The article is talking about a salary scheme in which a certain percentage of the salary was based on how performance matched against goals-so for a research guy such as Derek, his experimental results (his mice) were determining a part of his salary. No poetry required.

I used to think that the dust specks was the obvious answer. Then I realized that I was adding follow-on utility to torture (inability to do much else due to the pain) but not the dust specks (car crashes etc due to the distraction). It was also about then that I changed from two-boxing to one-boxing, and started thinking that wireheading wasn't so bad after all. Are opinions to these three usually correlated like this?

Hi! I'm Free_NRG. I've just started a physical chemistry PhD. I found this site through a link from Leah Libresco early last year (I can't remember exactly how I found her blog). I read through the sequences as one of the distractions from too much 4th year chemistry, and particularly liked the probability theory and evolutionary theory sequences. This year, I'm trying to apply some of the productivity porn I've been reading to my life. I'm thinking of blogging about it.