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 know multiple instances of math majors switching to non-math fields and easily getting good positions. I myself was doing fairly good research (improving on the current best technique for solving a problem that people care about) within 8 months of switching from math to robotics (although I also spent a year doing computational cognitive science in the time between math and robotics).
It sounds like the real issue is figuring out what field to go into. Personally I just tried a few different fields until I started to get a better idea of what was going on, and finally was able to narrow down to a shortlist of problems that I consider really important (probably similar to paulfchristiano's, it looks something like synthetic biology, brain scanning / simulation, machine learning, environmental engineering, clean energy, and materials science).
If you ask yourself what you would like the world to look like, it is usually easy to at least differentiate between things that do a lot to move you towards that goal, and things that do very little; maybe at the top it is hard to figure out which research programs will be the most effective, but it is probably not difficult to find something that is more effective than what you are currently doing, which should be good enough from the perspective of deciding to switch.
You are right in that the real issue is figuring out what field to go into.
The thing about it is that I don't really know how to taskify "trying a few different fields;" this is perhaps the soul of my question.