Response to: The Value of Theoretical Research
Reading paulfchristiano's article the other day, I realized that I had had many similar discussions with myself, and have been guilty of motivated stopping and poor answers to all of them.
However, one major roadblock in my pursuing better answers, is that I feel that I have been "locked in" to my current path.
I am currently a mathematics Ph.D. student. I did not have a minor. I don't have significant programming skills or employment experience. I know nothing about finance. I know a lot about mathematics.
Paul says:
There is a shortage of intelligent, rational people in pretty much every area of human activity. I would go so far as to claim this is the limiting input for most fields.
However, "most fields" is not a very good tool for narrowing my search space; I have spent my entire life in school, and I like having structures and schedules that tell me when I'm doing productive things and that I've progressed to certain stages. I'm not ready to drop out and do whatever, and I don't have a particular idea of what whatever might be.
On the other hand, I currently have a variety of resources available to me. For example, I have a steady income (a grad student stipend isn't much, but it's plenty for me to live on), and I have the ability to take undergraduate classes for free (though not the spare time at the moment.)
My current intent is to continue and finish my Ph.D., but to attempt to take classes in other subjects, such as linguistics, biology and chemistry, and computer science which might lead to other interesting career paths.
Has anybody else had a similar feeling of being "locked in"? How have you responded to it? For those who have studied mathematics, are you still? If you continued, what helped you make that decision? If you stopped, what about that? What did you end up doing? How did you decide on it?
I suspect that there are. However, I doubt my ability to accurately find such problems and solve them.
I am in particular interested in finding non-math things that I am interested in and could reasonably pursue, and narrowing down such "non-apples" to something like this or this (the part about biotech); and then especially I'm interested in turning that into a set of tasks.
What I would like to leave with is a to do list that reads like: "Take chemistry classes next year and earn a degree in biology while remaining a graduate student, then apply for biotech internships."
Obviously this is somewhat personal and I've digressed into something that is more of an addendum to the OP rather than a reply to your comment.
I am not convinced that this gets too much easier in other fields. For example, in biology, a natural and apparently rather straightforward problem (compared to some of the long term goals of the field) is killing all humans. Its not clear how the field should proceed to accomplish something useful without introducing a serious existential risk. If you feel unable to evaluate the long-term impacts of your work, it seems possible to do a great deal of harm, nevermind doing no good.