Things I'll never do.

48.7% of survey respondents said they blog as a form of therapy. Me, I'm primarily here to improve my writing skills (28.7% of respondents) and because much of the information I'm presenting isn't easily available elsewhere on the web (3.3%, more or less), But last episode, that was therapy---a means of asking myself where I want to focus in begging for my next contract. The conclusion is that I have a clear, strong preference for places that report confidence intervals. I want to remain on the scientist side of things, rather than the businessy managerial side of things. But this means that I'm choosing to put a limit on how pleasant my life will be, and how much I'll get done between now and when I shuffle off this here mortal coil.

I am good at inventing structures. Give me a topic, a blank page, and an hour, and I'll have a structure and meaning for ya. In such a manner, via black marks filling a blank space, I've produced a dissertation, a book or two, 145 blog entries, a stats library, assorted models of reality, stuff.

I am bad at inventing social structures. Doing so is a two step process: first, one must invent the structure, which I've just bragged that I'm good at, and second, one must convince others that the structure is valuable and worth working toward, and this is something I am supremely bad at.

There are a number of problems at hand here. The first is what I'd kvetched about before and above: I want confidence intervals, and think that people who have absolute certainty in anything (including their theology, by the way) are lying either to me, themselves, or both of us. But obviously, most of the world takes confidence at face value, and feels funny about Bayesian ranges.

The second is just that I'm crazy. People aren't looking for any old meaning, they're looking for meaning that makes sense to them and internally resonates and makes them feel better. Again, I ain't getting nowhere here. The `how can I possibly dilute my artistic vision' sentiment is honestly not very strong in me; it's more dominated by the `I don't get what everybody else is getting at' sentiment.

Life is a lot easier for people who think like everybody else but just a little faster or further. We like to characterize famous innovators as, um, innovative, but upon scrutiny of the work of all but the most exceptional, if you've heard of them they probably made an incremental improvement. Newton really did just stand on the shoulders of giants. It's not just whether your way of thinking is objectively superior, it's also a question of how many people will adopt it, and people just have limited tolerance for anybody who says `hey, let's try everything in a whole new way!', because 1) it takes effort to think like them and 2) for every person who thinks in a whole new way and makes the world better, there are fifty who think in a whole new way to everyone's detriment.

Have personally been working on this aspect a lot lately. Every time I write a paper, I interrogate the paper to work out how I can make it as boring as possible. How can this paper be turned into a minor, incremental, obvious extension of the existing literature?

But for the sort of reasons above, any hopes I may ever have had about working with lots of people, instead of just sitting solitary at a computer until I go blind, are fast diminishing. Somewhere, back in the mists of my life, I decided to focus on learning stuff---math, machines, et cetera---instead of learning how to better organize other people who have learned stuff, and at this point it'd be a long haul to turn around years of bad habits.

Why, you ask, would I want to become a manager-type despite my obvious bias against? First, there's the simple fact that most of what is worth doing is too big to be done by one person. Apophenia will never become a full-featured library unless it gets contributions from others. I could write a dozen books about how software patents are dumb, but it does nothing for the fact that they're law; fixing that takes organizing people.

Then, there's the reason we all have but most of us won't admit to: we want to be rich and famous.

Rich: Ms. DH of Ann Arbor, MI, points us to Morris & Western, who point out that: "[at the end of the century,] the earnings for professionals in technical/scientific fields stagnated, even in professions closely tied to technological innovation... During this same period earnings increased by 34% for all occupations in the category of office work, an increase that was driven by the nonscience, nontechnical business professionals and managers..." (Citation below). That is, as much as we may praise Mr. Einstein (and see below on that), our modern scientists aren't necessarily seeing the cash money that their counterparts in the insurance industry are seeing. You're still much better off, security and cashwise, using your time and brains for managing an office than doing original research.

Famous: as for those physicists with Nobel prizes, they're a back seat to the real prize---the peace prize---which rewards successful organizational and managerial effort. Even among the big-name celebrities, like the lead singer of your favorite foursome or the biologists who run the most innovative labs, the ratio of personal talent to persuasive talent is often low. You can go through your day's newspaper and count two managerial and organizational celebrities for every one individual innovator.

Sure, there are certain rewards to being talent (to use the Hollywood term). You get to stand outside of class in a number of important senses, and will still be invited to the fancy parties, and get to turn your nose at those mere managerial types, but life will never be as easy for the scientist as for the scientist's manager.

@article{morris:western:inequality,
author = "Martina Morris and Bruce Western",
title = "Inequality in Earnings at the Close of the Twentieth Century",
journal ="Annual Review of Sociology",
year=1999,
volume = 25,
pages= "623--657",
url = here
}