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Job outlook as mathematician?

Mathematics, Personal Stuff 1 Response »
Sep 172010

Once upon a time I had this idea that I could become a professional science fiction writer and earn enough money for buying reasonably much stuff (for surviving, for example). Unfortunately, I found out that it’s not realistic at all to assume that I could live from writing science fiction stories alone (even though authors, writers and editors in general have an acceptable income). Well, unless I move to a country where it is very cheap to live. So, even if I stuck to the 10 laws of good science fiction and wrote a lot of science fiction stories and novels, I would probably still have to live on welfare.

Therefore, I had to look for a more reasonable source of income. Consulting sounded interesting, but I would probably have to work the whole day in that sector. A similar argument also speaks against becoming a professor. That’s why I took a deeper look at the professions that are available to mathematicians which are sufficiently interesting and attractive and allow me to have a reasonable amount of spare time. Of course, a job as general mathematician would be okay, but there aren’t too many really fascinating jobs for mathematicians in business sectors outside of banking, insurances and consulting. As I already mentioned consulting doesn’t sound like a good option for me. From my point of view, banking jobs don’t seem to be really interesting, so what about mathematicians in insurance companies?

Often insurance companies look for a mathematician/actuary. “What’s an actuary?” I asked myself. An actuary is something like an economic risk management mathematician. Yeah, that sounds interesting enough to me. I don’t know why exactly. Somehow in my mind the job creates associations with existential risks and the possible impacts of the Singularity on insurances and stuff. Anyway, all the job descriptions for actuaries that I have read sound rather interesting, at least compared to other jobs in insurances. And as highly qualified specialists their payment is good, with a median income of about 85000 $ in the USA. In Germany they earn 71500€ a year on average. There are some statistics about the median incomes in the USA when including all the bonuses:

  1. Initial payment: 82873 $
  2. After 4 to 6 years: 122906 $
  3. After 8 to 10 years: 183951 $
  4. As Actuarial Fellow: 223437 $

But one of the most important aspects of that job is that actuaries don’t have to work terribly long, so I would still have some time left for writing science fiction stories.

The option of relying on welfare on purpose in Germany is not attractive at all – especially since the Hartz IV reform. There are already stories about people not getting any welfare anymore, because they reject the job offers they get assigned to from the bureacratic apparatus.

To sum it all up, it looks like choosing a “standard” specialist job is the best option for me; which feels somehow weird, because in theory I would prefer a non-standard occupation. However, having an attractive job perspective feels pretty motivating.

Posted by RadiVis at 20:47 Tagged with: , , , , ,

Paradigm: Entertainment

Depression, Personal Development 1 Response »
Apr 102010

Entertainment is pretty old, but I think it is much more central to our lives than we believe. If we feel entertained, that’s a signal that our brain gets the right input and thus can work in an optimal way. If we don’t feel entertained, well, then there might be something wrong!

If it’s no fun, it won’t work in the long run!

There are two ways of becoming more entertained, getting more fun, and thus becoming more efficient in everything you do:

1. Do things in a more entertaining way! This is difficult. You have to experiment with what you find really entertaining and what not. Be creative! Leave usual patterns of thinking! Break habits of not having fun while doing things! Ignore “common sense”! You do things for entertaining yourself! Otherwise you would be a slave of someone or something else!

2. Focus on the things you find very entertaining! There’s no point in doing the things you do, because you have the feeling they should be done. Such feelings should be questioned thoroughly. Stop doing things which aren’t entertaining enough to you! They just waste your time, diminish your productivity and make you less happy! Take watching TV for example, actually a thousand TV channels together present two hours or really good entertainment a day on average at best! Only read good books! And only hang around with people you really resonate with!

Granted, there are things you do in order to maintain yourself, and your basis for entertainment. This kind of preservation is a reason for doing those things, but not a very good motivation. So, when you do those things, do them in more entertaining ways. Or just do something else at the same time, which is really entertaining, like listening to good music, singing, dancing, daydreaming, chatting, whatever. Your brain needs entertainment! Don’t let it down

In fact, I go even further and claim that entertainment is virtually everything the brain needs. Don’t be fooled! Your brain wants to learn, to have fun, to be entertained (all of which is pretty much the same, so it would suffice to have only a single word for them)! So, you do things because they are fun, unless there’s some external or internalized force, which keeps you from doing them, or forces you to do something which is totally boring and arduous!

Okay, there are those really basic things, like having enough food, and liquid, and warmth, but everything else is really “just” entertainment!

  • You chat with people to be entertained.
  • You have sex to be entertained.
  • You read to be entertained.
  • You play games to be entertained.
  • You pursue hobbies to be entertained.
  • You buy things to be entertained.
  • You go to social gatherings to be entertained.
  • Even if you sleep, your brain entertains itself by creating dreams.

Only work doesn’t seem to fit in here, so there is something wrong with it! It doesn’t feel natural to write: “You work to be entertained”. But actually that ought to be the case! If your work isn’t entertaining, it should actually be your topmost priority to change that fact! Do work that’s entertaining! And no, there is no “but”! If you don’t manage to make your work entertaining, you are a loser! What you lose, is the chance to use your brain in an optimal way. There’s no excuse for that! If society doesn’t allow your work to be entertaining, then just go and change society! Entertain yourself by fucking up old suboptimal social structures!

Be entertained or become depressed

By now, I realize that my depression just was the result of insufficient entertainment! Yes, really! If studying isn’t entertaining enough, and playing flash games becomes rather boring (some of them are really good, but there too few of those), and I don’t have contact with really entertaining people, that’s enough of a reason for becoming depressed – given the usual background of all the nonsense and suffering in this world!

So, is this a calling for unlimited hedonism? Well, it’s supposed to be a calling for intelligent hedonism, which is just necessary to do anything you want to do in the best way possible! There’s no reason to abandon ethics. Trying to be good can be really entertaining! Apart from that, it just isn’t ethical to waste your potential!

We are the eternally entertaining life!

Posted by RadiVis at 13:49 Tagged with: , , , , , ,

Screw time management! Use concrete tasks!

Personal Development 3 Responses »
Apr 022010

Using time as element of organization only makes sense if you have to meet others at a specific time. So, time tables should only be used for actual meetings. For me it’s not a good idea to plan actions which I can do myself using a time table, or even a guideline about how much time I should spend for a specific activity. It simply doesn’t work for me! There are a lot of things which can go wrong with such a method:

  • Something could cut down my time, like waking up too late, or having to do a lot of not planned tasks, or just procrastinating.
  • When time runs out I’m not sure what to do.
  • Time management systems create the danger of using time inefficiently, because of trying to force myself to do something I’m only motivated to do by my time management system.
  • I could need less or more time for a specific task than I have assumed when planning it, which messes up my time management.
  • With time management systems time has to be checked regularly. Checking the time is actually a waste of time. And I could actually miss checking the time at the right time, thus missing the right time to start or stop some activity.

So, forget time, and just focus on the actual goals! A method which turned out to be relatively effective is to write down a list of about 5 concrete tasks which I want to do the next day. Even if I don’t manage doing all those tasks, they give my day a lot of structure and purpose, so I’m less inclined to waste time.

Writing down more than 5 tasks is not a good idea, because that’s too much. It’s more than the number of fingers of my left or right hand, so it’s not even a primitively one-hand-countable number!
Writing down less than 5 tasks is not a good idea, because it makes me feel lazy, so I fill up the list with very simple tasks, which might still be useful. But those extra tasks aren’t something I would do every day anyway, like brushing my teeth. Counting such trivialities would be pointless.

At the times when I used that system my to-do lists got shorter and shorter, even if I have accumulated a lot of tasks on those little daily lists which I haven’t done. It’s a really good system, but I have also had large breaks from using it, when I was too lazy to think of any meaningful tasks besides my usual daily activities. That was no good. Not using this tool makes me work at suboptimal performance levels, which is just bad.

Basically, this blog post is a reminder to myself to use that task-list-system every day. It’s also a good-bye from non-meeting-related time management.

Finishing a blog post was one of my tasks for today. Done. :)

Posted by RadiVis at 17:21 Tagged with: , ,
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