Josephine's Shortform

Josephine

This is a special post for quick takes by Josephine. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

Consider these two cases:

A university graduate on a job hunt just can't find something that matches his skills. People never get back to him, interviews go nowhere, pretty opportunities peter out. Attempt after attempt leaves him frustrated and empty-handed, and as his motivation thins or his desperation thickens, he finally decides that he needs something and applies for a job he's massively overqualified for, maybe an entry-level position in a supermarket. Then, to his horror, that job rejects him.
A woman trying to pay her bills runs into complications - her checking account is overcharged by an unexpected payment, a new emergency crops up or someone in her life needs her help. Running out of ideas, she finally elects to sell her more valuable items. The process of losing so much is tearful, but she prepares to part with most of her library, her furniture, her entertainment and so on. Only after trying this does she discover no one wants any of it - used bookstores won't give her more than $30 for her collection and no one will respond to her ads.

I've had experiences like these, even today. And I think the root of much learned helplessness in my life stems from situations like these where things are measurably worse than I'd thought possible. I would call this insufficient cynicism, but I think it's a combination of both overvaluing the likelihood and value of certain options combined with flinching away from thinking about them too closely.

Some options don't work out, and some options are painful to consider, but options that are both can be generators of helplessness and bitterness. I graduated early with a degree in Communications, and my experiences since have made my wish dearly that I'd made different choices; looking back, what would need to be different for me to predict that this achievement would make no actual difference to my career?

2Gunnar_Zarncke5y

Reading this it seems your question was more about the second part of failing: When plan B (or C, or D) fail. Or how to reduce the likelihood that they do - or to have more realistic expectations about that. I was once running out of options and falling back to plan C and D on a big life topic. It was related to joblessness. A previously existing plan B for such a situation had become unavailable for other reasons (also big ones but that did work out). I scrambled and got a good job offer and started to relax but they postponed the signing for weeks and weeks - while promising it would go thru. It worked out well but there was a point where I resigned and accepted a much lower economic level. Not too bad as Germany has a good safety net. The level of the safety net depends very much on the country of course but the general pattern seems to be that few people will worry about other people's economic mishap. Many more ways lead down than up and you are left in the dark which ways lead to the good places.

4Viliam5y

I think the society tells a lot of lies, or at least often lies by omission, and it is difficult to correct these lies, because they exist for a reason -- there is some social mechanism that rewards the liars and punishes the truthtellers, for example by raising the status of the liars and lowering the status of the truthtellers. If anyone asked me about education choice to maximize the chance of getting the job, STEM is the obvious answer. (Although it depends on who asks; some people do not have the necessary skills/traits. I don't know what would be the right answer for them.) But if I gave such advice in public, I can easily imagine the backlash. Humanities are high-status, STEM is... let's say medium-status because it is associated with nerds but also with money... definitely lower-status than humanities. The proper way to express it is that STEM makes people merely smart, but humanities make them wise. (Wise = something like smart, but mysterious and higher-status.) Recommending STEM feels like an attempt to give nerds high status, and invites an angry response. Which is the reason why you haven't heard such advice more often and more strongly (in general, not just on LessWrong). Problem is that the advice "study humanities, not STEM" is actually correct for a small part of the society; namely for the rich people. If you have so much wealth and connections that you will never need a job to pay your bills, but you still want to study something, because for some weird reason having a university education is considered higher-status than not having one... then humanities are definitely the right choice. You want to know something that other people at least partially understand, so that you can impress them with some smart quotations; you don't want the inferential distance to be too large. Also, if you study something that makes it quite difficult to get a job, that's good counter-signaling! As a rich person, you don't want to be suspected for someone who might

I have yet to meet the opinion in the wild that the humanities are better or more worthy of study than STEM, and I'm skeptical that a degree in, say, entomology has anything like the market of a science like physics. (That said, from some cursory checks I'm surprised at the level to which a non-applied math degree seems to affect one's career, although I'm suspicious that the STEM label lets it get lumped in during analyses with potentially higher earners like statistics, physics and engineering.) And my courses were largely on subjects like web design, ru... (read more)