Mimetic Traps
mimetic

Home

2019-05-19
I’ve been a graduate student in physics for almost three years, but I
only recently figured out why. I had to tackle a simple question do
so:
Why does this matter?
I realized that I’d never forced myself to answer this honestly. As
Paul Graham has pointed
out, these systematic gaps in conversation should raise suspicion —
they often indicate when you’re wrong about something important. I was
wrong in thinking that my work mattered to me, and I avoided asking
myself this question because I knew the answer would be painful.
One afternoon, while moving out of an apartment, I came across a
cardboard box packed with binders and paper folders, full of notes
accumulated over the past year. As I let it fall in front of the door, a
thought dropped into my head and stuck there: none of this means
anything to me. This was, nominally, the fruit borne of a year of my
life, and it felt so viscerally wasted. Despair bought me honesty — by
enrolling in graduate school, I’d made myself miserable for no reason.
Why had I spent so much time in purposeless hard work? I arrived at a
simple mechanism: an excessive sensitivity to the desires of others, and
a competitive environment.
I ended up in physics through stubbornness, and an unusual
willingness to suffer for the sake of grades. As an undergraduate, I was
not particularly passionate about quarks, quasars, or quantum mechanics,
but I was academically very competitive, and once I’d settled on physics
as my major I determined to place myself at the top of my class. I did
so by throwing myself into the hardest classes and putting in the hours
required to ace the tests. This was, to put it mildly, a bad idea. I got
a sort of grim pleasure from vanquishing my classmates in these academic
slogs, but I was basically miserable. So why’d I keep it up?
When multiple people are striving towards a shared goal, they often
rank themselves by progress within their peer group. This was my mistake
— I swapped an absolute goal (figuring out how bits of nature work) with
a relative one (scoring higher on tests than my classmates). Later, when
I found myself unhappy, I couldn’t leave without feeling like I’d lost
something. That social capital sunk cost was the first part of the trap
I found myself in.
The second was a positive feedback loop that encouraged me to spend
ever-increasing amounts of time on my work. Humans inherit convictions
mimetically
from each other — we learn what to value by imitating our peers. As my
desire to excel academically grew, I spent greater amounts of time in
and around the physics department. The more time I spent there, the
greater my desire to excel. I’d never given physics much thought at all
before my senior year in high school — but once I was surrounded by
other physics students, competing for the same pool of grades and
research positions, I could think of little else. This inherited desire
was unchecked because I had no life outside of academics — no fixed
reference point. Although quitting would have made me happier, I felt
like I had nowhere to quit to. My tunnel vision left me with few
concrete notions of alternative pursuits, and without a destination, I
could not seriously contemplate leaving. Plans are never plausible until
they contain specifics, and implausible plans tend to be discarded. Many
of my peers in physics only added incredulity, consciously or otherwise.
The result was a reality distortion field — quitting was not just
painful, but unimaginable, unthinkable. I ended up in graduate school
not because I wanted to toe the bleeding edge of natural science, but
because I simply couldn’t imagine doing anything else.
That’s the mimetic trap in a nutshell: it hurts to leave, and there’s
nowhere to go. It decouples the social reward signal from the rest of
objective reality — you can spend years ascending ranks in a hierarchy
without producing anything that the rest of humanity finds valuable. If
you value the process itself, that’s fine. I didn’t. Cowardice kept me
from acting on this, and after a while I came to believe I had to
succeed in this field I’d fallen into essentially by chance.
I suspect I’m not the only one who’s felt this trapping effect in
physics. Some theorists seem to work primarily on fad topics inherited
from other prominent departments (ever heard of dynamical quantum phase
transitions?). That’s not to say these research areas aren’t valuable,
beautiful, or profound — but I’m wary of the process that pulls people
into them. Among experimentalists, it’s not hard to find graduate
students who can tell you every detail about how a particular machine
operates, and almost nothing about why it should be built. Again, if
they’re enjoying the process, more power to them. My point is that
they’re driven in part by mimetic forces, and for people with a certain
psychological weakness, this can lead to purposeless toil. I know what
this feels like, and it terrifies me.
Physics is hardly a lone offender within academia. Graduate programs
select for intensely competitive individuals with highly specific
skills, often with negligible market value outside of universities. A
strong desire for publications on esoteric topics is inherited from
senior postdocs and professors, making tunnel vision especially acute.
The activation energy required for quitting is famously high, in part
because the glow from the genuine intellectual lights in any field make
outside jobs seem (unfairly) pale and shallow in comparison. The number
of academic positions in any sub-field is typically small and static,
leading to zero-sum competition for titles. This is the worst sort of
posturing, and harms the psyche — as Eric Weinstein puts it,

…it’s better to be in an expanding world and not quite in exactly the
right field, than to be in a contracting world where people’s worst
behavior comes out and your mind is grooved in defensive and
rent-seeking types of ways.

Academics have uniformly rather low salaries, increasing our tendency
to focus on social status as a measure of success. Salary gradations are
useful for disrupting mimetic effects because they tie effort expended
directly to units of universal economic value — convertible to kilos of
rice, oil, and stuff in the physical world. A price is a lifeline to
reality: all else being equal, the job with the lower wage is probably
less valuable. Without this signal, the goals of a peer group are easily
decoupled
from the outside world, making it easy to drift into time-wasting
pursuits.
So — I’ve convinced myself that mimetic traps are a real thing, and
that I should be worried about them. Should you? If you find yourself
vaguely dissatisfied with your work, unable to describe coherently why
you’re doing what you’re doing — yes, you probably should. “Why does
this matter?” is an excellent way to gauge if you’ve drifted into a
mimetic trap. If you find this question impossible to answer honestly,
you’re probably wasting your time. Getting out is the hard part — that
requires courage and diligent planning. It’s much easier to avoid
falling in. But in either case, you’ll benefit from building a system
that steers you towards productive, meaningful activity in the long
run.
Mimetic environments are a serious problem only if you fall into one
where you can’t enjoy the process. They’re a tool for amplifying
ambition and diligence, and it’s up to you to apply this tool to
yourself wisely. This requires some care. It’s important to have a
strong learning signal — a fast feedback loop between effort expended
and success. This way, you’ll know quickly what it takes to succeed, and
whether you can be happy doing so. Look for environments where
competitors see themselves as playing a game, rather than fighting for
survival — this prevents rankings within the hierarchy from becoming an
existential problem.
Outside of competitive environments, your peer group can be
engineered to improve your decision making and steer you away from
unhappy traps. The authors you read (or the podcasters you listen to)
are a good place to start, because you have absolute control over their
presence in your consciousness. Speaking with authors through their
written work triggers the same neural circuits that produce imitation of
desire. By stocking a bookshelf judiciously, you can express a
preference over preferences — “what should I value? What do I want to
spend my waking hours thinking about?” — and act on it through careful,
honest reading. This engineering is safe: most authors exert their
influence slowly, over hundreds of pages, and if the effect turns out to
be undesirable, you need only put the book down. It’s cheap and reliable
— if you want to emulate someone, start by reading what they read. Most
importantly, it’s powerful, because authors form a large part
of the meta-peer group that determines which communities and games you
engage with.
In closing, some tips:

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.
Enjoy the process of whatever you’re doing — you’ll be happier,
and much more likely to practice, which leads to better
outcomes.
Make sure your job has clear price signals for success and
failure. Be suspicious of roles that compensate you with status or
non-financial rewards.
Hold yourself to ambitious absolute standards in morals and
productivity — write them down on post-it notes. You have an obligation
to use yourself well, your time is valuable, and there are right and
wrong ways to spend it.
Maintain a diversity of pursuits — you want to ensure that, no
matter how engrossed you become in one, you never forget that the others
exist.
Join Twitter — there’s no better way to reduce tunnel vision.
Here’s a list
of some of my favorite twitter follows.

Good luck!
2019-05-19
update 2019-05-20


What
does any of this have to do with physics? h/t Gwern.

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Dan Wang for writing the piece that got
me thinking about this consciously. Thanks to James Ough and especially Alexey Guzey for comments on earlier
drafts, and to Alexey again for prodding me to write this.


