I even went to a career counselor who gave me a personality test. I'm a classic INTJ, a perfect fit for a scientific researcher. But I just couldn't keep doing the same and tried to mix it up in different ways. I had children, did a sabbatical in Amsterdam, changed jobs multiple times. A colleague called me "a restless soul."
I took service roles in the field, started this blog, wrote survey articles and a popular science book. In my research for a while I kept doing complexity though trying to focus on applying it to other disciplines such as economics. But I found myself often working on problems that few others cared about.
Eventually I became a department chair and a dean, during an incredible transformation in computing as we moved towards the data-driven future we now inhabit. Now that I've returned to the professoriate I lack the excitement and probably the skills to go back to complexity, which has become more of a mathematical field mostly ignoring the changes we've seen in computing.
In an interview for an administrative job I did not get, I gave a vision talk emphasizing growth and impact. Afterwards when I met with the faculty in small groups, one of them, a CS theorist whom I’ve known for decades, looks at me and says “You’ve changed". Yes. And they hadn't. Two responses to the same restlessness, perhaps. Or maybe they were never restless at all.
I think often of the Harvard Grant Study - one of the big findings of the study is that happiness/thriving was not necessarily correlated with career stability or prestige. The non-linear path leads to a rate of happiness that is the same as a stabler path, provided that people maintained a sense of purpose.
ReplyDeleteAs a fellow restless soul who briefly passed through your orbit, I totally get it. Cheers.
See https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/what-is-theoretical-computer-science/
ReplyDeleteYou are not alone. Most extremely active researchers last only 10 or 15 years in our fast-moving field. After that, the field moves on and they become irrelevant and then inactive, unless they make a big effort to redefine themselves. How many researchers have managed to do the latter for 4 or 5 decades?
ReplyDeleteThis post resonates with me. I've yet to go down the service route. I've achieved what I wanted in terms of publications and student supervision. What next? Titles do not motivate me. Another research area? same ol same ol.
ReplyDelete'Twitchiness' of life (paraphrasing Philip Ball's 'How Life Works')
ReplyDeleteWhen I look at any living organism (be it at a macro or at a micro scale); it has an inescapable constant 'twitch' (in the current context, restlessness) that is completely absent in man-made artifacts (though attempted to be mimicked in software).
What causes this twitch?
The answer (of course) is 'Brownian motion'; the magic is that life has found a way to not just harness but to exploit this perpetual phenomenon (in a watery medium) as its own essential motive force (by essentially creating semi-permeable membrane barriers to sequester molecules with different entropy states).
We rue the fact that our products are subject to a constant degradation (none of our machines last more than two, max three decades; corroding away in tiny bits and pieces) but life chooses instead to embrace this indispensable phenomenon (in some cases staying alive for thousands of years).
Just as one specific example, the "ion pump" organelles that line the cell walls are responsible for maintaining the intra-cellular concentration of ions within a very narrow band.
These ion-pumps, a veritable real-world implementation of Maxwell's demons, dutifully move ions against the prevalent entropy gradient (not unlike trying to sweep water up a slope with a broom); this requires (expending sequestered internal energy and) intelligence to coordinate across the entire cell because it sure looks like life is violating our beloved law of thermodynamics!
There is no violation because all life has a finite duration; in this duration where the magic is sustained however, we see that life has gained the vantage by intelligently crafting resilient (beautiful, intertwined, nurturing, grieving, violent, curious, courageous) oases of negative entropy relative to a desolate high-entropy landscape (Sagan convinced NASA to capture this undeniable nothingness emphatically in https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/voyager-1s-pale-blue-dot/).
What then is the purpose of all this 'twitching'?
It is simply so that life can constantly seek out and 'click' into new niches; like a child learning to walk, bike, swim or make a friend; like a plant creating a new flavor, fragrance, flower or fruit hoping to entice an insect or bird to return; like a bird trying out a new song, dance or nest to click with a mate; like a predator attempting to capture a well-defended prey (and its complement); like a leaf clicking into place to capture the most sunlight.
Life chooses not to come pre-programmed but instead to be born with an innate ability to figure out the real-world; and therein lies life's intelligence.
Even more directly; as a self-fulfilling prophecy, life's twitch has itself fabricated the underlying objective function of all life - "to maximize the survivability and reproducibility of molecules".
Computers sure are awesome at perfectly crunching numbers but by no means do they play a perfect game of chess!
Life has selected a magic subset of ~29 from 92 naturally occurring elements and then down-selected an essential subset of {2, 3, ..., N}-atom configurations (many with multiple structures, several toxic) from all possible compounds of those 29 elements.
There is no way that life simply brute-forced (or alpha-beta pruned) through all those possibilities despite being able to run several orders of quadrillions of experiments simultaneously.
We are witness to an (the kicker, only to us) astounding, purely physical phenomenon, that may very well not exist, or emerge, anywhere else in the universe; a phenomenon that will endure long after we are gone, finally extinguishing when the sun's corona boils away the earth's oceans.
Calling AI "Astonishing Indexing" would be more candid but who would pay big-bucks for that?
At the rate I encounter software bugs, I would call it quite twitchy!
DeleteThanks for sharing I enjoyed this quite a bit. Note that I don't think you are alone in this.
ReplyDeleteI experienced the same. I explored a bit what kind of work had made me happy in the past and why.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with our field is that the central problems are too hard to make meaningful progress on except for a few extraordinary researchers and most of our work is not really very impactful.
The most interesting parts are parts that introduce new ways of thinking about something.
I also wonder if I would have been happier as a researcher if I worked in more practical areas. Theory requires a deep motivation to discover mathematical truth, a kind of single mindedness that I don't possess.
I have seen some senior researchers enjoy what they do but attacking some fundamental problem that that's them, even if no one else cares about it much right now.
I look at what Valiant and Blum have done post their 60s. I think they are good role models.
Past some age, most people transition from continuing directly to a field to building a legacy through others, by coaching and helping younger folks. What we have that differentiates is experience and maybe some wisdom.
I personally looking forward for what you will decide to do. I think your experience and your perspective and your skills is likely to have impact on the rapidly changing world we are in. We need people like you to find good trajectories not just for our own field or academic research but the society in general.
What I would do if I were in your position would be to consider the problems that society has and will have as a result of AI advancements and then pick a problem that is so important from your perspective that we must make progress on that, and then focus your energy and skills and connections to make a dent in that area.
Having started and continued this blog along with Bill is in itself monumental. The consistency (sometimes I feel Bill had to work extra hard to keep it alive but has also done a good job), is non-trivial. Just witness the degree of struggle that Scottie has been undergoing.
ReplyDeleteThen of course there are other exceptional cases not in our field per se, let's say Terry Tao who has been ruthless about his blogging -- even he must have had his moments, but harder to tell when it was challenging for him. Ironically, he won most of the awards in his field, but still keeps going strong.
Don't worry, Lance. We will do your part!
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