I began programming "late" in life (around age 30), and was initially confused at the number of programmers in their mid-30s who decide they are too old to program. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that, while they expected to feel like they didn't know what they were doing when they began programming at age 15, they somewhere along the line expected to never feel that way again.
Inevitably, technology changes, and at some point you have to learn a new language, programming paradigm, database, or what-have-you. One feels again that one does not know what to do, at first. It's rather like feeling stupid. I have become able simply to say to myself, 'ah, yes, that feeling again, it shall pass in time', and just keep working at it (whatever 'it' is that year).
If you haven't felt like you don't know what you're doing in many years, your programming career has stalled, and I believe you should seek out a new skill to learn that makes you feel stupid while learning it, pronto. It takes practice to remain calm while having that feeling, and if you haven't had it in years you might let it panic you into thinking you can no longer program.
The lack of enthusiasm to learn new stuff is also due to opportunity costs and “exploration vs exploitation“ dynamics.
You spend time and effort when you are younger (eg 15) to develop skills that allow you to be productive and valuable.
Learning entirely orthogonal skills when you’re older no longer pays off after a certain point because the opportunity cost of not using your existing skills to produce becomes too large.
To make an extreme analogy, there is no point in Warren Buffet to learn to program at his stage of his career (or even 30 years ago). Any time spent not reading financial reports is such a huge opportunity cost that he really has no reason to learn any other skill.
Another extreme example is Lang Lang the pianist has no reason to pick up the violin. He has absolutely nothing to gain by learning new musical instruments.
Science is a special career where learning new things is important for longevity. A productive science career involves breaking new ground, picking up the low hanging fruit before your competitors do, then move on to break new ground once your old field becomes saturated. Learning new things is strategic, where you try to leverage existing expertise to break ground in new fields.
I agree with this 100%. I also think this is the primary driver of the old observation that people get more conservative as they age. (I'm using "conservative" in the more basic sense of "generally opposed to change" here and not in the current US political sense.)
One way to define of "experience" is "optimize for solving problems in the current environment". As you accrue experience, the best way to provide value to others is in an unchanging world that lets you leverage what you already know. When the world changes, some of your experience gets invalidated, making you less useful. So there's a natural incentive to prefer the status quo as you age, not out of any intrinsic heartlessness or selfishness, but just because you are most useful to yourself and others in a familiar world.
The young, however, don't feel this same pressure. They have relatively little experience—i.e. they aren't particularly good at getting things done in the current environment—and they do learn quickly. So they are incentivized to want change and to explore novel environments since those environments are no worse for them than the current one. Or, in other words, every environment is equally novel when you're young, so why not try a new one that puts you on more even footing with the older folks?
Your analysis of the cost-benefits is mostly sound, but I think in the case of programming it breaks down. People's instincts are to think that now that they have become expert, they shouldn't need to be a neophyte again. This works in most fields, but then you see programmers at age 35 realizing that the pool of jobs for their skillset is shrinking, and their labor market leverage is shrinking with it. Yes, there are those last few COBOL gigs, but they only become lucrative after 90%+ of the COBOL programmers have given up and got out.
This is likely always true, but in most fields the skill remains in demand for centuries; wainwright may not pay like it used to (or maybe it does, I don't know) but the decline in demand is slow enough that nobody has to bail out, as long as youngsters aren't continuing to plow into that field it's fine. In programming, the hotness of 10 years ago may already be at its peak, and if you're not willing to move on when you're in your 30's to learn something new, you have sentenced yourself to decades of working in a shrinking job market, which is kind of soul-crushing. Nothing to make your current job intolerable like thinking there's nowhere else you can go.
So, while Lang Lang may not choose to pick up the violin, it is probably fine, because the pianoforte is going to be a good skillset for the rest of his life. The harpsichord players who refused to move on to piano or organ may not have had a crisis in mid-career, because the transition from harpsichord to piano was slow enough to happen over generations. Programming tech changes faster than that (for better or worse).
A lot of teenagers and below have zero humility. Arrogance can be useful to get you past the stage when you're terrible and don't realize it, to when you actually are good.
My daughter is learning HTML & CSS, as she's getting annoyed with copying and pasting headers.
Her work is ugly as can be, but she is totally in love with it and proud of it. Think back to early Geocities days.
I'm sure one day she will be embarrassed by her early work, but for now, she's enthusiastic and gaining useful skills.
I recall realizing that, when I looked at my past programming and was somewhat embarrassed, that was really a way of saying I had learned something significant since then. I suppose if you look at your own work from years before and see nothing you would do differently now, it must mean the opposite.
Totally agree on the advantages of youthful arrogance (in this context).
I’m 19, blind, and currently feel this way. I tried to learn new skills early on so I don’t struggle to keep up with my classmates later on. Sometimes I feel it isn’t enough.
I think the most intense part of feeling stupid is gotten over in the first couple of years of PhD. If you’ve gotten through that you’ve probably crossed a huge and insurmountable barrier between novice and expert. After that it’s not as bad bc you know you can do it again.
For me the more difficult part right now is learning how to become self motivated. Going from having my supervisor coaching me in my PhD to being basically totally unsupervised and free to work on what I want in my postdoc has been very difficult both for my work and my mental health. You have to become almost totally self reliant. You start to value and amplify every bit of motivation you get. Discipline doesn’t cut it, because a lot of academic work is impossible to force. There aren’t many mechanical aspects of it, almost all of my work requires a tonne of diverse creative thinking, even just responding to reviewer comments
Back on stupidity, one of my favourites things has become to ask “stupid questions” as a postdoc. Partly because as a postdoc, people just assume you are very smart, so there is no pressure to “look good” or “not say stupid things”. There’s something weirdly liberating about hearing a bunch of very technical questions from PhD students and then me deciding to ask a very basic conceptual question. That said there are “stupid” questions and then there are ignorant ones, and the line is often blurry
> Going from having my supervisor coaching me in my PhD to being basically totally unsupervised and free to work on what I want
This was my case during my PhD (physics). My supervisor was not competent enough in my field of studies to help me from a science perspective (I had a co-supervisor who had more information, but not too much - it was a really unique area at that time).
BUT - he was a wonderful, extraordinary person when helping me travel the muddy waters of academia. He was always there to arrange after some, let's say, more "heavy" discussions. I was really delighted to have him as a supervisor.
He also let me roam free in innovative areas, he supported me when I wanted to publish 45 pages of thesis, when the norm was more 200+. He was really, really great.
I started to work in academia during my PhD and he was concerned I would not finish it. I sworn him that I would, before the end of the millenium. I had my defense mid December of the last year :)
I kept on visiting him over the years, presented him my children but he unfortunately died last year. RIP Prof. J.
I argue, that the ability to ask stupid questions is one of the most important skills to learn during your phd. Too many people avoid asking those questions, because they think they make them look stupid. In reality I estimate that in many cases a large fraction of the people listening were asking themselves the same question. Many "stupid" questions are not even stupid by any definition they are just basic (and are often not simply to answer either). Asking these questions enables one to really understand a subject.
I would also argue that it really does not take to be a postdoc to ask these questions. Hardly anyone thinks "this was a stupid question".
I definitely don't think you need to be a postdoc to do it, but a PhD student will naturally have more reservations about doing it bc they are less confident
Yes, but conversly after too long at the top, this leads to some professors thinking they know about everything and approaching a problem like they're an expert.
Feeling stupid isn't good, relising you don't know everything and how that doesn't make you stupid is. Especially when you then harness that into driving yourself to learn about whatever that is, childcare, science, politics...
If you start to act like you can do no wrong then you get situations like academics system getting hacked. The IT guys have to deal with the fall-out, and the academic is still demaning that they get full root access to do the same thing all over again despite not learning from the situation.
I can totally relate! Asking the basic premise questions, for me at least, is what allows the more complex parts of presentations to click into place. Like it all just sits in the buffer, percolating, recombining, and I just need that seed crystal for the whole thing to click. I think my goal during every scientific interaction is to really find the most basic, simple thing I'm missing because I find those details the most valuable to learn. They help put into place so many other disparate things because they are foundational knowledge.
> Going from having my supervisor coaching me in my PhD to being basically totally unsupervised and free to work on what I want in my postdoc has been very difficult both for my work and my mental health. You have to become almost totally self reliant.
My supervisor more or less completely ignored me during my PhD, with hindsight I'm not entirely sure how he got away with it.
Yeah it's really the luck of the draw when it comes to supervisors. Thankfully mine was very supportive both academically and psychologically, but most people aren't that lucky
Same here, cultivating motivation is definitely the hardest part of the job. Academic work needs months if not years get out and have impact and, personally, I don't get to discuss my work too often with people because it's too specialized.
Yeah and also it's really hard to justify to yourself spending time on more general topics. Like I should go through a general textbook or two that I'm interested in, but instead I just procrastinate bc it doesn't feel worthwhile or active work. Same for keeping up with scientific news. Even within my own research group of 30 students probably only 3 students understand a given project in any depth.
> One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time.
Eh, no. The reality is that there is always a pressure to produce more papers with positive results.
Ignoring the incentives is a key skill in science. And in all creative work in general. If you respond strongly to external incentives, you are unlikely to create anything truly novel, because you are doing what others are telling you to do. You may be good, and you may be successful, but your work is probably not as good as it could be.
Not even close. You do science often in the middle of a complex regulated system called university. Is a highly regulated, highly hierarchical environment and a faux pass can be the end of your career easily.
You can safely ignore everybody, as long as you do it with your own money; or when you achieve the status of holy cow. Big mistake otherwise.
I agree but the incentives are sometimes too strong to ignore. I've seen too many cases where even if you're trying to ignore the incentives, they're sometimes forced on you, or you're bullied into them. Sometimes it's not an emotional thing even, the bullying starts to have practical consequences.
I'd even go so far as to say today this is a sign of a strong academic department, one that is comfortable with its faculty sometimes having periods of time where they are going against trend. Unfortunately, it's becoming less and less common.
Except for when an area of science does this well and sructures itself well, in which case all problems are academic.
Academics are responsible for sorting out academic funding and likely always will be, pretending the 2 are separate creates problems such as is seen in biology (and yes, other sciences to an extent) where big funding from the private sector is forcing open publically funded research for the greater good toward lining the pockets of nouveau-industrialists.
I’m also a scientist. I very much agree with this, I even think you have an enormous advantage over colleagues who avoid feeling stupid! There is so much interesting stuff that makes you feel stupid.
I have to admit though, it took me until about 35 in age to being able to say to myself: “You know, if you don't understand something, it because it’s hard.” Total game changer for my attitude.
Before that I relied a bit on a certain naïveté, as a biologist among physicists I was sometimes called “Stupid biologist”, I guess it helped seeing it as the joke that it probably was for the most part.
One of my friends had a Nobel Laureate as a professor. The professor half-jokingly told everyone that getting a Nobel prize is easy, just disprove something that everyone accepts as accepted truth.
This is what really struck me when I tried some game dev in my free time. All that experience and intuition that makes me feel smart was missing. I imagine the feeling is significantly more intense when you're literally studying the unknown.
Funny to see this pop up, it's from 2008. I worked with Martin for quite a few years and we spoke about this article at one point. If I recall, the intended audience of this article is primarily incoming graduate students.The point being that the experience of doing research is very different from taking classes. It is not uncommon to see those who excelled in their undergraduate studies go on to graduate school and be dismayed to find that a PhD program uses a different skill set from getting good grades.
Perhaps more scientists need to be self-aware and feel stupid, rather than cocksure confident & wrong. But the incentives in university, popsci, etc make that harder
I think this is a common misconception, perhaps amplified by popsci and the media stoking outrage. Granted this is anecdata, but I belong to a family of scientists (myself, both parents, spouse, one sibling, his spouse), and live in a town where you can't spit without hitting a scientist.
Most scientists are just "normal" people like everybody else, and are vastly more aware of the difficulty of getting things right in scientific work. Get to know a few of us!
As for the topic of the thread, I think "stupid" might be an extreme term, but every scientist has experienced being wrong about things, over and over again. But it's a different kind of wrong: Being shown that we are wrong by Mother Nature, because we invited her to do so. On the other hand, the only "wrong" that most people outside of science experience is anticipating the wrong side of a choice of humans that is ultimately arbitrary, subjective, or random. The difference is being rationally wrong, rather than being socially wrong, for lack of better terms.
What I think makes prominent scientists seem "arrogant" to the public is that they expect us to behave as if our predictions are ultimately decided subjectively, i.e., to hedge our bets, and to give social encouragement to both "sides" of an issue. We don't give out participation trophies, nor do we ask for them. If I'm wrong about something, I'm not "wrong but tried hard." I'm just plain wrong. I'll be wrong again.
Not related to the content, but does anyone else get a 403 error when using a smartphone with Chrome to visit the link? I have to explicitly check "desktop site" to get access here.
Readit News
Inevitably, technology changes, and at some point you have to learn a new language, programming paradigm, database, or what-have-you. One feels again that one does not know what to do, at first. It's rather like feeling stupid. I have become able simply to say to myself, 'ah, yes, that feeling again, it shall pass in time', and just keep working at it (whatever 'it' is that year).
If you haven't felt like you don't know what you're doing in many years, your programming career has stalled, and I believe you should seek out a new skill to learn that makes you feel stupid while learning it, pronto. It takes practice to remain calm while having that feeling, and if you haven't had it in years you might let it panic you into thinking you can no longer program.
You spend time and effort when you are younger (eg 15) to develop skills that allow you to be productive and valuable.
Learning entirely orthogonal skills when you’re older no longer pays off after a certain point because the opportunity cost of not using your existing skills to produce becomes too large.
To make an extreme analogy, there is no point in Warren Buffet to learn to program at his stage of his career (or even 30 years ago). Any time spent not reading financial reports is such a huge opportunity cost that he really has no reason to learn any other skill.
Another extreme example is Lang Lang the pianist has no reason to pick up the violin. He has absolutely nothing to gain by learning new musical instruments.
Science is a special career where learning new things is important for longevity. A productive science career involves breaking new ground, picking up the low hanging fruit before your competitors do, then move on to break new ground once your old field becomes saturated. Learning new things is strategic, where you try to leverage existing expertise to break ground in new fields.
One way to define of "experience" is "optimize for solving problems in the current environment". As you accrue experience, the best way to provide value to others is in an unchanging world that lets you leverage what you already know. When the world changes, some of your experience gets invalidated, making you less useful. So there's a natural incentive to prefer the status quo as you age, not out of any intrinsic heartlessness or selfishness, but just because you are most useful to yourself and others in a familiar world.
The young, however, don't feel this same pressure. They have relatively little experience—i.e. they aren't particularly good at getting things done in the current environment—and they do learn quickly. So they are incentivized to want change and to explore novel environments since those environments are no worse for them than the current one. Or, in other words, every environment is equally novel when you're young, so why not try a new one that puts you on more even footing with the older folks?
This is likely always true, but in most fields the skill remains in demand for centuries; wainwright may not pay like it used to (or maybe it does, I don't know) but the decline in demand is slow enough that nobody has to bail out, as long as youngsters aren't continuing to plow into that field it's fine. In programming, the hotness of 10 years ago may already be at its peak, and if you're not willing to move on when you're in your 30's to learn something new, you have sentenced yourself to decades of working in a shrinking job market, which is kind of soul-crushing. Nothing to make your current job intolerable like thinking there's nowhere else you can go.
So, while Lang Lang may not choose to pick up the violin, it is probably fine, because the pianoforte is going to be a good skillset for the rest of his life. The harpsichord players who refused to move on to piano or organ may not have had a crisis in mid-career, because the transition from harpsichord to piano was slow enough to happen over generations. Programming tech changes faster than that (for better or worse).
My daughter is learning HTML & CSS, as she's getting annoyed with copying and pasting headers.
Her work is ugly as can be, but she is totally in love with it and proud of it. Think back to early Geocities days.
I'm sure one day she will be embarrassed by her early work, but for now, she's enthusiastic and gaining useful skills.
Totally agree on the advantages of youthful arrogance (in this context).
For me the more difficult part right now is learning how to become self motivated. Going from having my supervisor coaching me in my PhD to being basically totally unsupervised and free to work on what I want in my postdoc has been very difficult both for my work and my mental health. You have to become almost totally self reliant. You start to value and amplify every bit of motivation you get. Discipline doesn’t cut it, because a lot of academic work is impossible to force. There aren’t many mechanical aspects of it, almost all of my work requires a tonne of diverse creative thinking, even just responding to reviewer comments
Back on stupidity, one of my favourites things has become to ask “stupid questions” as a postdoc. Partly because as a postdoc, people just assume you are very smart, so there is no pressure to “look good” or “not say stupid things”. There’s something weirdly liberating about hearing a bunch of very technical questions from PhD students and then me deciding to ask a very basic conceptual question. That said there are “stupid” questions and then there are ignorant ones, and the line is often blurry
This was my case during my PhD (physics). My supervisor was not competent enough in my field of studies to help me from a science perspective (I had a co-supervisor who had more information, but not too much - it was a really unique area at that time).
BUT - he was a wonderful, extraordinary person when helping me travel the muddy waters of academia. He was always there to arrange after some, let's say, more "heavy" discussions. I was really delighted to have him as a supervisor.
He also let me roam free in innovative areas, he supported me when I wanted to publish 45 pages of thesis, when the norm was more 200+. He was really, really great.
I started to work in academia during my PhD and he was concerned I would not finish it. I sworn him that I would, before the end of the millenium. I had my defense mid December of the last year :)
I kept on visiting him over the years, presented him my children but he unfortunately died last year. RIP Prof. J.
I would also argue that it really does not take to be a postdoc to ask these questions. Hardly anyone thinks "this was a stupid question".
Feeling stupid isn't good, relising you don't know everything and how that doesn't make you stupid is. Especially when you then harness that into driving yourself to learn about whatever that is, childcare, science, politics...
If you start to act like you can do no wrong then you get situations like academics system getting hacked. The IT guys have to deal with the fall-out, and the academic is still demaning that they get full root access to do the same thing all over again despite not learning from the situation.
My supervisor more or less completely ignored me during my PhD, with hindsight I'm not entirely sure how he got away with it.
Eh, no. The reality is that there is always a pressure to produce more papers with positive results.
You can safely ignore everybody, as long as you do it with your own money; or when you achieve the status of holy cow. Big mistake otherwise.
I'd even go so far as to say today this is a sign of a strong academic department, one that is comfortable with its faculty sometimes having periods of time where they are going against trend. Unfortunately, it's becoming less and less common.
Academics are responsible for sorting out academic funding and likely always will be, pretending the 2 are separate creates problems such as is seen in biology (and yes, other sciences to an extent) where big funding from the private sector is forcing open publically funded research for the greater good toward lining the pockets of nouveau-industrialists.
I have to admit though, it took me until about 35 in age to being able to say to myself: “You know, if you don't understand something, it because it’s hard.” Total game changer for my attitude.
Before that I relied a bit on a certain naïveté, as a biologist among physicists I was sometimes called “Stupid biologist”, I guess it helped seeing it as the joke that it probably was for the most part.
Most scientists are just "normal" people like everybody else, and are vastly more aware of the difficulty of getting things right in scientific work. Get to know a few of us!
As for the topic of the thread, I think "stupid" might be an extreme term, but every scientist has experienced being wrong about things, over and over again. But it's a different kind of wrong: Being shown that we are wrong by Mother Nature, because we invited her to do so. On the other hand, the only "wrong" that most people outside of science experience is anticipating the wrong side of a choice of humans that is ultimately arbitrary, subjective, or random. The difference is being rationally wrong, rather than being socially wrong, for lack of better terms.
What I think makes prominent scientists seem "arrogant" to the public is that they expect us to behave as if our predictions are ultimately decided subjectively, i.e., to hedge our bets, and to give social encouragement to both "sides" of an issue. We don't give out participation trophies, nor do we ask for them. If I'm wrong about something, I'm not "wrong but tried hard." I'm just plain wrong. I'll be wrong again.