domum | studium | esoterica | utilis | breve

Take an Advisor

Transcription

Eric Weinstein


[Legal]

Excerpt from: [Dr. Drian Keating Podcast] (December 31, 2020)
Max Tegmark & Eric Weinstein:
AI, Aliens, Theories of Everything, and New Year's Resolutions!

Take an advisor. I didn't have an advisor and I did not understand...

You don't need an advisor to do mathematics, you don't need an advisor to come up with new ideas. You need an advisor to negotiate the system. In effect, the way in which we regulate population in mathematics - just like many avian species - we don't feed certain chicks. If you don't get fed as a chick, it doesn't matter how good your ideas are.

Once you take an advisor, you need to have a really frightening conversation with that person, where you come in and say "I know what my odds are, and if you aren't willing to swing for the f*cking fences, I'm going to die. You've assessed me. I want you to tell me where I stack in my chance of viability. I don't care about anything else. I want to know if you think I'm viable, and if so, at what level."

And if that person is not willing to say "I think you're one of the top people and I will fight tooth-and-nail to make sure you survive, provided you do what I think you're capable of", get out.

You will not have that conversation because you're going to be a p*ssy about it. By virtue of not having that conversation, you're going to find out later that when that person withholds the high praise necessary to secure a job for you, and to secure opportunities for you, you will then wither and die.

If you can't get into one of the top five departments, it's almost not worth going. It doesn't mean nothing good happens below that, but what you're dependent on is a system of selective pressures in which your parents have to kill, and feed you for a period of time before you can hunt and kill for yourself. That situation is one in which you are going to be squeamish and your advisor is going to intimidate you away from asking the questions.

But quite frankly, having done research in this area, advisors usually form an impression almost immediately - whether you're viable or not. Then, your department will extract labor out of you for a period of time. Your advisor may get you to work on subroutines for their career. And then your carcass will be discarded.

If you do not understand that this is what has happened in the acadmic hunger games, you will not be able to defend yourself. The fact that nobody's talking about it - you watch, nobody in the University system will tell me that I'm wrong, they'll just tell me to shut up.