Sometimes I look back over my journal to see what is repeatedly on my mind. Complaints about PPE figure heavily:
2023/11/25: I have a philosophy essay to write and I don’t want to. I have a feeling [next term] will be like this a lot
2024/02/12: I’m looking at the word doc for my genphil essay now and just feeling an immense frustration that I am meant to write about such a stupid + boring + infuriating topic.
2024/02/14: found politics reading dull and wanted to be doing almost anything else
Yet I don’t like the idea of failing to do my work:
2024/02/19: [quiet quitting] feels ~deontologically wrong to me. Would be uncomfortable not following rules to hand in seven essays, etc etc.
Until about a month ago, I had been doing With the exception of the Q-Step politics assignment, because I really couldn’t stand having to make some graphs in R for the sake of it. I had a look in the Exam Regulations to check that it wasn’t an official part of Prelims PPE (it’s not), and was fairly confident that nothing bad would happen (it didn’t, or at least hasn’t yet). . Not to the best of my ability, but with a enough effort that I didn’t feel sheepish handing the work in with my name at the top. The work was boring and felt unimportant, but also:
- I had signed up for the degree; shirking would be unvirtuous
- These were weighty topics that have been occupying intelligent minds for centuries. Who was I to dismiss them?
- Getting praise from tutors was rewarding
- Taking the risk of doing poorly in exams seemed imprudent
Charting your own, non-conventional path requires a level of self-confidence I might call arrogance. Deciding not to do a politics essay is to claim that I know better than the institution about what’s worth thinking about or spending time on. I think that paternalism can work well – external actors can often know what would be By that individual’s ethical standards. . Does this not apply to me in the case of where to devote my time? Is it just that the University of Oxford isn’t the expert whose judgement I trust best?
One thing I which helped clarify my thinking here is that there are inordinately many things I won’t learn. It’s unlikely that I’ll ever make my way through the first-year History syllabus, for instance. Given that I now no longer endorse studying PPE, it would be strange to privilege its reading list and work over everything else.
I’ve been spending time over the last few weeks on things which feel much more worthwhile to me: enjoying the sensation of sunshine on my face and grass against my toes, coding a dating app, making lino prints, polishing up essays on this site, pursuing assorted other projects. Doing them has also been fun! I’m happier now.
Preferences?
It’s hardly surprising that doing things I have an aversion to is less pleasurable than not doing them. But as Duncan Sabien notes:
many of our more ambitious goals (like earning a postgraduate degree) require a large number of more-or-less difficult, more-or-less arbitrary, and more-or-less thankless steps, few of which are intrinsically desirable on their own. We want the end goal, but we have to consciously marshal our resources in order to take steps toward it, fighting against “yuck” factors much of the way.
Perhaps by just following what I want to do at any moment, I lose my way towards the long-term goal in exchange for short-term comfort. In order to decide whether or not to abandon my politics and philosophy essays, I needed to be able to tell whether they were necessary steps towards something valuable. It was hard to know for certain, and my concern about avoiding imprudence was one of the main reasons I continued with them.
In the back of my mind – and what eventually won – was a brief comment from Brian Timar in his post on Essentially, when you desire something purely because others also do, and you want to beat them at getting it. It’s a concept that came up a few times in the readings for the Polaris fellowship. :
Don’t force yourself to do anything you hate. If you get too good at this, you won’t be able to figure out when to quit.
Yes, often we need to do tedious or tiresome tasks in order to achieve our goals. But the fact that a particular goal involves a great number of tedious and tiresome tasks should lead you to re-assess whether or not it actually is a goal you want to pursue. In the language of Bayesianism, there is now new information which can be used to update your world-model. Doggedly persevering with something you hate leads to what I call losing your sense of taste.
I have never had much of a refined palette when it comes to food. I associated this with moral virtue – being unfussy was a point of praise and pride during my childhood. Similarly, until fairly recently I did not want to allow myself to care at all about my choice of clothes, because doing so would be a There was also a thought along the lines of: if I do start caring about my appearance, then I’m investing myself into it, so (a) I’ll feel worse compared to before if my outfit on a given day is “bad” or low-effort, and (b) other people will have more of a legitimate reason to make judgements on my outfits if I have put effort into them. Something very similar can be said about deciding to put serious effort in to revision, actually – it feels a bit like doing so “switches on” the caring-about-exams part of my utility function. With the conscious decision to put in minimal effort I’m less bothered by mediocre performance, as it doesn’t feel like a reflection of my academic ability or work ethic. .
In these areas of life, and in academics, I have been undergoing a realisation along the lines of what Scott Alexander talks about:
“Oh! Wait! I have preferences!”
In the absence of that awareness, it is easy to go along the “default track”: apply to a high-status university, take a graduate job at a big corporate, settle down and live a respectable life. Camps like Atlas and ESPR try to shake participants off this path by imbuing them with a sense of agency, and I think this is really valuable. The flaw is that such communities have their own cultural norms and status hierarchies, which means that one set of mimetic traps may just be replaced with another. In particular, the very act of dropping out becomes prestigious, and following the default track is an To be clear, this was never an explicit message, and the organisers stressed that you shouldn’t do anything too crazy as a result of the programmes, or put too much weight on their takes. However, it seems clear to me that when one course of action is strongly encouraged over another, there are inevitably social incentives which distort people’s choices. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing! On the current margin, I agree that it’s better for more talented teenagers to be off the default track. But it’s worth noting that programmes like Atlas and ESPR are not impartial intention multipliers for participants (in the way a weak paternalist might be). .
Elizabeth van Nostrand describes the result of this well:
Sometimes it’s hard to tell if you authentically want something, or are trying to impress people with how ambitious you are.
I think there actually just isn’t an alternative to paying attention to your preferences. Does whatever you’re doing at the moment feel like real work? Are you enjoying the process? Is it helping you become the person you want to?
For the last word, Gavin Leech:
You cannot allow other people to decide what you want from life. This is the most likely single thing to ruin your life.
I’m glad to have my sense of taste back. Delicacy doesn’t need to be treated with moral disdain.