My summer job

My graduate supervisors were nice enough to give me a job for the summer, and they were even nicer to let me use much of my time to pursue my own interests. (I also contribute to ongoing lab research, mainly finding economic statistics and trying to make sense of them. If you're interested, here's an overview of the general area I'm investigating; the papers mentioning economic/income inequality are the most relevant.) So far that pursuit has been mainly an attempt to identify, or at least narrow down, what my own interests are. So I've been doing a lot of reading and thinking, which is pretty much what I spent the last year doing, only now I have more resources at my disposal and I'm getting paid for it. Not bad for a summer gig.

In regards to pursuing my own interests, I'm to figure out what kind of project I want to be doing for my graduate work, research that would (most likely) become a Master's thesis. It seems that most accepted students already had a much better idea what theirs would be, but my supervisors were willing to take a gamble on a less conventional candidate. I feel like I'm making progress, although now that I'm thinking about writing about it here, I'm worried that it will sound like pretty much everything I've ever written about my interests, and then I won't feel like I've made any progress. Nevertheless...

I'm starting by thinking about what motivations I have, and I think there are a few interrelated high-level reasons why I'm going to be doing what I do over the next 2 to 6 years. I want to foster a world with more "rational" behavior. That probably being an unrealistic goal, I at least want to understand what rational behavior really means, and seek to understand why it might seem so elusive.

A specific kind of behavior that I think is rational and that I want to encourage is subversion. I think that many if not all of mankind's power structures are morally illegitimate and make the world worse for the vast majority of the population, and thus I'm motivated to contribute towards the disruption or dismantling of such power structures.

I tend to want to mention all that shit about trying to make the world a better place first, but perhaps a more important motivating factor is that I want to try to understand myself better. Understanding the world around me is a big part of that, and so is understanding human nature. I think I'll also learn something about myself by being in new situations where I can interact with lots of smart people who have a variety of specialized knowledge. This blog has more or less chronicled what has felt like a very rapid and radical change in my outlook, and I'm curious to see what that will mean to me when I'm back in a school environment again. I guess maybe I'm just highly self-absorbed, but I put a lot of energy into trying to make sense of myself, and in a way that's a big part of what this whole grad school thing is about for me.

Reading about evolutionary psychology was the first time I remember thinking that there was a satisfactory explanation for a feeling I'd had for many years, which is that I felt like I was a square peg trying to fit into a round hole in the world. I remember learning the word "Procrustean" and thinking it was the Best Word Ever. The insight I gained from reading about evolutionary psychology, which I've noted here before, is that humans really are built for a different world than this one. We're all strapped into this Procrustean bed, not just me. As such, evolutionary psychology has already helped me understand myself better, and understand some of the underlying caused of the seemingly irrational behavior that I'd like to discourage.

So those are my high level motivations and inspirations. With that as background, I'll move on to other considerations of my interests in research areas in a future post.