Well, I didn’t have any of these problems before I started learning more philosophy, and the type of philosophy I think is true happens to be related to CF, so my problems are both related to CF and pre-existing.
One part of the thoughts I’m having that is closely related to CF stuff is that I’ve realized (edit: CF has made me realize) the epistemological importance of goals. Basically, my main reason for thinking this:
is that it seems impossible for me to come up with good goals to pursue in my field.
Basically, none of the things being worked on seem to have known current or future practical applications, so there is no objective standard of value. There’s no way to objectively say that one project matters more than another. It’s like playing a video game.
In practice, since people need some standard of value or else they can’t function, I think that the standard of value I was adopting in practice (before I started learning more philosophy) was some mix of the following bad things:
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A social, Peter Keating-like standard of value, thinking stuff like, “it’s worthwhile to try to prove this result because others think it would be valuable, and if I can do it I’ll get lots of citations and accolades” or “I need to prove I’m smarter than that other guy.”
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A mystic / Platonic standard of value, believing that what I was doing is Important (writ large) because I was accessing these eternal Platonic objects from another realm—things which “practical” people *scoffs* can’t even begin to conceive of.
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I had a partially pro-life standard of value, but deluded myself into thinking that the things I was working on were much closer to being applicable in the real world than they actually are.
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I became cynical about it all and didn’t work as hard as I otherwise would have worked.
I think a lot of people in string theory or pure math (my field is also closely related to pure math by the way; for a period of time I was strongly considering transitioning into that) are the same, but it’s really hard to know. All I know is that my peers can’t ever give me clear answers for why they are doing what they are doing.
Okay, I’ll try. I tried with this post, but I had to think hard about what I wanted to say.