This is not a post on mathematics, statistical physics, nor evolutionary biology. So there won't be any equations or
theorems involved, but the reasons why we may be enjoying them. Similarly, how we may alienate from our own curiosity,
become more distant to something we were dying to be a part of, right after we finally force ourselves to become a part of it.
I've been into science since I was a kid. I remember the feeling of reading something that I absolutely don't understand, yet it feels beautiful to try to jump into it. Diving into books on particle physics, string theory, evolutionary biology, or challenging mathematical problems were fun, even though there were times that none of them really made sense. But the books are here to show you what you can't understand, not the things that you've already understood. By any means, reading on science was fun. I was doing it just for the sake of doing it. Books, theorems, and equations were good places to hide when your high school teacher does his job with a negative degree of excitement. It was pure enthusiasm for me. It still is.
Now I understand why our excitements, independent of what they are towards to, should not be transformed into intangible accomplishments. I guess this is true for any kind of enthusiasm in life.
Each process has a unique tempo in nature. Forcing them to operate faster simply distorts them. Similarly, slowing things down may be as dangerous as forcing them to speed up. And all processes are dynamic with respect to their agents as well. They evolve with the things they interact, affect, and be affected by. Thus, they become impossible to predict with infinite precision. As Susskind says, we begin to talk in probabilities when we don't understand how a dynamical system interacts with its surroundings with absolute certainty.
On the contrary, what we do is to asses a fixed time for a process, say academic research, depending on how much we value its possible outcomes. If a small problem takes longer than its supposed to, we leave it. If there are no papers to publish on the horizon, again, we leave it. Value of dealing with a problem depends how long it survives to remain as a problem, not what it actually means to solve it. We have well defined time intervals, well defined academic accomplishments, well defined funding options, and as a result, all these nicely fixed numbers make us think we are dealing with well defined problems.
A well defined problem is a problem such that its solution solves the core problem itself, not the other problems such as GPAs, publications, or citations. And unfortunately, when your priorities transform into these other problems, it becomes unbelievably easy and seems extremely reasonable to generate scientific problems which are fundamentally not scientific, nor problems.
Enthusiasm, towards anything, is a gift. It gives you the nerve to read something again and again and practically torture yourself until you understand it. It is capable of forcing you to go out of bed at the middle of the night and run to pen and paper for a slight chance of being right for this time. It is capable of making you feel unbounded.
So if you have it, do not exchange it for anything quantifiable.
I've been into science since I was a kid. I remember the feeling of reading something that I absolutely don't understand, yet it feels beautiful to try to jump into it. Diving into books on particle physics, string theory, evolutionary biology, or challenging mathematical problems were fun, even though there were times that none of them really made sense. But the books are here to show you what you can't understand, not the things that you've already understood. By any means, reading on science was fun. I was doing it just for the sake of doing it. Books, theorems, and equations were good places to hide when your high school teacher does his job with a negative degree of excitement. It was pure enthusiasm for me. It still is.
Now I understand why our excitements, independent of what they are towards to, should not be transformed into intangible accomplishments. I guess this is true for any kind of enthusiasm in life.
Each process has a unique tempo in nature. Forcing them to operate faster simply distorts them. Similarly, slowing things down may be as dangerous as forcing them to speed up. And all processes are dynamic with respect to their agents as well. They evolve with the things they interact, affect, and be affected by. Thus, they become impossible to predict with infinite precision. As Susskind says, we begin to talk in probabilities when we don't understand how a dynamical system interacts with its surroundings with absolute certainty.
On the contrary, what we do is to asses a fixed time for a process, say academic research, depending on how much we value its possible outcomes. If a small problem takes longer than its supposed to, we leave it. If there are no papers to publish on the horizon, again, we leave it. Value of dealing with a problem depends how long it survives to remain as a problem, not what it actually means to solve it. We have well defined time intervals, well defined academic accomplishments, well defined funding options, and as a result, all these nicely fixed numbers make us think we are dealing with well defined problems.
A well defined problem is a problem such that its solution solves the core problem itself, not the other problems such as GPAs, publications, or citations. And unfortunately, when your priorities transform into these other problems, it becomes unbelievably easy and seems extremely reasonable to generate scientific problems which are fundamentally not scientific, nor problems.
Enthusiasm, towards anything, is a gift. It gives you the nerve to read something again and again and practically torture yourself until you understand it. It is capable of forcing you to go out of bed at the middle of the night and run to pen and paper for a slight chance of being right for this time. It is capable of making you feel unbounded.
So if you have it, do not exchange it for anything quantifiable.
