just couldn't imagine being an adult.

I understood that I was growing up, every year the number on the cake gets bigger, but I couldn't get my head round the fact that one day I would be 18, or 21, or 30.

This is still the case for me in my thirties. The idea of being 55 and well-established, or 70 and retired, or 80 and physically worn, are impossible to tangibly imagine.

As a kid I had two dream jobs: cosmonaut and road roller driver. I stopped wanting to be the former when I got scared by some TV show about "unexplained mysteries of space" and to be the latter when I grew up. Thankfully, I got into programming in my early teens.

I hear you on the road roller. If I ever got the chance I'd love to try driving a road/steam roller and frying corn chips. Both look like they'd be fun to do once. I imagine I'd get very bored going as slowly as they do, but I'm not going to pass up a chance to try either.

First comment here (and in fact first comment ever on the internet) after lurking for a while. I preemptively ask for forgiveness. I also was a sci-fi nerd, in fact your "tag" is maybe derived from my favorite sci-fi-medium to this day. So naturally I wanted to become a physicist to understand more about the universe. Everything turned out quite differently and now I'm on track to become a lawyer very soon. (still at uni for now) Though my wife is a theoretical physicist and it brings me satisfaction, that someone is doing the hard math/work of contributing something eternal to the realm of human knowledge for me, while I'll do something which is extremely fun, completely arbitrary and transient but will support my wife, me and future children. Besides two people trying to stay in academia is way to complicated anyway. I'm sorry for the long sentences, my mother tongue has this feature and it is hard to get rid of it.

Indiana Jones. Well, if you asked me I'd say archaeologist, but what I meant was Indiana Jones.

I spent half my childhood wanting to be a scientist or astronaut. Turns out India doesn't have a manned space program, and that the woman who blew up in the Challenger disaster was an American citizen, though you wouldn't know it from how much Indians crowed about her being half-Indian.

I've got an aunt and uncle who are distinguished biologists, which is probably where the desire to be one came from, but then I learned what the salaries looked like and that you primarily need a microscope to look at your payslip, not the bacteria.

I'm not particularly passionate about medicine, it's always been the Default™ career choice, but it pays well and is a relatively smooth ticket out of India, so can't complain too much. I'd have liked to spec into aerospace medicine or prosthetic surgery, but opportunities for that are few and far between, and psych is interesting enough.

I wanted to be an Imagineer for the Disney Parks. And I would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for those meddling kids MAE2030-Dynamics! (and I took a cryptography class as an elective that I ended up liking more.)

Didn't think about jobs for probably too long, but was always interested in engineering. My dad and grandpa were nuclear/mech-Es and we were generally similar people, so I knew it'd be something along those lines.

I dabbled with putting "Bounty Hunter" on the career choice field during middle and high school, did some research about what it would take and then stopped. Some people suggested medicine, but school blows so why commit to so much of it?

Kicked off college thinking Aerospace, then pivoted to Computer/Electrical (which was very difficult, IMO) and landed in Software after doing very well in the first class.

A film director.

I loved watching movies growing up (still do), and I thought the idea of working with actors, crew, and producers in creating a cinematic masterpiece sounded fun. Thankfully, The Movies got me close to living out my dream; I sunk countless hours into the game.

What was your dream job/career as a kid? Was it anything remotely realistic?

Video game developer - I was a huge fan of Halo but , because it took time to get anything back home, I got really involved in all of the BTS stuff like vidocs Bungie put out, identified with the team and found the idea of working on a game with 1 million daily players enthralling.

Was it realistic for an upper middle class kid in Africa? The consensus (actual laughter) was no.

For an African upper middle class teenager in the US it was more viable - and I did end up going into Computer Science - but I'd put away childish things by then.

I hear the hours and bennies are awful anyway.

(I think I also wanted to be a writer, but that was definitely unrealistic)

Which African country are you from?

Gambia.

Nobody I know who has worked in the game industry says it's fun - the closest I've ever heard is that it's somewhat palatable from the folks who work on internal tooling and so have stable careers.

Even if you really love video games the industry ruins it for you. IMO the best approach would be to kick ass at general software development and then try and leverage it into a position at one of the few decent shops out there. I still might give it a shot one day.

Oh yeah. Maybe as a kid the idea of sleeping at the office making Halo 2 sounded cool.

But nothing I've heard since as an adult (or am still hearing about shambolic productions filled with precariat contractors like Halo Infinite) has made me regret not pursuing it further.

And I'm usually very prone to regret and worrying about the road not taken.

I remember wanting to be a ski patrol ranger. Now I just want to shift from technical project manager into something more creative.

As a young kid I wanted to be George Bush's right hand man. As a teenager I wanted to be an economist. By college age I was studying philosophy and now I'm happy if I have a job that will let me read on the side.

As a small child, I wanted to be a "danger man" and no one knew what it meant but there was speculation that it could have been anything from road construction (they work around signs that say danger) to superhero (pretty unlikely to happen).

Surely a "danger man" would be a secret agent . Just don't try to resign your position, or you might get imprisioned in a village somewhere in Wales....

You know, oddly enough I wanted to be an architect as a kid. For whatever reason I loved geometric doodling in elementary school, and even in highschool really enjoyed taking CAD classes. To this day, when I'm woodworking I still sketch out (badly) my designs, and figure out all the angles and measurements ahead of my first cut. Which I would have assumed was normal, except I see a lot of youtubers winging it, and being utterly unable to do the fractional math themselves, and relying on their phones or google sketchup for everything.

When I was very young, an actor or journalist, and when I was a teenager, a philosopher or occasionally a psychologist (variably academic or practicing). I did want to do a degree (MA, maybe then PhD) in philosophy after my undergraduate degree before going back into finance but I had a crisis of confidence when I struggled with trying to teach myself formal logic (in all fairness, it was at least partially laziness) and so abandoned it.

I’m still not sure whether most good academic analytic philosophers are much more intelligent than me or just hide the relative banality of their ideas behind a tradition of overwrought language and an emphasis on ‘rigor’ that usually just means structuring arguments in a needlessly complex way.

Formal logic is... Boolean algebra. Most Electrical/Computer engineering students learn it in 2 weeks.

Mathematical logic is a pretty wide field of which boolean algebra is only a small part of the basics.

Yes, but a philosopher doesn’t need to know anything about model theory or large cardinals (unless they specifically specialize in the philosophy of modern mathematical logic). The only logic that most philosophers need is the very simple boolean algebra they teach you in CS 101.

And what percentage of that shows up in a philosophy course?

Not a lot (then again, it's such a huge field that only a small fraction shows up in a PhD in mathematical logic), but in all likelihood, more than just boolean algebra.

In addition to the propositional calculus (effectively a subset of boolean algebra and probably equivalent to the part you are expecting EE students to learn) I'd expect any advanced student in analytic philosophy to be familiar with the basics of first-order logic as well as modal logic (in fact most research in modal logic is done in philosophy departments because of how essential it is in quite a few areas -- c.f. Saul Kripke).

You're not missing much from philosophy imo. I did a minor (1 course away from major but I would've had to do an extra semester) and especially as I've gotten older, I'm less and less impressed with philosophy. It's great for signaling high intelligence/status and talking your way around people, but in terms of actually leading a good, satisfying life, philosophy is a remarkably poor guide.

Which is sad, because that's ostensibly the whole point of the enterprise.

because that's ostensibly the whole point of the enterprise.

Well... not really?

Philosophy started as a comprehensive rational inquiry into the nature of reality. It was math, science, and metaphysics all wrapped up into one. Knowing how to live a good life might be part of that inquiry, insofar as it's a prominent feature of our reality that we observe people making good decisions and poor decisions, and we want to know what the difference between them is - but it's only one component.

The surviving texts we have from the pre-Socratics are heavy on theoretical speculation about metaphysics, logic, and mathematics, but they contain relatively little in the way of practical life advice. When Plato considered ethical questions, it was typically done as a pretext to introduce broader theoretical issues (e.g. the moral dilemma in the Euthyphro turns into an inquiry into the metaphysical status of moral facts as such). Certainly by the time we get to Descartes, we have a model of a theoretical philosopher who focuses solely on metaphysics and epistemology and pays no attention to ethics at all. So the situation you bemoan has been commonplace for at least 400 years now.

That being said, there are philosophers who make "living life" their main focus, and you'll mainly find them in the continental tradition: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Lacan, etc.

I’m kinda there as well. As a hobby, I think it’s interesting to read and attempt to do philosophy. I also think reading, watching, and analysis of media is interesting. The academic fields are generally fart sniffing exercises producing little worth the money spent getting into it or the people who do it.

I assure you that you're more than intelligent enough to learn analytic philosophy (along with pretty much everyone else who posts here). It's not that hard, in comparison to say STEM fields.

I don't think it's fair or accurate to say that philosophers are "hiding banal ideas behind overwrought language and needlessly complex arguments". Do you have any examples in mind? Every field has jargon, it's unavoidable. Analytic philosophy jargon is in my opinion not that hard to learn; if you come across an unfamiliar word, you just look it up and then continue reading. There is an initial investment of time required on your part when you're first starting out, but it's nothing insurmountable. I think analytic philosophers generally make a pretty strong effort to make their arguments as easy to understand as possible.

Your reaction is not an uncommon one though - some people who are first getting into philosophy feel like they're being tricked in some way, that philosophers are surely just making all this stuff up, etc. But I think that's just a reaction to the ideas being strange and unfamiliar; it's not proof that philosophers are actually just writing BS.

As for whether the ideas are "banal", I suppose that's somewhat a matter of taste and perspective. You don't have to think that philosophy is interesting. But when people make claims like "tables and chairs don't exist", "there are sentences that are true and false at the same time", or "no one has ever felt pain before", I don't think those are banal claims! I think they strike at the heart of how we think about reality. You might think those claims are false, but that's different from being banal.

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