That guy was probably just too handsome.
Is there a less sympathetic personal essay topic than "I wanted to be the next Einstein but physics turned out to involve too much math so I settled for working on Wall Street"?
White guys really are the worst, aren't we? I guess I don't know that the authors of both of those pieces are white, but it's hard to imagine anyone else with quite that much oblivious privilege.
A friend of mine from grad school did exactly this. Makes shitloads of money. I dunno if he's happy or not, though.
"I lost my job in proctology because of Obamacare and losing three wrist watches."
From the link: Quit a good job as an electrical engineer in Southern California
Worst Creedence rewrite ever...
I wanted to be the next Einstein
That was the bit that really seemed foreign to me. Some of what he described was familiar (even though I wasn't doing "High Theory"), but the whole "I'm only interested in physics if I can be the next Einstein/Dirac/Feynman/whatever" thing felt off. Do people really think that going into grad school?
He definitely diminished his sympathy quotient with his happy ending of going to Wall Street. Just in time to help destroy the economy! Awesome, dude!
Just in time to help destroy the economy!
Perhaps if he had really understood fiber bundles he wouldn't have broken the economy. A lesson for us all.
I remember learning about fiber bundles when doing differentiable manifolds, and I didn't really understand them, either. In undergrad. I should've been receiving excellent compensation while wrecking the economy.
The fiber bundles I work with are actual bundles of fiber, but I don't get to wreck any economies.
Even if you can't wreck a whole economy, there's no reason you can't defraud and ruin a subset of the people you know.
3: If there is, it probably also starts with sipping single-malt scotch with a stockbroker, just like this one.
14: That's your problem. To have the power to ruin so many lives you need to invoke Platonic perfection.
My insane freshman year math class was taught by the same guy who had taught it the previous year. There were complaints that it had been too intense the previous year, and the department had intervened to lay down some ground rules. The main rule was: "No fiber bundles."
Shoot, I think I misremembered and the rule was "no vector bundles."
Oh crud, maybe that's what I'm thinking of. Maybe I'm too much of a failure to succeed at evil? Regardless, not something for a freshman class. Even an advanced one--you really shouldn't have any topology beyond what you'd get out of real analysis then, IMO.
I thought the article was more interesting than I expected going in, just as a document of what goes wrong with students. I think the main morals are:
1) No you can't do anything.
2) Don't go into science because you think you'll be Einstein, make sure you like ordinary science.
3) Quitting is not a dirty word, and we need to teach children how and when to quit.
The whole game was given away at the very beginning with his girlfriend asking him if he's ever been happy. This dude was able to spend his youth studying something abstract and interesting, receiving way more intellectual support than many grad students ever get, went on to presumably make a lot of money doing quant work - enough to allow him to quit and tool around on a motorcycle, pursue a career as a writer.
I mean, what else could you reasonably expect from the universe after that? To be Einstein, I guess. He's been given a truly magnificient life but it's utterly wasted on him.
The universe could give him a girlfriend who doesn't ask so many personal questions.
At least I know what a fiber bundle is, gawd.
I found the article sympathetic.
I was a physics major for a couple of years. I am super glad I switched out. I don't think wanting to contribute to science is such a crazy goal. The problem is not that he didn't discover something like Einstein but that nobody did. The heroic era in physics is over (at least for now).
Why can't they be like we were,
Inventing weapons for doomsday?
What's the matter with physics today?
Another thought about it - anyone interested that he brings up Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? Anyone find that a bit unsympathetic as well? I struggled through the book when I read it as a teen, and by the end found it a sad/moving/revealing picture into mental illness and parenthood, but overblown and not the kind of thing I would have read if my dad hadn't pushed it on me. (Maybe I'd like it more now, who knows. He and I get along well but have never had similar taste in books. The point is, though, curious what others think.)
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I thought the article was more interesting than I expected going in, just as a document of what goes wrong with students. ... 2) Don't go into science because you think you'll be Einstein, make sure you like ordinary science.
Fair points. This reminds me of how I have thought often that there's an interesting book, or even body of policy proposals, to be written based on how the difference between academia and vocational education has broken down over the past 50-100 years, but I'm way too much of a layman to have any actual insight on it.
I mean, once upon a time academia was an ivory tower for research or philosophy with its own unique culture and people went into it out of a genuine love of the subject matter, at least in some sense, and the vast majority of people got the education they needed for their jobs in less formal settings. Within my parent's lifetime, academia has become basically required for a middle-class lifestyle, and its culture has changed in some ways but not others. It does kind of seem like this Wall Street guy, unsympathetic though he personally is, got into and out of academia for understandable reasons.
Example: while I was in college, I worked for a couple weeks substitute teaching at a local high school. In addition to some day-to-day stuff I also filled in for one teacher for the last two weeks or so because she had to move before the school year ended. In addition to busywork there was also some actual work in there, including for a presentation for a 9th or maybe 10th grade class. The presentation was on whatever topic the students wanted; the actual goal was to show their use of PowerPoint. I gave one kid a failing grade for plagiarism. (On the project, but not the class.) There was no blowback in either direction, but I still feel kind of bad about it because this is really not the kind of situation that current standards about citing your sources were created to address.
You did the right thing, Cyrus.
Being obliviously privileged, I too found the article sympathetic.
Physics PhD here, emotions familiar from my own life and the lives of others I knew in grad school pretty well described. I didn't much like the writer's current perspective on life myself.
I don't care for Pirsig much as an adult, but liked him as a teenager.
Thinking about impossibly large problems requires a certain level of confidence/arrogance, similarly working through known smaller problems from first principles. Sometimes this confidence leads to idiotic outcomes, both intellectually and emotionally. Other times not, thinking stuff through rather than humbly accepting that someone else has done it can be part ofhealthy thinking and healthy feeling.
Myself, I compartmentalize thinking and feeling-- I see that there are people who think well who are emotionally stunted, and people who have a great emotional perspective who are analytically unsuccessful. There are cases where people's stupid thought patterns poison their feelings, but I do not see them as typical or particularly normative, just one possible interplay out of many.
34: I found this comment from his advisor interesting:
"The hardest part of all," he said, about theoretical physics, "is controlling your emotions."
I found his tentative efforts to diagnose problems with the field itself interesting, but he did bog down a lot in personal anecdote and figurative language. I don't know how ogged got through it tbh. I never read the Pirsig book -- like Catcher in the Rye, I missed the window of being young enough for it and never got the impression that it was worth revisiting after aging out. I may be unusually inhibited that way.
22: what are you, the gratitude police?
IIRC, it was more motorcycle repair than maintenance. I had trouble getting past that.
That's where the zen part comes in.
I didn't get the impression this guy was particularly privileged by U.S. standards. I thought that he wasn't raised in an intellectual milieu and that was part of his problem -- he seemed exceptionally brilliant and intellectually inclined to his parents and teachers, and that was part of the reason his ambitions were so grandiose.
Maybe, but the Chilton's served better.
I am both sympathetic with the author, and understand why it puts some people off. I've seen colleagues make roughly the same struggle though.
The often repeated narrative of "oh well, your in physics you can always go to Wall street" has a number of problems also.
I read Pirsig's book as a teenager, but I don't remember much about it now.
I recall that, over at Crooked Timber, John Holbo referred to it as "that book about the Straussian on a motorcycle".
I also missed the immaturity window for Gödel, Escher, Bach. And, for that matter, for Alice in Wonderland.
And for the OuLiPo! (Kind of serious there.)
GEB is suitable for adults-- a little twee, and I like Nagel and Newman better for Godel, but it's something completely different than Pirsig.
Georges Perec is quite good-- not everything he's written works for me, and my French is not strong enough for the original.
39: yes, his father was a policeman who had to moonlight as a night watchman (so presumably not a senior or well-paid one). Doesn't exactly reek of privilege.
45: I've tried and will probably keep trying with Perec. Maybe it's all too French for me.
Nagel's granddaughter was a high school/college friend of mine, and I remember her showing off his book to me around the time that we were both leaving for college. I assume she'd read it by then.
39, 46: the guy became a stockbroker who got rich enough to quit his job temporarily and support himself while writing, right? Maybe I don't understand what "privilege" means. If you earned it, it's not privilege? (This is a sincere question.)
He said he "left his job" in 2012. I have no idea whether he quit or was fired (like a lot of quants) or how rich he is.
A
Well, I was responding to the idea that only someone raised in tremendous privilege could have such preposterously grandiose ambitions. Whether he is currently privileged -- I don't have a strong opinion on that. As ajay points out we don't know that he is wealthy now.
I am for sure not wealthy now, nor were my parents wealthy when I was growing up (I am guessing their combined income was a good deal less than a moonlighting cop in the Bronx, and yes my mom also worked three jobs). I have no problem at all saying that I'm (highly) privileged. Maybe I'm lying to myself. It's all context, right? Do you guys want to talk me down from my assertion of great privilege?
That is the disconnect for me. I am not sure how I can regard this guy as not very privileged, and myself as very privileged, and I don't see any reason to yield on the self-assessment.
BUT I will stop now, because this is asinine and must be maddening to read.
"This must be maddening to read, so I'll now add the worst pun I can think of just in case it can be more maddening" seems more typical.
39, 46: I'll grant that he's not nearly as bad as a lot of people we make fun of around here. However, I still think it's fair to point and laugh at him for at least two reasons.
1. He opens with his girlfriend asking him a ponderous question straight out of a movie. In the following two paragraphs he mentions that the scotch he's drinking is single malt, that the bar they're drinking in is shiny and in Manhattan, and that he's a stockbroker. (He, his girlfriend, or maybe both. After a reread I'm not clear on that.)
2. He expected to be the next Einstein. For the record, I'd call that neutral to good in a kid, but he did so well into grad school. That's a hell of an inflated sense of self-worth and/or ambition.
A propos of nothing, I got my B.A. at the University of Rochester too and the glimpses of campus life throughout that article got to me.
47. Life:A User's Manual is what I liked best.
51. On a scale of 0 (Robert Johnson's first wife who died in childbirth as a teen) to 10 (GWB), I'd say mom worked three jobs and childhood fear of poverty is about a 4. I think privilege should be assessed with most weight on social status at 17, prior and subsequent parental influence counts, but counts less.
I agree with all of 56, even though I also sympathized.
Also: Bausch and Lomb is eyedrops! It's eyedrops!
"We've been administering Bausch and Lomb ocularly!"
I just want to record right now (while btocked), that I was trying to relate [the early part of] this thread as a narrative to Iberian Fury, and I realized that, in my mind, Moby's 23 presented itself to my imagination as a ... what do you call it? An alley-oop slam dunk? Where someone sets up the ball, and then someone else just smashes it in the hoop? Anyway, Moby's 23 was a beautiful example of the genre (which he is, in general, the master of). And I wanted to that to be on the record.
Have a drink for me. I'm on an extended period of responsibility-induced sobriety and it's wearing on me.
RESPONSIBILITY-INDUCED SOBRIETY IS THE WORST SOBRIETY
We had two bottles of wine for the two of us, which means I'm totally hammered. I may open the fourth-bottle of bubbly our refugee Flatmate gave us last year.
(Tomorrow is a holiday in Austria)
I am drinking the third bottle, which is 20/75 of a real bottle, of bubbly (I was estimating when I called it a 4th-bottle). Iberian Fury wants me to put down for the record that I am only doing this for your sake, Moby, against her advice.
X. Trapnel! I'm going to tentatively vote no third or fourth bottle, even for a three- or four-day weekend.
Okay fine. Moby, tell me to do something so I can successfully defy you. Then we should all be square.
Hah. Yeah, I'm stopping after this. We were having the most bougie discussion ever, about whether we should buy real estate in Portugal, and how secure we were in this burning-to-flames world. Her judgment: aaaah!!! My judgment: hey, our four sets of parents are: professional/managerial class, 2x professional/managerial class, cabinet minister of a small country. We are fucking okay.
You can stay at the hypothetical place we buy in Lisbon, if we can stay at your real place in Pittsburgh. Wait, Pittsburgh is cold and gets 2000 hours of sunlight a year, no?
69: I assume by the latter you acknowledge that if the flames start to properly burn, the professional/managerial class is well and truly fucked.
I'm in a place colder than Pittsburgh. Apparently, frost bite will be a thing tonight.
I thought you were in Pittsburgh! Aaagh. Now nothing is clear.
Anyway, if we do buy a place in Lisbon, we will be even more welcoming to visitors than we are now. And we are currently very welcoming! We have 2 guests rooms in Vienna -- let me know if you're going to be in the neighborhood!
I'm on an extended tour to learn about white people.
I don't even have a passport these days.
Is this also a discussion of relocating to Lisbon? Or do you just want to have three times the guest rooms in twice the cities?
1- An interesting thing about white people and Portugal! ... ok, time out while I confer with Iberian Fury about this...
(No, not relocating. We just have too much money and are trying to figure out where to put it in the next few years, until she gets or doesn't get tenure. And are now thinking that maybe we should put it in Portuguese real estate.)
Like with a shovel and "x marks the spot"?
(TIL: british people are Bife/Bifa, because they eat beef.)
Okay, more on Portuguese and whiteness:
They think of themselves as white, though others don't always. So as Iberian Fury understands it, for Portuguese, there's normal people, blacks (African immigrants), and bife/a (British) -- and she's not entirely clear where other north/western Europeans fit in this categorisation.
I sort of want this to end with "drunken online real estate purchase." Ha ha ha ha ha yeeeaaahh this place has potential! Woooooooooo it has a really big basement waive the right of rescission sure thing! Why is the window over there now? Ha ha ha, I think they put a new window in while we were looking at the pictures! I'm going to lower my offer! oh god I'm so ill. oh god WAIT THIS WAS TORN DOWN IN 2007
82: no, like with a Google and a "what are the taxation levels and fees on standard financial instruments in our adopted country? Oh god, kill me, can I really be a member of the Socialdemocratishe Partei Österreichs when I'm considering these questions? Friedrich Alder would shoot me" kind of questioning.
86: we are very close to a 245k buy, but it will wait until the sober morning. What do you all think of this place?
I had to awkwardly stare my own bougieness in the face every day for a while while the dog was going to... dog daycare. But then I took a much lower-paying job and that particular problem resolved itself.
It was -17F at my house as the sun was coming up this morning. Even without a roof, a house in Portugal has some appeal.
88: I think 245k goes a lot, lot further there, than here.
God, everyone just send me your extra money I will keep it AT LEAST as safe as Portuguese real estate will.
92 was me but prob true of literally everyone.
No, I won't keep it as safe as Portugese real estate. I will, however, write a detained report on the fun that was had . . .
I'd just blow it all on white people in a red state.
It looks like a nice place. Think hard, through your fourth bottle of wine, about whether this truly is in line with your lifelong (or adulthood-long) personal values.
Iberian Fury confirms that we have no more personal values.
Iberian Fury confirms that we have no more personal values.
Do whatever you want with your money, but I have to say your drunken liveblogging financial planning game is solid.
It looks like it has a disproportionate number of doors. I didn't count but it felt like a lot of doors.
But then I guess you're know you're getting your money's worth in doors, so.
Do whatever you want with your money, but I have to say your drunken liveblogging financial planning game is solid.
Well, ok, in for a dime, in for a dollar.
So here's the thing. My sense from 30 minutes of googling is that Austria is incredibly punitive about capital gains resulting from financial instruments not registered with Austria. But I don't think that applies to EU real estate, even outside Austria. Our problem is basically: how can we earn a decent return in the 4 years until she either gets or doesn't get tenure? And my impression is that Austrian financial instruments have ridiculous fees. Hence the attractively of Lisbon real estate, which would also have the benefit of us using it when we go there 2-3x a year, possibly living there if she doesn't get tenure, etc.
Plus, the neighbourhood (Campo de Ourique) that we're looking at is reasonably likely to get a subway stop in the next decade or so.
So: what do you think?
Meet up at the FuryTrap's
We do have guest bedrooms in Vienna. Seriously, if any Mineshafters are in the area, let me know.
Okay, that's not a "too much money" problem but a "we want more money" problem (i.e. decent return vs punitive taxation). Much more common! I do want to know whose dark thoughts were expressed in 73, though. Perhaps the collective unconscious.
What's Lisbon like? Is there a housing shortage?
Nice light, small kitchen. How is the Portuguese economy?
104/5: bad, but it's been improving, and looks like a promising place for rich Europeans to park money. A bit of a housing shortage. E.g. brother-in-law, very jr diplomat, makes 1300 and pays 600 in that neighborhood.
Fantastico, luminoso.... how can you possibly resist?
We will be in Vienna in April! Briefly!
I've been planning a trip to Vienna but not sure when.
Seems like every time I click a link to a Nautilus article, I feel like I'm being trolled.
I was wondering how you would react to this one.
Me, too, to 111. I also want to snark on the guy for ditching a job and pursuing his theoretical physics dreams at University of Rochester. Is there something I don't know that made it a top school at the time?
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I had a productive evening of overwork one night after drinking a lot, and decided alcohol helped me to focus. I am really not reproducing those results tonight, but I do feel inspiringly sick. Back to the plan A of caffeine, I guess? X. Trapnel, I certainly hope you're faring better than I am...
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Alcohol makes you productive in the same way alcohol makes you charming.
Well, in fact I think the key was the loss of inhibition: I could easily get started on a task without endless dithering and hesitation. That part of my mind went away. That was great. It stopped me from checking the clock. There may be more reliable ways to get this to happen, but the brute force option was a nice surprise.
It doesn't work as well once you move beyond drinking four loco.
Lisbon is a lovely city, and whenever I've been I'm always surprised it's not more of a hipster mecca than it is. The €-crisis was very hard on both Lisbon and Porto, and there are a lot of empty buildings.
Having looked at it, the location is decent (at the end of the 28 line!). €245k is close to what I paid in London five years ago. Anyway, I'm going to be in Vienna briefly after the 20th.
Nice apartment, though I wouldn't buy it for myself because I don't like the kitchen. I don't know Lisbon prices from a hole in the ground, but I'd guess 245 was fair, neither a bargain nor a bubble. If fate moved you back to Portugal, would you want to live in it?
Ugh. Hungover, but not as bad as one might have expected. No drunken purchase offers were made.
If you want to avoid a hangover, drink champagne. Or cava or prosecco or mousseux...
Lisbon is a lovely city, and whenever I've been I'm always surprised it's not more of a hipster mecca than it is.
Lack of jobs, I guess. Even hipsters need to earn some amount of money.
122: I thought he did! Just not exclusively.
That's why it wasn't as bad as he might have expected.
I have a certain fondness for drunk trapnel, at least at this distance.
damnit I missed a chance to say "buy real estate while drunk." I never have, but I've done it in a manic episode. mmmm, it's worked out...differently than I though. worse in most ways, better in terms of theoretical appreciation, so in short we know nothing till it sells. maybe y'all should think hard?
€245k is close to what I paid in London five years ago.
srsly? I had gotten the impression that that was impossible...
You could buy houses on my street for less than that amount in dollars right now.
Actually I couldn't. Isn't that hilarious? This is all pure abstraction for me and maybe always will be.
Assume a spherical city with affordable housing.
129: Probably multiple houses on mine. Mine would probably have been the cheapest because everything else is smaller, but still at least two maybe three.
Assume a spherical city with affordable housing.
A decommissioned death star?
Ohio State is apparently trying to nudge out Kent State as the school where you go to get shot at.
You could make a good downpayment for that amount in dollars on my street (or any nearby)
So yeah, rentals.
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Anyone still looking for New Year's Resolutions can crib a few here. For the real estate subthread, may I suggest "get hoous ein UK an Loft in NY or Apt in Centrakl Park West"?
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"learn and asian language"
That sounds easy! And who wouldn't want to speak Asian?