Got a little meander-y, sorry about that.
I think I might just be exhausted by school and life more generally, but this all feels so surreal and useless. I’ve been pursuing a terminal degree in a STEM field for years now, almost done, and the job market is overwhelmingly bleak most days. I’m on the computation/data side of things, and I look at the listings out there and start to spiral. “You don’t want to go work for some FAANG company? Why not?” why do you? (The fat salary, but is that really worth it?)
I’ve got a textbook I was given during a library clean out, “Stochastic Processes” by John Lamperti. In the intro he says:
It is impossible for me these days to write or lecture about mathematics without ambivalence. It is obvious that in many nations, and most of all in my own, science and mathematics are all too often serving as tools for militarism and oppression… I believe that today it is a vital duty for the scientific community to struggle against such misuse of science, and to resist the demands – made in the name of “defense” or “security” – to develop ever more efficient means for killing and exploiting other human beings.
Even this attitude is basically absent these days. I guess the answer is to go teach, that would make my work feel sorta meaningful. But I don’t want to feel pressured to do research, I haven’t enjoyed it. I’m not sure what my question is, but do any of you all in STEM have ideas on how to make this all useful and not spend my life building weapons or working for “national security”? I’m almost thinking I’ll just get some neutral-ish analyst job and pursue stuff in my free time.
The advancement of medical technology is an unequivocal good. Like we have more advanced prosthetics than ever, and those auto self dosing insulin things for diabetics are better than the finger pricking I grew up watching people do. Just two quick examples.
Surely there is massive data analysis happening in disease research, which the US government probably no longer does, meaning you’ll have to find a rare NGO job or work for a for-profit corporation.
Let’s see, what else has a lot of data and isn’t evil… Astronomy? Uh… What’s that running app that keeps leaking the position of American warships? There are plenty of cybersecurity applications I can think of that would protect people from prying governments and AI training; Signal is one quick example.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with finding “neutral” work and using funds and free time of a tech salary to contribute and participate in your local orgs.
But also I think there’s a whole generation of Americans who got lied to by their parents that seeking a tech degree would be a deed to a consistently comfortable working life, because their parents are rubes who are so enamored with the past they grew up in that they forget they destroyed it.