Why I am not a scientist
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February 03, 2024

I was an obsessive tv series binge-watcher in my teens. One of the numerous
titles was "The Big Bang Theory" that I enjoyed while it was ongoing around
2010. Only recently (around two years ago) I have realized the degree of
influence towards my personality and decided to write it down.

The show got me interested to become a scientist and try myself in the academia.
It created an image of a cool scientist, nerdy and funny. That's why, up to
a certain degree, I've tried to learn lambda calculus, followed a lot of people
from academia, learned about type theory, read different papers, played with
Agda, Twelf and other proof assistants, visited https://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/splv/splv19/,
and participated in the creating of functional programming course for Ural
Federal University (this was mostly about giving back to the community and
getting teaching experience). I seriously thought about applying for different
PhD programs.

Sounds great and cool! Except the fact that most of this, at the beginning, was
about Ego. The biggest motivation was the desire to build an image of a smart
person who has a PhD degree, knows cool words and facts, draws mysterious
smart-looking diagrams on the board and notebook using greek letters and arrows.
It was all about collecting and assigning different attributes myself that
seemed cool to me, building a simulacrum and an absolute fetishization of it.

It took me some time (years) to realize this and finally give up on this absurd
quest. I have tried myself in teaching, learning things, creating educational
materials, and tried to contribue to different scientific projects (not much).
Yes, of course, I enjoyed some of these activities. I learned a lot of
interesting things and it was a pleasant experience. But it was a wrong
direction. A good test to check if the path is correct is to ask yourself
(citing Naval Ravikant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qHkcs3kG44):

> Would I still be interested in learning this thing if I couldn’t ever tell
anybody about it? That’s how I know it’s real. That’s how I know something I
actually want.

That's a perfect way to figure out what's worth learning. What's the real
interest. Unfortunately, I have learned it too late. I realized that I
overvalued the theoretical and scientific stuff, that I prefer engineering and
the practical side. It just feels more natural to me. And it took me some time
to understand that software engineering is not less cool than doing science.
All activities are different and require different skills. All we need to do is
to find what suits ourselves better and makes happy.

I talked to great researchers (who are amazing persons) about their experience
and everyday work. I learned that scientists depend on their funding, on grants
and writing grant proposals, and they can't just start researching what they
find interesting. They deal with a lot of bureaucracy (which I can't stand,
I'm extremely allergic to it) and exist in the rigid social structure
(a university or a research institution), while I value freedom too much.

That's how removing the Ego from the equation was a major factor that helped me
to resolve my long-standing self-identification crises — to be an engineer or a
scientist.