Log
Yesterday, I was chatting to Dad and he said that I’ve such a clear idea of what I want to do, which is not the case. I started the Msc in part to get this clarity and its definitely helped but I still don’t have any idea of where I might contribute.
This research project has taught me that an area like risk could be useful. It’s somthing that is not widely appreciated or at least is not a commonly known field. I also think that people might not find it overly interesting, a bit like power electronics. Because I do find it interesting that might mean I’m a good fit, even if I’m not the most talented at it.
In saying that, it’d be nice to have a problem to solve. Likely, with no initial preference I should just pick any problem that I feel I can contribute too. This isn’t the inspiration I might have hoped but, once again, projecting a fantasy onto reality might just hinder me from doing what I might enjoy in the long run rather than acting as a heuristic for it.
‘Energy innovation’ and working on Science’s for new energy or the foundations for Thermodynamics would be cool, but this just doesn’t exist. It’s an idealised notion in my head. I’d like to contribute to Science and being in that sphere but I can’t always project what I think thats like on to it. Sometimes, I see it as a failure if I’m not working towards this Star Trek/Sagan higher ideal.
This ideal, well, what is it? I read Carl Sagan in my teens and liked the way he saw things. I kind of moved into the intelligence as an escape realm. Where I figured reading and learning would make me look smart and be smart so that I could be smarter than other people, feel better than them, because I didn’t really feel great about myself I suppose. Sagan represents this ideal scientist, full of wonder, what I wish I was. I’m not too sure why, I can’t really think or hold in my head why.
Another impactful moment is the pale blue dot speech at the end of Cosmos. Watching this clarified for me that it was silly to not be contributing to something I loved. That these problems I’ve created for myself were not real problems.
Star Trek then also offers an escape, to be in a world like that where intellect is the superhero. Being a scientist seemed to me when I was young as really understanding the world, writing equations etc. Unfortunately, it did not come naturally to me. It’s only now I realise it doesn’t come naturally to a lot of people. This alone is not reason to give up but it may be a reason that its not the career for you.
Maybe it all comes down to wanting to be a person myself in my teens would like or feel had achieved, which is odd because theres so much that person doesn’t know about me now or about the world in general. It might be time to let this ideal standard (which I can’t even define) go, or redefine it for the way the world is now, who I am now. I can take the positives from it, use Sagan as inspiration, but I will never be Sagan, I will never be Tooze, I’ll never be any of the people I admire. That’s not a failure. Holding myself back because of this heuristic I can’t quite define is a problem.
I can’t help but feel that this notion of what I ‘should’ be doing seeps into the decisions I make almost daily, especially what I work on. Maybe what this is ‘emotion’ thats why its hard to pin down. While it can be good its similar to looking at how one ‘feels’ rather than the facts. Say with me and weight loss and food. I might feel bloated or generally feel ‘fat’ or weak or whatever but if the numbers are going up in the gym, which I would say is my goal then that feel is ‘wrong’ for the general outcome I’m looking for.
I listened to Hanah Ritchie this morning on the 80,000 hours podcast. She kind of frames the ‘climtae change’ problem as one of international development which I think is the best way to look at it. She talks a lot about crops yields in Africa and how its important to improve productivity there.
She also uses the Ozone layer example to show that we need to create markets for the better options, this puts more power in the hands of developed countries to create these markets for things like electric cars, vegan foods etc. offering incentives for companies to enter these markets. It seems to me a good thing to do as a priveledged person or nation to help.
Its worth putting time aside to get some examples in my brain like Ritchie talks about here. Where market incentives work, what the problem in Africa, in terms of yields is etc.
I’ve been watching this video from Angela Collier about lemon water and how your stomach acid will just neutralise it so its just always water. This is despite the fact that people say it works. So you can say it literally makes no difference empirically but then people say its worked wonders for them. It reminds me of how I went off carbs. Empirically or scientifically it might not have been the carbs at all that got me shredded but thats what I think did it so you generate this notion, thats not backed by solid Science in your mind.
Decision problems, languages, that is a set representation where the set qualifier is some indicator function is the same as a decision problem for some input.
Thinking about decision problems, the halting problem is telling us if we can actually solve them.
Research
- Work on results section putting in figures.
- Work on methodology then.
Is one of the reasons I’m not doing a Gaussian or UI estimate because its questionable how useful those numbers are in a vacuum? I think for comparison they make a bit more sense, but even still its hard to know how such numbers contribute extra information.
It might just be a matter of changing what an uncertainty analysis consisted of. As well as mentioning this in the representation part.
The approach then is more creating a tool for analysis under generalisation for notation in a few select papers. We then demonstrate the tool.
How does standard error relate to things?