I worked hard and got into one of these prestigious universities for my Masters, but grew up lower-middle class, on the countryside, in a not very healthy environment.
Having seen it first-hand, I can only agree. There's so much privilege at these institutions, it's almost sickening sometimes. I don't want to throw everyone in one pot, there's certainly genuine, decent people there. But there is so much self-importance and arrogance floating around, and just this casual and unquestioned attitude of superiority.
What I do want to say is that pretty much everyone I met there had a base-level above average smartness and/or work ethic. But I also mostly hung out with STEM people. Didn't get to know many managerial or related types.
Even if the probability for this to succeed is really really small, there's a good chance it will happen when you have billions of years time and idk how many orders of magnitude (10^40? 10^50?) of atoms/molecules constantly interacting.
No, that's not clear at all. The smallest known system capable of independent existence and Darwinian evolution has billions of atoms. A mere 40 or 50 orders of magnitude is trivial compared to the unlikelihood of this arising by chance.
I agree to some degree. I am finishing up my PhD at the moment and have had this below-surface feeling that following this path is inherently selfish for a while.
Choosing to go into research means your career choice is entirely determined by what you are most interested in, what you are passionate about, what you want to spend your day thinking about. I feel like the benefit to society is often secondary in that choice. It's nice that often science benefits humanity as a whole, but often it also doesn't and is just obscure niche research.
And indeed, the relational sacrifices that come with a (high ambition) career in science are IMO not worth it. I would not recommend anymore to pursue some abstract high brow principle like "the pursuit of knowledge" over deep, loving, healthy, sustainable relationships with people to a young ambitious person. People are more real than principles.
Ideally you can combine it of course. But the academic job market is not easy and rarely allows this without significant friction.
I am 99% sure I will leave academia after my PhD. Not for the this reason per se, but it appears in the equation. The relational aspect is a big part, though.
Including work-related things. Anything you do because of your job (including core work, emails, chatting with someone about work and stuff like that; but excluding e.g. coffee-chat with a colleague about non-work related things, surfing web about non-work related things and stuff like that).
Having seen it first-hand, I can only agree. There's so much privilege at these institutions, it's almost sickening sometimes. I don't want to throw everyone in one pot, there's certainly genuine, decent people there. But there is so much self-importance and arrogance floating around, and just this casual and unquestioned attitude of superiority.
What I do want to say is that pretty much everyone I met there had a base-level above average smartness and/or work ethic. But I also mostly hung out with STEM people. Didn't get to know many managerial or related types.