There was some support for the idea of starting an advice repository for grad students much in the same tradition as the Boring Advice Repository and the Solved Problems Repository started earlier by Qiaochu_Yuan. So here goes.

Please share any advice, boring or otherwise, for succeeding at grad school. I realize that succeeding might mean different things to different people, but I believe most people largely agree with what it means in this context. Feel free to elaborate on what you believe it should mean, if you have views on the subject.

I am a theoretical physics grad student, so I'm personally more interested in advice for mathy disciplines (i.e. physics, math, CS), and I also suspect that there are many grad students from these disciplines on LessWrong; but advice for any discipline is welcome as well. 

Advice is welcome from anyone, but please do mention your background for providing the advice so that people can weight the advice accordingly. For example, I would be more be open to listening to advice from someone who has completed a very successful PhD, than from someone who has simply interacted with a lot of grad students but has never been to grad school. 

Also, feel free to link to advice from other sources, and maybe quote the most useful parts in what you read. Remember, this is meant to be a repository, so that people can come and find the advice, so don't worry if it seems to be something most people would've already read or known.

Thanks!

I sometimes have thoughts of suicide. That does not mean I would ever come within a mile of committing the act of suicide. But my brain does simulate it; though I do try to always reduce such thoughts.

But what I have noticed is that 'suicide' is triggered in my mind whenever I think of some embarrassing event, real or imagined. Or an event in which I'm obviously a low-status actor. This leads me to think that suicide might be a high-status move, in the sense that its goal is to recover status after some event which caused a big drop in status. Consider the following instances when suicide is often considered:

1. One-sided break-ups of romantic relationships. The party who has been 'dumped' (for the lack of a better word), has obviously taken a giant status hit. In this case, suicide is often threatened. 
2. A samurai committing seppuku. The samurai has lost in battle. Clearly, a huge drop in status (aka 'honor').
3. PhD student says he/she can't take it anymore. A PhD is a constant hit in status: you aren't smart enough, you don't have much money, and you don't yet have intellectual status.

Michael Vassar has written a provocative response to this year's Edge question: "What *should* we be worried about?". But, I'm confused about his post. My attempt to summarize his point of view follows:

1. People have physiological needs (food, shelter, safety etc.) and social needs (esteem, love, respect etc.).

2. People have mental programs to try to achieve both needs. 

3. Modern society has been exceptional at fulfilling people's physiological needs but not very good at fulfilling their social needs.

4. Thus, mental programs that were meant to achieve physiological needs do not develop very well relative to mental programs meant to achieve social needs .

5. Mental programs for achieving physiological needs are more precise and hence harder to hack. Mental programs for social needs are fuzzy and vague and thus more easily hackable. 

6. Thus, and because of (4), people are more hackable. 

7. This manifests operationally as a few powerful people (the rich, the politicians etc.) hacking the majority into submitting to their will. 

8. But even the powerful do not have significantly better mechanisms for precise thought. It is just that their social weirdness (need for power, lack of empathy etc.) allowed them to be the hacker instead of the hacked.

9. Thus for most of our useful innovations, we are forced to rely on the rare people who are capable of precise abstract thought because they worry less about their social needs. 

So, I guess Vassar's point is that this pattern is what we should worry about as it systematically suppresses useful innovators.  

Would agree about my reading of his short essay? 

How solid do you think his argument is?

Our internal dialogues are often exactly that: dialogues that suit a narrative. Narrative building (the basis of the narrative fallacy) is often quite detrimental to attempts to think clearly. It is therefore beneficial to detect and correct for biases introduced from narrative building. But it can be hard to distinguish a 'clear' thought from one that is a consequence of a narrative.

I offer a heuristic to make the distinction between a thought which is a direct attempt to model reality and a thought which is based solely on its suitability to a narrative:

1. Isolate a sentence uttered in your internal (or external) voice. It could also be a pattern of images, voices or feelings. Tastes and smells are harder to do in this technique, but I believe we rarely 'think' with our tastes and smells.
2. Imagine it in a movie or a story. Also see how easy it is for you come up with some music to suit this thought pattern. Also examine the suitability of the people in your thoughts as characters in a movie or TV show. 
3. Evaluate its suitability to the above, narrative-like contexts. 
4. If it seems very suitable, it is now much more likely that it is part of narrative building. Otherwise, it might be an 'accurate' thought. 

Two examples:

1. When buying something: Often times, when I'm standing in a Starbucks line for a coffee and try to imagine why I'm standing there (when I can make my own coffee both at my home and at my office), I am usually returned with a feeling of being part of The People Who Do Things. Or one of being a Hard Worker who needs his Coffee to do his Hard Work with Focus and Determination. It fits too well while introducing a character in a novel. After I started noticing this, I've been realizing that coffee is not as useful in improving my focus as I thought it was earlier.

2. In conversations: This must be very familiar to most people. Anecdotes get highly embellished based on their suitability to a story. Also the way they are usually 'narrated' rather than just 'conveyed'. Realizing this when it happens can be quite useful.

Other examples?

Computer science and information theory were separate from physics. Not anymore. People realized that information had to be physical and this had profound consequences, especially in the form of quantum information/computation.

Psychology and economics were separate. Not anymore. People realized that humans were the core of economic systems and their behaviors fundamentally shape the nature of economies, even at the largest scales. Note the rise of behavioral economics.

Neuroscience and computer science were separate. Not anymore. People realized that thinking about the brain as a computer is probably the best possible abstraction to understand it. 

Reality exists. There are no intrinsic boundaries in reality. All fields of study are created by humans. But these divisions seem so natural that nobody realizes that the boundaries have to dissolve. The fields have to collide. And when we realize that--or finally have the language and ideas to meaningfully talk about it--we find out all of kinds of crazy, cool stuff.

So: what collisions are we currently blind to?

As I've recently been understanding signalling/status behaviors common among humans and how they can cloud reality, I've had a tendency to automatically think of these behaviors as necessarily bad. But it seems to me that signalling behaviors are pretty much a lot of what we do during our waking life. If you or I have abstract goals: become better at physics, learn to play the guitar, become fit and so forth, these goals may fundamentally be derived from evolutionary drives and therefore their implementation in real life would probably make heavy use of signalling/status urges as primary motivators. But that does not necessarily reduce the usefulness of these behaviors in achieving these abstract goals^1,2. 

I suppose what we need to be cautious about are inefficiencies. Signalling/status behaviors may not be the optimal way to achieve these goals. We would have to weigh the costs of actively ignoring your previous motivators and cultivating new motivators against the benefit we would gain by having motivations more aligned to our abstract goals.

Any common examples of behaviors that assist and/or thwart goal-achievement? I've got one: health. Abstract goal: We want to be healthy and fit. Status/Signalling urge: desire to look good. The urge sometimes assists, as people try to exercise to look good, which makes you healthier. Sometimes it thwarts, like in the extreme example of anorexia. Has anybody made personal trade-offs?

^Note:

^{1) I realize that this theme is underlying in many LW posts.}

^{2) I'm not trying to talk about whether abstract goals are more important than signalling/status goals.}

I was reading the introduction to a textbook on electrodynamics (J.D. Jackson), and in there was a description of an experiment designed to measure the exponent of the inverse square force law that governs forces between charges (Coulomb’s law). So, the experiment was designed to detect how close the exponent is to 2, and put error bars on the value of the exponent. The experiment was performed in 1971 and established that if the exponent was not 2, then the error had to be in the 15th or greater decimal place! So far, so good...

So, the experimental design seemed to use all kinds of fancy modern electronic equipment. Here’s what bugged me: they were testing the oldest law in electrodynamics, using all this technology, which was based on over a century of development in the theory of electromagnetism. It reeked of circularity to me. You build an instrument using a set of laws, and you use those instruments to test one of the laws? It’s almost like you use a map to build a territory and use that territory to check the map. What’s going on here?

So, trying to exercise the virtue of scholarship, I went on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and read the article on Experiment in Physics (highly recommended). And I found the resolution in this line:

Instruments create an invariant relationship between their operations and the world...When our theories change, we may conceive of the significance of the instrument and the world with which it is interacting differently, and the datum of an instrument may change in significance, but the datum can nonetheless stay the same, and will typically be expected to do so.

So, it’s like if you use a map of the territory to build a road from A to B, and then you later realize that the map that you used to build the road was wrong. But the road still takes you from from A to B! So it doesn’t matter if you built it with the wrong map, it still works. So in the context of the Coulomb’s law measurement, as long as you’ve secured the input-output characteristics of the fancy equipment you’re using, it doesn’t matter if they were built using a wrong theory. So, there is no circularity in testing the theory which you used to build the instrument, since the instrument is going to follow reality no matter what.

So, experimental physics is very epistemically secure. What about other fields? For sure, other fields dealing with understanding reality have one reality to deal with. But the aspect of reality they’re interested in maybe much more fragile. And for an truly accurate map of the territory, you need to take into account how just your presence is changing the territory. Goodhart’s law in economics is the perfect example.

In the US, if you look at political candidates in public view, they often appear with family in tow. A candidate's family plays an important role in the election campaigns. I'm from India. There, the politicians' family play little role in election campaigns (unless the family member herself is actively involved in the party and politics, which is often). But, the relative importance of family (relative to other aspects like money, education) in the cultural value system of India is significantly greater than its relative importance in the cultural value system of the US. So why the inverse relation?

I think it may have to do with signalling (inspired by Hanson, Zahavi). Maintaining a stable family is considered to be less of a status quo situation in the US, when compared to India. So in the US, maintaining a stable family is a signal of your management skills at the level of family, because you had to spend effort to obtain that signal. But in India, the family does not have signalling value, because it is much more common to have a stable family. So having a stable family did not require an 'extra' effort (extra compared to society's default). 

What would this imply? How would one test such a theory?