A recent discussion of IQ at this blog caused me to upwardly evaluate my estimation of my own. Viewing the chart at Assessment Psychology Online caused me to be dissatisfied with the job I was in. The programming language was abysmal, created in the 70s and only expected to last a couple years yet trudging on due to the caverns of legacy code too bothersome to replace with a worthwhile language. I was told by a manager that after five years of working there I would probably be unable to get a job anywhere else. Thinking on it for a while, the idea of dealing with that for the rest of my career seemed like a life sentence given as punishment for who-knows-what. By nature I am fond of routines and averse to change, so even if I posted this and the unanimous response was “GET OUT NOW” I might not have done anything in the near term, particularly with the economy having seen better days. Fortunately my employer made the decision for me by giving me the boot. Hopefully Anonymous has previously suggested that years from now a group of OB readers go for an econ phd at GMU under Robin Hanson, and while I don’t think I’ll do that anyone is invited to throw out crazy suggestions. One I’ve been thinking of is the Air Force, since my younger brother is in its ROTC program and seems to like it, they use lots of computers, it’s probably the safest of the military branches and the government is one of the few entities hiring counter-cyclically. It would probably hurt my cred among internet anarchists & the broader antiwar crowd, but I’ve never claimed to be principled. Hopefully it’d be through Officer Candidate School rather than as an enlisted airmen.
In the meantime, by popular request (coldequations asked for it) I have redone all the GSS analyses in the Being a Republican is not a better way to nail chicks post. I was planning on doing that before I started writing this post, so I treated it as an exception to my decision to refrain from blog-activity before doing some things on the looking-for-a-job front. It wasn’t a very effective commitment since I found ways to procrastinate by arguing about nationalism/patriotism & the civil rights movement at Wilkinson’s, the effectiveness of brutality in counter-insurgency at Larison’s, and HBD & economics at bloggingheads.
Entitled to an Opinion 
December 7, 2009 at 2:31 am
I’m in a similar job(college?) predicament, very low income and ratcheting debt load, plus I’m not particularly tech savvy. You’ve got skills, and thinking about where to take them.
Go with your talent and disposition in this rough economy. If the military is hiring, so be it.
December 7, 2009 at 2:37 am
Sorry to hear about the news.
I think military service could be good for you (as you know, I’m a fan of technocratic paternalism).
It should help you in the private sector even if you only do a single tour.
Plus you’ll qualify for that very generous new GI Bill if you decide later to go the graduate school route.
The private sector is cut throat and chaotic. Very few of us will do as well as someone who simply works for the military for 20 years and retires with pay and full benefits.
December 7, 2009 at 2:54 am
If you don’t mind me asking, why did you get fired? Was the company just downsizing because of the bad economy? Or did something happen?
December 7, 2009 at 3:17 am
What are your qualifications/academic interests? How old are you? What do you have to lose?
December 7, 2009 at 3:20 am
Were you spending too much time online at work reading blogs or something?
December 7, 2009 at 6:45 am
They probably did you a favor. I remember, in my first job out of grad school, being told something similar (that there was no market for what we did outside of this institution) and receiving this news as a kind of death sentence. Eventually, I was exonerated, i.e. fired, which was a trauma only in that I should have taken the step out the door months before, but inertia, anxiety, poor decision making, etc.
In a sense, you’ve been given the boot at the perfect time, since later on you can very plausibly attribute this to a corporate downsizing. The fact that there are a lot of other unemployed people means more job competition, but also more cameraderie, plus less stigma. Psychologically, it’s a net benefit.
I believe you’re in your early 20s. Perhaps you’ve prematurely caged yourself in. I couldn’t stand working in a cubicle even in my early 30s. I wouldn’t have dared contemplate it in my 20s, and I doubt that I doubt that I could tolerate it now (nearly 50). My advice, travel and work. Do something physical, preferably outside, in an interesting place. Consider working in a national park. Why not? You’re into Wyoming, go work at Yellowstone or Grand Teton. I was a laundry truck driver in Y.Stone in the early 80s. It remains, in many ways, the best job I’ve ever had. You’ll have many opportunities for grinding boredom and intellectual compromise later in life. Believe me.
“At either end of the social spectrum, there lies a leisure class.”
-Eric Beck, Yosemite Valley climber
December 7, 2009 at 7:07 am
If you’re young enough to be thinking about the Air Force, why not aim higher? They’re still hiring quants on Wall Street, you could go to med school…
December 7, 2009 at 8:31 am
Sorry about that. I’ve been fired a couple of times; it stings for a minute.
Be a carpenter.
December 7, 2009 at 9:08 am
Cold Equations advice is reasonable. I wouldn’t advise that you be a carpenter or work at yellowstone … unless your values truly are very different than mine.
I would advise you more in the direction of grad school now than wall street, but a computational finance masters wouldn’t be a bad way to go. If you’re seriously interested in Wall Street, you could do it in the NYC area and spend that year or two interviewing and networking there.
But Air Force is easier, and 20 years later statistically you’ll probably be ahead financially.
December 7, 2009 at 9:51 am
TGGP, in the diavlog discussion you said:
Height is an interesting analogy to intelligence because it seems to be about 50% heritable (not the same as saying “50% genetic) with much of the remainder “non-shared environment” meaning “we have no idea why people raised together are different”. There is no known “height gene”, it is a normally distributed trait that is likely the result of many, many additive genetic + environmental inputs.
Wikipedia says that “height is 60%-80% heritable, according to several twin studies”, i.e. in the same ballpark as IQ. According to this study, “there are now 44 loci known to influence normal variation of height”.
Geoffrey Miller seems to be hinting that there are studies in the publication pipeline that will pinpoint IQ genes.
December 7, 2009 at 9:53 am
The Miller link: http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14742737
December 7, 2009 at 12:31 pm
Do you think the economy will ever get better re jobs? Lagging indicator, right?
You seem to have crushing powers, so why do you say you arent the greatest programmer. It seems like you have pretty much beat the market in sociopolitical philosophy and science, at a tender age. I’m sure that took you years. Nevertheless I would think you could get up to speed in any programming language fast, especially if you turned some of your avocational energies toward it.
I am in a crap position myself. Theres actually nothing I loved more than mowing big country estate lawns on the big orange industrial mowers, with insane hicks and illegal immigrants. Well, I’m romanticising, they largely relegated me to weed-whacking. I was nothing very impressive in their world, and I found it hard to do jobs nearly as well as they did. It was very novelistic, interesting stuff always happened, partly because the people were so half-idiotically wacky, and dangerous things happened, and perilous ones often threatened to. However, you can never do anything avocational after laboring, I cant. All I could do evenings was inhale an entire box of pasta (one pound measured dry) and chill. Besides, I would eventually have a serious accident dealing with heavy equipment. In the abstract world I rarely miss a beat, in the concrete world I am a wretched fool, always failing to notice something.
Thats why I wanted to move into web design, by way of autodidactic study. Does this seem stupid? I figure I can hammer the market. If I can just make $17 an hour or something, I can cosset myself with expensive foods and buy a decent kayak, basically shore up morale, whereas in so many crap jobs one barely seems to clear a profit.
I used to be a bohemian visual artist, I was good. I was very pre-postmodern lest you get the wrong idea; art is the one and only thing I havent had to move rightward on, not one inch. As for the programming side, I have only taken once C++ course, but I’ve done technical stuff before (math, bio), and I am blisteringly smart (1550 SAT and GRE) — plus with rock bottom conscientiousness and agreeableness, wait, I forgot, that’s actually bad! But I can cover those things up pretty well.
My bud has the greatest life, I’m not quite sure what kind of programming he does, but he does it all tele: if he feels like going to Crete or something, he can fly there about three days after the fancy strikes. He has romanced the exotic femmes of Armenia, Estonia, and Buenos Aires. I’d love to go live in Poland or Estonia awhile, how refreshing would it be to live in a traditionalist culture. Instead of the newspaper and every other intellectual product grating on you, it would be sweet harmony. Unfortunately, I dont want to learn any of those languages, what is there to read in them? Learning natural languages is the hardest and slowest abstract task for me, so I’d rather be learning latin, german, french, greek, if anything. Russian would be fine to read in, but I dont feel drawn to sojourn in Russia they way I am to Polska or Eestlane.
December 7, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Eric Johnson,
Your post was interesting to me because I think we share some similarities, but I may have lucked out with more conscientiousness and agreeableness (which in the past I falsely attributed as byproducts of intelligence).
An interesting article on conscientiousness:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200701/field-guide-the-flake
Also, even though I suspect I’m on the high end of conscientiousness (I’ll sacrifice my standing as an anonymous blogger to get a project done or to build an IRL relationship) it’s all relative. I’m sure my conscientiousness is nothing compared to that of Eric Schmidt or James Simon.
It’s a good area to look at for continuous improvement if one has material ambitions.
December 7, 2009 at 12:47 pm
I am currently undergoing a career change form Engineer to Actuary (long story), but anyway, you should look into a Statistics Masters. They are in demand and there are several good online programs through reptable Universities.
December 7, 2009 at 1:05 pm
Supposing height does have a similar heritability as IQ, what of the ratio (within-family variance) / (total variance). It seems that this ratio is “high” for IQ, but high compared to what? Does height have a lower ratio?
The “high” value of this ratio for IQ has been pointed to by hereditarians; it does indeed seem high, compared to what it should be in a model where shared environment really does something. It seems to me that a high ratio also suggests, by the law of large numbers, that relatively few loci account for most of the variance, unless unshared environment and other components could account for all that. While the above sentence is a bit tortured, one can very easily see that if the heritability (narrow-sense of course) were 100%, siblings should be very similar in IQ if it were caused by 2,000 or 5,000 different alleles: by the law of large numbers each sibling would get alleles that are, in their total effect on IQ, rather representative of the parental pool. If there were a small number of alleles causing most of the variation, then siblings would easily diverge in IQ by recieving a “non-representative sample” of the parental alleles. If fewer alleles do the job, and none of them get uncovered by the GWAS of the past and perhaps the more potent GWAS of the next few years, then the obvious solution will be that these fewer alleles are rare, deleterious ones. Rare as in below 5% population frequency.
This would also explain what I have heard (I am not 100% confident this is true): that high-g brains work more efficiently with less commotion and energy use. This suggests perfect g is an ideal that is messed up, largely, by mutation pressure. The same seems likely to characterize the beauty of the face, since the most beautiful facial structure is the most average, and if you computationally blend together 200 female faces, the result is heartbreaking beauty. So why can’t every individual get there? It seems this would be plausible only if the ideal has rapidly changed, and not every allele of every locus has caught up yet. If this is so, Cro-magnon skulls should betray a different facial ideal (ie, average face) than we have today. Otherwise, insofar as the trait is heritable (narrow-sense), it seems like ugly must consist of mutation pressure preventing a mo’ betta’ looking population mutation-selection balance.
At least insofar as the trait is genetic, that is. It certainly seems to be, from looking at MZ twins raised together, but of course the caveat is that they were raised together. Here’s a passage from a paper by the ever-unbiased (kidding) S Kanazawa:
“McGovern, Neale, and Kendler (1996) show that the correlation in physical attractiveness between female MZ twins (n = 334 pairs) is .65, and for female DZ twins (n = 216 pairs), it is .33. Because h^2=2(r[MZ]-r[DZ]), their data show that the heritability coefficient for physical attractiveness is .64. Rowe, Clapp, and Wallis (1989) measure the physical attractiveness of 25 MZ twins (14 male and 11 female pairs). Because their final sample does not contain DZ twins, they are not able to estimate heritability
(h^2) of physical attractiveness from their data as do McGovern et al. However, the uncorrected correlation in physical attractiveness among the 25 MZ twin pairs is r=.54, and Rowe et al. estimate
the ‘‘true’’ correlation, corrected for measurement errors, to be r=.94, which seems to suggest a very high h^2. These available estimates therefore show that physical attractiveness is probably as highly heritable as intelligence is (see Section 5.3).”
r’s like .54 or .65 for MZ twins (raised together) seem *extremely* unrealistically low to me. I’ve seen plenty of MZ twin pairs. I wonder what in the world kind of “corrections” can be applied to get those numbers from .54 up to .94, which seems accurate, a bit high if anything. I cant imagine that such huge corrections would be satisfyingly precise and non-arbitrary.
December 7, 2009 at 1:07 pm
“Lagging indicator” is kind of a silly term, I notice. It should be lagging variable.
December 7, 2009 at 1:13 pm
So how do you corner your bread, HA, or would you rather keep it to yourself.
December 7, 2009 at 1:17 pm
Prefer to keep it private for the sake of your anonymity, I mean. I didnt mean to suggest you would simply be to snobby to tell us, or something like that.
December 7, 2009 at 1:40 pm
I prefer to keep it anonymous, but it’s not that glamorous. Part of it is being a professional who thinks about their money and career a lot.
December 7, 2009 at 2:44 pm
If you’re in your twenties, then med school is the way to go.
December 7, 2009 at 6:18 pm
I am 24 and about to leave a job as a local government bureaucrat, basically reading blogs 40 hrs a week on the backs of local property owners. I’m moving back to my hometown to begin a long process of re-education – I already have a Masters in some kinda bullshit – with the idea of eventually getting into bioinformatics, in case anyone cares to offer advice for that.
December 7, 2009 at 7:16 pm
Well, it is supposed to explode, along genetics and computer programming lines, I guess, but surely you know this.
Most wet work in bio is rather specialized, postdoc advertisments reflect this. It seems perilous to over-specialize on the programming side, according to what programmers (in general) say. But I would think that on the bio side, it would be keen to specialize in genetics and so be able to beat the market on that. To do genetics you dont really need to know blah blah about particular proteins or details of immunology at a near-PhD level, you just need to know how proteins and physiological systems work in general. I dont have a PhD, just a touch of post-grad work in bio that I did as a non-degree-seeker.
Really, though, you should ask them that knows much more than me, and then pretty much forget what I said. Dan McArthur has advice on biology computing on his blog, with some comments from that guy Andrew Something. Try keywords like perl and python, because they were discussing that. He might well respond to email especially if short. So might p-ter of GNXP. I would tend to trust those guys because they have harsh realism blogging cred, and harsh realism is of course true.
If you want to try for a professorship, the odds are as long as the work hours. You just have to be way more into science than anything else, and you have to be satisfied to be rather specialized in your topics. In industry hours are shorter, more like the rest of the normal world. There are also non-prof jobs in the academy.
December 7, 2009 at 7:28 pm
One problem is that the drugs thing, industry, is looking tough. The amount of new drugs is stagnating. Lot of layoffs, including before the financial crisis. See In the Pipeline (Derek Lowe) on this. In general, people inside science see the articles that professional orgs manage to get printed in the papers, about terrible shortages of scientists, as rather propagandish. It always serves professors and industry to say that stuff, because obviously just like everyone else they want to lure the smartest people away from law, business, government, whatever. Grad students who are stuck getting a PhD though they have come to really face and realize the long odd of being a professor, and industry PhDs suffering years of danger of getting laid off, like to play the martyr. But the core of what they say seems pretty true.
Of course, I might be over pessimist on such things. I never got good grades relative to my IQ (or my learnedness), I never glided through academia and stuff like that, I struggled just to get into a fairly elite college.
December 7, 2009 at 7:31 pm
I agree with HSigma – if you have any inclination whatsoever toward medicine and believe you can score high on exams, go med school. It will probably be two good years of serious work and padding up your qualifications before you can get in but it’s worth it.
About twenty years ago I was facing a similar decision, decided against the intellectually boring option of med school and regret it ever since. So now I have a moderately paying job that I absolutely love. The only downside is that somewhere by my mid 50s, I will lose it. Then I will be too expensive to hire in places that actually would want my experience and overqualified everywhere else.
December 7, 2009 at 7:43 pm
What matters in biology grad school is of course not *only* some School of Athenian ideal of learning, but also, and really more importantly, what you can do for the prof. The prof is *not* tenured — not by the NIH grant-meisters he isnt. He is living in a darwinian world. Its in your best interest to become well-rounded and “deep” as a biologist if you want to become a professor, and some service is paid to that, but what he really needs is for you to have good hands in doing the stuff he needs you to do. In other words, make experiments work, on a quotidian level that is not at all “deep”. Understanding why experiments and techniques fail on the most grubby literal level (ie, simply giving inconsistent results) is as important if not more important than understanding the grad epistomolgy and everything of the experiment, the really scientific part of it — which your prof has already contemplated correctly, in most cases, if he isnt dumb. If you “have the hands”, “golden hands”, youll be very much wanted as a postdoc and such. Being creative and deep is more important later, once you are already a postdoc (to an extent), and once you apply for and recieve a tenure-track position and attempt tenure. Or once you apply for an industry job.
But of course, you will certainly need some level of broad and deep understanding — thats just far from being the whole game. I studied a ton of stuff purely autodidactically. I had no trouble having hours of conversations with my lab mentor profs that they found worthwhile. I’m sure they were impressed. But I really struggled to do wet experiments successfully, mainly I think because of my poor connection to my five senses; similarly I am a bad driver of my car.
December 7, 2009 at 9:28 pm
I have my suggestions, but you should contact me to get them. The med school and actuarial suggestions aren’t bad though.
December 7, 2009 at 9:41 pm
Not med school. Something more practical.
December 7, 2009 at 10:20 pm
To echo some of the comments, if you are young enough to consider the Air Force, even possibly enlisting, then you sound like a good candidate for a PhD program.
If you’re considering OCS then I am assuming you have a BA/BS. Your obvious interest research oriented issues could make you a strong candidate. Do not underestimate the impact you may have made blogging.
I am in the School of Government here at Carolina and we don’t offer PhDs. If we did then I would definitely flag your application for a strong look, no matter what your grades or SAT scores were. Other professor-bloggers may feel similarly.
If you are interested in an MPA by any chance, doubt that would fit your needs, contact me.
December 7, 2009 at 10:57 pm
I work in bioinformatics (loosely speaking), and am generally overwhelmed by the incredibly complex task of pulling out meaningful information from the noisy and many-dimensional world of wet biology. Given what I know of your proclivities, you should consider getting a graduate degree in machine learning/data mining/statistical inference, which would put you in good shape for doing the more interesting sorts of bioinformatics as well as other things — it is a pretty safe bet that the future will hold incredibly large amounts of uninterpreted data, so interpreting it should be a growth industry. Or skip the degree and teach youself while doing consulting or something.
December 8, 2009 at 2:05 am
All, I’m impressed by the volume of response. Half Sigma always did say his career complaints got the most attention on his blog, though not too many here referenced their own experience as a programmer. In the future I should probably ask for advice more often.
Dain, you’re working on a phd in poli-sci, is that right? I’m lucky not to have a debt problem, I don’t even have a credit card though I probably should.
HA, I hadn’t heard of the new GI bill. Something to keep in mind.
Aaron, the company had its first layoffs after going through a period of expansion, but I was deemed an ill-fit and so would not be rehired when the economy picks up. I did a poor job of taking notes & communicating (particularly with clients), and also made some mistakes computer-wise.
Gregor S, I’m 23 and I have a B.S in CS. Since I’ve already lost my job I guess the only remaining thing to lose is opportunity costs.
Aaron, I generally tried to hold off on the blogosphere till I got home, but for much of the time I wasn’t given enough to do (perhaps for fear I’d screw it up) and so wasted time reading stuff on the net. I didn’t hear any complaints about it though.
Dr Horsemeat, I also regarded it as something of a favor and feel we left on good terms. I’ve got no problem with cubicles. I wouldn’t want to live in Wyoming, spending a few days hunting is enough. I can’t say I have a big problem with compromise. Like I said, I’m not too principled.
coldequation, I actually received a call from a financial company’s recruiter, but it was for a local office rather than Wall Street. I told her I was looking for a programming position. Oddly, I’ve gotten more emails from people looking for sales/marketing people than computer stuff.
Chip, I was never too good in shop class. I probably also wouldn’t be good in a lab. Like Eric Johnson, I’m also a poor driver.
HA, I think our values are very different (I’m more indifferent about death, for one) but not sufficient for me to pursue those occupations.
JL, thanks for the info.
Eric Johnson, I also miss things often in the concrete world. I started trying to learn Python a little bit ago, but I don’t see job offers for that. A lot for Ruby on Rails, which I might need a server to train myself on. I think I’m also low on conscientiousness, since I’m prone to procrastination and not very considerate of others.
stephen, I always did regret not taking any statistics courses and feel somewhat guilty about my lack of knowledge in statistics. Sounds like something to keep in mind.
Eric Johnson, I know Sailer has made that claim about efficiency. He hypothesizes that the smarter you are the cooler (literally) your head will remain when thinking out a difficult problem. I disagree on mutations being the cause of imperfect g, Cochran & Harpending make a good cause that unusual mutations contribute to the Ashkenazi advantage. I think having a symmetrical appearance has long been advantageous, but the importance of IQ is more recent.
Half Sigma, you’ve got more experience than I as a programmer so I respect that your gripes about that career probably have some legitimacy. But attending law school didn’t seem to benefit you and I wonder if you’d feel similarly about med school if you’d gone that route. I don’t have any great interest in it myself.
Hogan, sounds like you should talk to mtraven. Best of luck to you.
Eric, are you a bio prof? I thought you’d said something like that a while back. Maybe I just assumed it though. I’ve often been told I should go into academia (since I spend my free time reading stuff), but I don’t think I’d be a good teacher and I was itching to get out of uni and into the real world with just 3 years as an undergrad. My grades would also be overpredicted by my test scores, with low conscientiousness likely being a culprit.
Nanonymous, well at least you’ve got the present. What kind of job do you do?
Eric Johnson, I was so bad in high school chem lab that during parent-teacher conference night my teacher said “I want to smack that kid”.
Karl Smith, glad you like the blogging and appreciate the offer. I do indeed have a BS and am young, but I don’t think I’ll be pursuing a career in public administration.
mtraven, I took a course in data mining and liked it. Another something to consider.
December 8, 2009 at 5:00 am
TGGP,
Karl Smith seems to me to be your most impressive fan:
http://www.sog.unc.edu/about/directory/kwsmith.html
I had an earlier post which didn’t actually post to the site that I won’t recreate, but it was in line with what others wrote (suggesting practical degrees and career paths, including statistics masters and bioinformatics).
I think your most reasonable approach is to end up getting a Ph.D. in economics. It’s fairly unique in being a natural blend of your interests in programming, world history, macrosocial phenomena, and earning a reasonable living. If you don’t have fantastic grades and conscientiousness, starting out with an MPA under Prof. Smith’s mentorship in a good school like UNC that isn’t insanely competitive wouldn’t be a bad way to go. Life moves fast and people aren’t always lucky enough to have multiple opportunities manifest. I can very easily see a reality where you get old and your potential gets squandered.
In short, I think you should take Prof. Smith’s comment in this thread very, very, very, very seriously.
There are worse fates than TGGP BS, MPA, Ph.D. Econ, Assistant Professor, 10 years from now.
December 8, 2009 at 10:22 am
Re med school, I think before entering med school you’d have to actually take all the science prerequisites, which I imagine you didn’t take during undergrad because you were a CS major.
There are university degrees geared for this, they’re usually called “post-bac” degrees or something. I’m about your age, and I have a few friends who decided to do this. They had liberal arts degrees and worked kind of soft jobs after undergrad, but then decided they wanted to become doctors. So they have to go through all the science reqs.
So if this is similar to your situation, it’s a fairly big commitment as the prereqs will take a couple years before even starting med school. Though you are young of course.
December 8, 2009 at 11:03 am
T,
No, I’m pretty far from a bio prof. On paper, I’m a whole lot of not much.
That CHH hypothesis on ashkenazi intelligence, its so good I have difficulty imagining it as false. As rapidly arising mutations they would almost certainly have trade-offs like increased energy use, even when present heterozygously and so causing no medical disease (except sometimes in the case of the dominant one, the torsion dystonia one).
I would think there are some other alleles like this, but it is still possible I think that deleterious mutations cause the great bulk of the variation, especially in non-ashkenazim. One day we’ll know. The coming rare alleles age should be a golden age of knowledge, possibly the major explosion of our lifetimes.
It occurs to me just now, shouldnt ashkenazim have a wider variance, or at least a less normal curve than gentiles, if they have those special alleles of large effect banging around? Many ashkenazim should have 0 of the four, so you would think the left end of the curves would become scanty in about the same place for ashkenazim and gentiles.
December 8, 2009 at 11:34 am
Why are folks recommending med school to TGGP when he doesn’t even show much avocational interest in the subject?
December 8, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Cause of trends. Ageing boomers. Plus if our GDP/head continues its historical rise, which I am almost half-doubting, medical spending will grow even more. Its inevitable. Plus Devin Finbarr avouches for the claim that the AMA is limiting MD numbers unreasonably, which means you will receive gratuitous unearned rents as a doctor. If this bothered you, you could always donate a ton of dough to worthwhile stuff.
December 8, 2009 at 1:32 pm
> even more
Even more than GDP does, that is, percentage-wise.
December 8, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Eric,
I don’t follow that chain of logic either as general advice to become an MD or as advise tailored to TGGP’s situation.
I think becoming an MD is like becoming an architect. It’s a narrow specialization best left to those who truly have it as a comparative advantage.
I think becoming a doctor historically has been a status trap for a lot of smart folks, ensnaring immigrant kids in particular who are probably more status hungry.
I think I became smarter when I realized that for most smart folks, a cpa license would probably offer more life value than a medical license.
December 8, 2009 at 3:15 pm
HA, dont you suspect MDs get laid better (better quality) than CPAs, at least within urban SWPLdom and the SWPL half of the ‘burbs? As well as getting more respect from all. Doctors are our humanitarian paragons, while CPAs are handmaidens of modern corporate fascism. True SWPLs couldnt care less that doctors trick everyone out of filthy lucre rents, contrary to the free market principles that have underpinned whatever we have been since 1750 — who would even have the gall to know about such a fact in the first place?
I agree that seeking the MD may or may not be the best advice for TGGP. I am not much opinionated on that. It certainly never attracted me for a moment, so I didnt contemplate it. Its for people who inter alia are energetic and cheerful, and can get along better (apolitically speaking) with “the system” than I can. I am the rebel, I rebel in some way against most things, confidentially, almost symbolically, or not. Recalcitrance, intransigence excite me whether true or false, good or bad. I marvel with little choice at the intellectual or artist who at his core is separated from bad influences, for example the confusions of his era.
December 8, 2009 at 3:21 pm
Yeah, I’m also surprised there arent more experienced programmers here, giving the good word of advice on that business. It always seems like Robin Hanson’s is like 98% programmers, Less Wrong more like 99%.
December 8, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Neither is an efficient path to getting laid.
Bartender, Photographer, personal trainer, and above all, acting teacher. Those seem like the efficient paths to getting laid to me.
December 9, 2009 at 5:47 am
Are you serious?
I mean correct me if I’m wrong but from what I can tell, TGGP hasn’t the slightest interest (or skill) for bartending, photography, personal training or acting.
December 9, 2009 at 10:03 am
or getting laid.
December 8, 2009 at 6:41 pm
Eric,
if you mean by quality SWPL is that middlebrows prize MD’s as pinnacle intellectuals, you may be right. But it’s kind of niche to have impressing middlebrow white folks as one’s life ambition, and med school seems to me like a big tradeoff for that.
December 8, 2009 at 7:34 pm
I dont think doctors are revered as intellects, but as life-savers, even by high-brahmin SWPLs. Particularly as saviors of orphans found on the street with tuberculosis. Which has some truth to it. I agree that acting teachers must surely see the most skin, but doctors get fine long term lovers, thats more the mode I think, and is what I meant. Many actress seem kind of, … , but they sure got the …
I’d far rather be a CPA myself, much more free time, also very in demand, and I have no love of great status and would desire to marry someone comparable, like if I could convert some art chick into a quasi-paleocon. Actually, I dont even care if she really is one, as long as she doesnt turn up her nose at the arguments. I dont need to be a doctor, I’ve always been confident that I can rather easily get girls by being artistic and interesting, though they themselves typically disagree. Very well — I have no desire to unwind the paradoxes that lend life so much of its mystique… I have the stronger argument on my side anyway.
Accounting would be fine for me, second to web design.
December 8, 2009 at 11:32 pm
Med school would be a bad choice for TGGP. He would have to focus on something he’s shown no interest in to the exclusion of almost everything else for 7 years. And for all practical purposes, doctors are, or certainly will be by the time TGGP graduates, government employees, so the government will easily be able to squeeze the pay of doctors.
Go to med school if you really want to be a doctor. Don’t go to med school to get a good job.
December 9, 2009 at 2:45 am
Is MPA a step toward an econ phd? I don’t know how such things work.
I took some science, but not more than requirements. I had A.P cred for physics in both mechanics & electromagnetism, had to take chemistry early on and also quantum. I imagine that pre-med would require anatomy, maybe kinesiology, and probably more bio & chem.
Eric Johnson, a process of selection would actually be expected to result in less variation. Say you lop off the left tail and leave the satisficing remainder, purging some underperforming alleles. Mutation provides variation, selection requires and diminishes said variation.
If the AMA is limiting doctor slots, that makes it less likely an individual can become a doctor in the first place to obtain such rents, right? I’ve always been easily contented without spending much and hence not too interested in winner-take-all lotteries like Wall Street is supposed to be, but who knows what may be the case when I’m older.
I’ve never heard of the concept of “status trap” before, nor was I aware immigrants regretted becoming doctors. And could you elaborate on “life value”?
I agree that doctors are much more highly regarded than accountants (who are either considered square or shady). I have unusually low libido for a male and don’t hold getting laid as a high priority.
Why do you have to convert an art-chick to your political views? Plenty of men pretend to be religious for their wives, you could do the same for politics or just not talk about it much.
It’s possible that the government will squeeze doctor pay, I think that’s the case in other countries with single-payer relative to here. But I think the doctor lobby is fairly strong, so they could continue to rake in the dough.
December 9, 2009 at 10:11 am
“Is MPA a step toward an econ phd? I don’t know how such things work.”
Liar. No, but you have a professor with an economics Ph.D. who teaches in an MPA granting program interested in mentoring you. Here’s where social intelligence can come into play. It deserves extra consideration, especially if I remember correctly that your grades aren’t great and you may have some conscientiousness/agreeableness problems that could hamper your credential-building performance at institutions where you don’t have someone on the inside pulling for you.
I’m not saying get an MPA at UNC and use a mentor to get you into an econ Ph.D. program. I’m saying value relatively prestigious people who are willing to mentor you and use their social spaces for your rational advancement.
December 9, 2009 at 3:48 pm
>If the AMA is limiting doctor slots, that makes it less likely an individual can become a doctor in the first place to obtain such rents, right?
Sure, but in practice that just means you have to do well on a standardized test, get good grades, and do some volunteer work. Anybody with an IQ of 115 who really wanted it could do it. You could do it.
December 9, 2009 at 6:43 am
I like your air force idea.
what about special forces/infantry/foreign area officer
foreign service officer
top 10 law school – air force jag
oil industry
helicopter pilot
IR MA/PHD
USAID
total language immersion in an interesting lucrative part of the world
phd econ is too boring in your twenties. wait till you’re older. I speak from experience. you can teach with an MA by the way at community college. also, publishing papers seems irrelevant to me, plus a lot of the teaching jobs are in very boring places.
December 9, 2009 at 10:13 am
Maybe for you.
I suspect TGGP should take special forces, infantry, foreign officer, and helicopter pilot off that list.
In my lost post, I did recommend language immersion as an alternative to getting a useful masters.
December 9, 2009 at 10:01 am
To fallow up, here is a list of quality online Stats-Masters programs:
http://www.gradschools.com/ListingFunctions/SearchResults.aspx?SubjectId=366&Country=&State=&ProgramType=1
If I weren’t already so far along the Actuarial track I would be getting a Statistics Masters. Only two years, the classes and software are all the same, and you don’t even need to have taken intro probability or statistics as a prereq. Although, that would be easy enough anyway.
The benefit is that you can work in just about any field, and given your interests I am sure you will enjoy it. The world wants more R jockeys.
December 9, 2009 at 11:05 am
Great post, Stephen. I think you’d enjoy my blog, too, and your comments would be welcome.
December 9, 2009 at 11:38 am
Thanks, and I will.
December 9, 2009 at 10:55 am
TGGP,
You’ve mentioned that money isn’t a high incentive, and that you’re not especially focused on getting laid. So why not just go the slacker’s route for a few years until something comes into focus? Countless jobs will do to pay the rent.
Razib is right about the credit card thing. Get one now or regret it later.
December 9, 2009 at 1:59 pm
I think if you want to be in the professions, it probably helps not to go AWOL from the professions for over a year.
December 9, 2009 at 2:00 pm
You know, lest you seem like some impractical “truth seeker” or something, is what I mean.
Most people do not want to “hire wierd” as Caplan puts it, though a few do want to, out of “tribal” feelings.
December 9, 2009 at 2:17 pm
Well, my wife says I have a knack for giving lousy advice.
December 9, 2009 at 4:57 pm
Thank you to those who gave bioinformatics advice. As a follow up, if any return to this thread, how feasible would you say it would be to get into the field through self-teaching and networking, rather than completing a degree program? I have no desire to work in academia and would much rather crunch data in the private/quasiprivate sector. My hope would be that, with the right contacts, I could get from point A to point C without stopping for unnecessary credentialing at point B.
I have finagled a lab assistantship with a fairly prominent population geneticist at the beginning of the year, but I will not be able to enter a phd program for some time as 1) I have an inadequate science background and would need to supplement it with courses taken as a special student and 2) I cannot afford to do this until I have re-established my residency in the relevant state, which will take a year. In the intervening time, I will be working in this lab, auditing the science and math courses I know I’m weak in, teaching myself programming and hopefully networking with the computational bio faculty. I am confident that I can develop the required skill competencies without piling on unnecessary years of dissertations, etc… but I’m not so confident that I can spin those skills into a career without the degree. Any counsel?
December 9, 2009 at 5:03 pm
I should obviously add that I would also be auditing the university’s available bioinformatics coursework.
December 10, 2009 at 2:06 am
Get the degree, straight up until Ph.D. Why not? You’re going to get older anyways, and what’s the difference 20 years from now? You’ll be the same guy with a Ph.D.
December 9, 2009 at 11:14 pm
Accusations of dishonesty, sheesh. I really don’t know much about postgraduate study, thanks for clarifying the comment.
coldequation, good reply re the AMA.
accidental gorilla (is that anything like an involuntary skinhead?): I did hear that the bar for FSOs has really dropped. People have told me I’d make a good lawyer (maybe from pedantic arguments). I don’t know about trial lawyering, but I think I heard that’s a minority of legal work. On the other hand, white-shoe lawyering might require more conscientiousness/agreeableness. My brother is actually specializing in languages and seems to like it. I didn’t like taking German in school, but I was really focused on CS at the time and thought it was getting in the way. I got no problems with the oil industry, should I have learned more geology for that? Since I’m a bad driver, I’d probably be a dangerous pilot. By “IR” are you referring to “international relations”? When I was younger I thought about what would happen if all the programming jobs went to India and I had to move there to work as one, which I now feel silly for believing. I’ve got no problem with going to another country, but the U.S is still pretty boss and I don’t know which other country would be preferable. Everyone thinks Singapore is great, perhaps I should look into what it takes to work there. It might be heavily english-speaking already, for other countries I think it would be a good idea to get a decent handle on it (which I can’t say I have even of German) first.
stephen, kudos to you for providing that. Perhaps I could take those on off hours while working a regular job.
Chip, there is something of a slacker to me, but I actually liked working as a programmer. It certainly beat retail! Just as I feel bad when spending money, I feel good having a steady stream of decent income and wouldn’t like to repeatedly switch odd jobs.
Eric Johnson, in accordance with the “five years and you’re stuck” point, I felt a bit like I was AWOL while I was working. I had the same feeling in the months between when I graduated and got hired.
Chip, we all must have a knack for something. And if it weren’t for bad knacks, we might have to knacks at all.
Hogan, I’ll give you mtraven’s email so you can learn more about bioinformatics. I’m pretty sure he’s in the private sector, a startup more specifically.
December 10, 2009 at 11:47 am
> If the AMA is limiting doctor slots, that makes it less likely an individual can become a doctor in the first place to obtain such rents, right?
The bottleneck is getting into school. Nearly everyone graduates, and (I think) passes licensure.
> Plenty of men pretend to be religious for their wives, you could do the same for politics or just not talk about it much.
I’d be alone in a crowd that way, or rather alone in a pair. Kierkegaard said “it is the duty of every person to marry, and so become known” — of course these were probably the words of one of his characters, and he himself broke off his engagement and never married. I dont take marriage as a duty, but I believe the rest of the quote.
I’m still thinking about the ashkenazi IQ thing (here I usually mean g when I say IQ). I agree that intensification of natural selection should narrow the distro — but shouldnt the distro still be “lumpier” than that of gentiles, for large enough sample sizes? Because only the ashkenazi have these alleles of large effect banging around in the distro, distorting it.
If not, maybe the reason why not is that *everyone*, or almost everyone, has a few large-effect alleles with effect sizes comparable to the torsion dystonia allele or whatever: namely, maybe everyone has a few rare deleterious alleles.
I think most deleterious rare alleles are thought to be partially (variably) recessive. This may be a stumbling block for a genetic theory of g dominated by rare alleles, especially if the heritability is as high as .80 or higher, rather than the conservative .50 — the word “heritability” alone means narrow-sense heritability which excludes dominance/recessiveness effects.
Of course, raw IQ scores are not normally distributed in the first place; they are transformed/fitted to a normal distribution. I dont know if this might mess up anything/everything I’m saying. I dont think all IQ tests have the same raw distro; they certainly dont have to.
December 10, 2009 at 4:27 pm
“And could you elaborate on “life value”?”
I think a CPA provides a widely applicable skillset (in the professional world and in managing one’s personal life) to optimize one’s life outcomes, whereas an architect or medical license doesn’t.
This is true to a lesser extent for a law license, too.
December 10, 2009 at 4:31 pm
I’m not recommending getting a CPA to you by the way (just like I wasn’t recommending being an acting coach to you, should have been obvious from my posts). You don’t seem like a good fit. Just pointing out that going for a medical degree traps a lot of smart people into a specialization that does less for them than a CPA would have.
I know a lot about you from your blog and comments, though, so my advice to you was more tailored and in the direction of “get a Ph.D. in Economics”.
December 10, 2009 at 9:33 pm
Criminology.
December 12, 2009 at 9:18 pm
I think Kierkegaard’s advice is questionable (cue Sailer/Wolfe on “communication”). It’s true that you’re spending too much time with and sharing too many things with a spouse to keep up some more formal personas, but you’re still playing something of a character. I think Chris Rock had a bit about how all of our presentation of ourselves to significant others is a lie, though that might have been dating though, where a more positive front may be presented for a shorter time. But I bet even old married couples share different things with their spouses vs their old friends.
I think most people do have some bad mutations, but because they’re recessive it isn’t a problem unless something like incest means there’s a likely match for those same bad genes. IQ could be largely about some imperfections, but I think there are also some mutational tricks that not everyone has.
H.A, why am I a bad fit for CPA? Personality, or I just have other interests?
December 13, 2009 at 4:50 am
You just have other interests. You seem to be motivated by global topics, knowledge of practical application and with market value, and you seem to function comfortably as a structured procrastinator. I think that matches up best with professional economist. There’s lots of yeoman economist jobs that will still allow you professional advancement from indulging in your diverse interests of coding, history reading, philosophy, and, well, economics. I think every sizeable bureacracy, on every level of government and in the private sector has staff economists.
Lawyer (of a particular type of subspecialty) would also probably be a good fit, but I figure it’s unattractive to you on an emotional level primarily because your sister is already a lawyer.
December 12, 2009 at 10:27 pm
> some bad mutations
Its basically all but a fact, the way it is discussed by A Leroi and J Crow, that individuals have 100-300 on average. Or maybe it is a fact period. But I’m still not sure how this is proved. And its not a fact that these mutations account for beauty of IQ, though Leroi definitely likes them for beauty.
I’m not sure what the approximate distro is for their effect sizes (on fitness). But most of them are not fully recessive, only partially. Their degree of recessiveness also has a smooth-ish distribution, rather than falling mostly in discrete categories.
I think this is a very interesting field for potential amateur research. I’m not saying you can likely get it published, just that it could be done. For example, you could raise butterflies or other insects. Butterflies are nice because you can scan their wings and use computation to see if averageness of the wing markings is preferred in mating, as it is in humans (beauty of the human face consists, largely, of conformity to an average). Of course you need a taxon that will mate in captivity, and maintain the same behavior as you perform an assay repeatedly and disrupt actual coupling as it starts (kind of like my mom did this one time, by banging on the door).
I cant think of a question in bio that can be done without a lab, that is of comparable importance. The whole question is also political triple super hot sauce, so it would be neat to have your own answers. Its the usual setup, now familiar for generations — bio “lefties” (eg Jerry Coyne), who I think like to see low fitness variance between individuals of any species, taking on bio “rightists” (eg Anders Moller I think), who are actually centrist Dems, centrist Labour, or whatever.
The rightie view makes a lot more sense a priori if you ask me, but I think there is rather limited empirical work to date.
December 13, 2009 at 2:33 am
As a former (non-American) military officer, and someone that has also done a higher degree, you would make a terrible officer and would likely get your underlings asses shot off or in deep shit.
If you are going to be an officer, I hope to god you stay in the rear echelons away from anything where you can do damage, which is what you seem to heading for. I say this because you are obviously smart, but from what I’ve seen online you are incredibly conservative in thought in certain cognitive domains. You are intellectually curious — in a narrow sort of way — but if something doesn’t match up to your worldview, you automatically disregard it without assessing its inner worth (your opinions on philosophy come to mind).
War demands creativity. It is not a science, it is an art. The most creative and cunning individuals win out. You are far too logical, and far to close-minded to certain worldviews to last long in a highly competitive environment where you need to put yourself in other people’s shoes and consider other angles that might not be ‘logical’ (go read Luttwak’s Strategy for more on this).
December 15, 2009 at 7:26 pm
Eric Johnson:
I’d never heard of Anders Moller before. I knew Coyne was a lefty though and a fan of Gould. Razib has a post on an attractiveness experiment on insects here.
honesty:
The plan was for air force, so those asses would be blown up rather than shot off. It may well be the case that I’d be a terrible officer (and I would indeed be seeking a reach echelon role where I’d be telling computers rather than people what to do), but I find it amusing you deduced that from my views on philosophy!
December 24, 2009 at 9:37 pm
In this and other posts, you’ve described yourself as very skinny, depressed, and as having low libido and ambition. It might be wise to have your testosterone levels tested.
As for career advice, I agree with those who recommended you become an actuary. Its focus on passing difficult tests rather than extra years of time-intensive schooling is ideal for the high-IQ, low conscientiousness type; and the salaries – if you can pass the tests – are comparable to those of doctors.
December 24, 2009 at 9:57 pm
I don’t recall describing myself as depressed. I have a fairly flat but mildly positive mood. I wasn’t upset when I lost my job.
December 25, 2009 at 2:13 am
I was referring to this post. You didn’t explicitly say you were depressed, but you gave me that impression.