I just looked at Jonah and Vipul's histories, and I was struck to observe that they both did higher degrees in math, but their first career steps had nothing to do with the content of their degrees. I mean that Jonah studied number theory but worked on "effective altruism", i.e. which charity achieves most per dollar, and Vipul studied group theory but became an open-borders activist.
When I thought about it further, I was reminded of the phenomenon whereby people do a degree in physics or math, but then get a job on Wall Street. In such cases, the actual content of the degree means very little, it simply indicates that the person in question is capable of mathematical analysis, and therefore might be able to add a small fraction of a percent to the profits of some bank or hedge fund.
In this case, it looks like math degrees have again served to signal analytical ability, but here the payoff was entry into the world of quantitative altruism - either the small world of organizations like GiveWell, or the larger and older world of public-policy economics.
It might be a laudable improvement to have math-degree-as-proof-of-ability-to-think being used in this way, rather than the other. But I still wonder about, for example, people who want their higher degree itself to be a meaningful pursuit, and not just a stepping stone to a career as a banker, an activist, or a mentor.
There are certainly people who do a higher degree, and end up disgusted with it and wishing they had spent their three years doing something else; but there are also people who do their higher degree because they love their subject and are genuinely interested in it, and who then crashland in an awful real world when they find they can't obtain continuing employment in that area.
So my questions for Cognito are these: What is its general philosophy regarding the pursuit of higher degrees? In their opinion, when is this a worthwhile activity? Are they equipped to advise people who aren't careerists, the ones whose interests and intellectual makeup will actually create difficulties for them in life, precisely because society offers little or no support or understanding for their specific interests and aspirations? And do the founders consider that their experiences are relevant for that sort of person?
Hi Mitchell,
Thanks for your interest.
Both Vipul and I went to graduate school with a view toward learning more math rather than as a stepping stone to a career outside of academia. Our academic credentials may have some signaling benefits, but if we had wanted to optimize for careers outside of academia we wouldn't have gone to math graduate school. As it turns out, our academic background has been quite helpful with the advising work we've ended up doing.
Our goal is to help our advisees attain life satisfaction. For some of them this may come from a high...
My name is Jonah Sinick, and I'm posting to announce a new advising service for intellectually curious students: Cognito Mentoring. I'm working on this in collaboration with Vipul Naik.
We have very broad intellectual interests, cutting across topics such as rationality, economics, pure math, psychology, humanitarian issues and classical music. I have a PhD in pure math, have been an active participant on Less Wrong, worked at GiveWell for a year, and have done research for Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) on how effectively can we plan for future decades and on how well policy-makers will handle AGI. Vipul has a PhD in pure math, and started Open Borders, a website devoted to discussing immigration liberalization.
We both have experience working with intellectually curious young people. I worked for three summers at MathPath (a summer camp for middle school students who are interested in math), taught at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (an academic magnet high school), and currently teach for Art of Problem Solving (an online school for high performing math students). Vipul has trained students for mathematical olympiads, and taught calculus and linear algebra at University of Chicago for years.
We spent several months researching the educational resources that are available to high performing students, college selection and college admissions, psychological findings on intellectual giftedness, and the experiences of past and current members of the population that we're serving, and we’re ready to help. We're currently offering free personalized advising on these things by email, Skype, or phone. You can connect with us here. If you're interested, we look forward to hearing from you.