> Ask yourself just what it is you think "meaning" might mean, and why you're so interested in it. What is the actual problem that you're hoping "meaning" will solve?
The actual problem is finding the reason to overcome the life challenges and not giving up, helping other people and not choosing a more simple path by cashing on people. If the meaning is lacking, then the latter are probably the most reasonable behaviours in life, aren't they?
You don't really need an external arbiter to enforce a "meaning" on living well with other people. Social connections are essential to happiness[1], at least for most people. The number and kind of connections vary, but the "abuse people and grow rich" model doesn't make most people happy.
That may be counterintuitive, but it's a mis-extrapolation from the fact that being poor really sucks. There are diminishing returns. More things are required, which for many people is some kind of connection.
Those connections are not sufficient, even if necessary. One may still want to give up, and there's no easy answer to the nihilist question. All I can offer is to note that you haven't given up already and therefore have some intution that there is some emotional state you might look for -- even though I assert that "meaning" isn't actually it.
[1] I'm actually using "happiness" as a shortcut for some generally positive emotional state, the kind where you don't feel morose and ask plaintively about "the meaningless of life". That state may not actually be "happy". "Satisfied" or "content" may be more accurate, but still incomplete, and "happy" conveys the notion better.
> That may be counterintuitive, but it's a mis-extrapolation from the fact that being poor really sucks.
I don't think it is so simple. Consider a totalitarian country. The people in the government have no skills which would help them achieve anything in a democratic country, but they are loyal to their leader and therefore are paid very well and do whatever they want. In a world without a meaning, such people chose the best path, because nothing else would make them (and their families) live so well. The oppressed people are suffering and revolting, but the police is also paid well and keeps them from changing the political situation.
In a world without a meaning, the best strategy here would be to join the oppressive government and get the profit, but some people still choose to revolt, even endangering their own lives. Are they stupid? (This is of course just one example of many similar ones).
> All I can offer is to note that you haven't given up already and therefore have some intution that there is some emotional state you might look for -- even though I assert that "meaning" isn't actually it.
Actually, I believe in the meaning of life, see my other post here. I cannot imagine why I would struggle through life otherwise...
I'm glad you believe in a meaning of life, and it's certainly not my intention to dissuade you. I don't wish to call anybody stupid. I'm offering the OP an alternative approach, on the assumption that they're asking because they've tried and failed to find that meaning themselves.
Any approach that gets you up and out of bed in the morning is a good approach. I'd prefer that it be one that also helps other people get up and out of bed, and I think under most circumstances, those two goals coincide. There are circumstances where they don't, as you outline, and I'm not sure how to advise people in that state. I've found that their mental states are such that they end up asking completely different questions.
The one caution I'd give -- and I apologize that I'm probably reading incorrectly between your lines -- is that if your meaning of life incorporates requiring me to accept your meaning of life, then it may not be working as well for you as you believe. There are other ways to struggle through life and my only concern is to find one that works for each person.
Why are you so sure there is no meaning of life? We cannot know it, because we do not know everything about the world.
Maybe we just did not find it yet? It's not inside the knowledge we have, so it might be beyond it. To find it, we may need to expand our knowledge about the world, i.e., do science. This is how science may (temporarily) replace the meaning of life.
And you don't have to be a scientist yourself. Instead you may help it in any way you like: spreading knowledge in humanity, preventing conflicts, providing necessary services, etc.
You can always put "certified by the Graphics Replicability Stamp Initiative" next to each paper on your CV. It might influence people a little, even if it isn't part of the formal review for employment / promotion. Although "Graphics Replicability Stamp Initiative" does not sound very impressive. And Federal grant applications have rules about what can be included in your profile.
Informal reputation does matter though. If you want to get things done and not just get promoted, you need the cooperation of people with a similar mindset, and collaboration is entirely voluntary.
> the distinction between "production-ready" and "science-ready" code
In the first case, you must take into account all (un)imaginable corner cases and never allow the code to fail or hang up. In the second case it needs to produce a reproducible result at least for the published case. And do not expect it to be user-friendly at all.
Oh gosh yes, the amount of `just works` Fortran in science is one of those things akin to COBOL in business. I just know some people are thinking 10 years - ha, be some instances of 40 and possible 50 years for some. Heck, the sad part is many will have computer systems older than 10 years just as it links to this bit of kit and the RS232 just works with the DOS software fine as and the updated version had issues when they last tried. That's a common theme with specialist kit attached to a computer for control - medical as well has that.
I know two fresh PhDs from two different schools whose favorite language is fortran. I think it's rather different from cobol in that way -- yes, the old stuff still works, but newer code cuts down on the boilerplate and is much more readable. And yeah, the ability to link to 50 year-old battle-tested code is quite a feature.
As a theoretical physicist doing computer simulations, I am trying to publish all my code whenever possible. However all my coauthors are against that. They say things like "Someone will take this code and use it without citing us", "Someone will break the code, obtain wrong results and blame us", "Someone will demand support and we do not have time for that", "No one is giving away their tools which make their competitive advantage". This is of course all nonsense, but my arguments are ignored.
If you want to help me (and others who agree with me), please sign this petition: https://publiccode.eu. It demands that all publicly funded code must be public.
>"Someone will demand support and we do not have time for that",
Well ... that part isn't nonsense, though I agree it shouldn't be a dealbreaker. And it means we should work towards making such support demands minimal or non-existent via easy containerization.
I note with frustration that even the Docker people, whose entire job is containerization, can get this part wrong. I remember when we containerized our startup's app c. 2015, to the point that you should be able to run it locally just by installing docker and running `docker-compose up`, and it still stopped working within a few weeks (which we found when onboarding new employees), which required a knowledgeable person to debug and re-write.
(They changed the spec for docker-compose so that the new version you'd get when downloading Docker would interpret the yaml to mean something else.)
As a theoretical physicist your results should be reproducible based on the content of your papers, where you should detail/state the methods you use. I would make the argument that releasing code in your position has the potential to be scientifically damaging; if another researcher interested in reproducing your results reads your code, then it is possible their reproduction will not be independent. However they will likely still publish it as such.
> "No one is giving away their tools which make their competitive advantage"
This hits close to home. Back in college, I developed software, for a lab, for a project-based class. I put the code up on GitHub under the GPL license (some code I used was licensed under GPL as well), and when the people from the lab found out, they lost their minds. A while later, they submitted a paper and the journal ended up demanding the code they used for analysis. Their solution? They copied and pasted pieces of my project they used for that paper and submitted it as their own work. Of course, they also completely ignored the license.
> Or is quality left up to the primary researchers?
Individual researchers, and in many disciplines (like physics), there is almost no emphasis on quality.
I left academia a decade ago, but at the time all except one of my colleagues protested when version control was suggested to them. Some of these have code in the 30-40K lines.
I formerly worked in research, left and am now back in a quasi-research organization.
It’s bit disconcerting seeing how much quality is brushed aside particularly in software. Researchers seem to intuitively grasp how they need quality hardware to do their job, yet software rarely gets the same consideration. I’ve never been able to get many to come around to the idea that software should be treated the same as any other engineered product that enables their research
Academics are strange like this. The root reason is fear: fear that you're complicating their process, that you're going to interrupt their productivity or flow state, that you're introducing complication that has no benefit. They then build up a massive case in their minds for why they shouldn't do this; good luck fighting it.
Doubly so if you're IT staff and don't have a PhD. There's a fundamental lack of respect on behalf of (a vocal minority) of academics about bit plumbers, until of course when they need us to do something laughably basic. It's the seeds of elitism; in reality we should be able to work together, each of us understanding our particular domain and working to help the other.
> The root reason is fear: fear that you're complicating their process, that you're going to interrupt their productivity or flow state, that you're introducing complication that has no benefit.
Yes, but how does it compare to all the complicated processes that exist in academic institutions currently? Almost all of which originated from academics themselves, mind you.
It's not that complicated. No one individual process is that bad. The problem is that there's so many that you need to steep in it for ages to pick everything up.
This means it makes most sense to pick up processes that are portable and have longevity. Learning Git is a pretty solid example.
I think this is why industry does better science than academia, at least in any area where there are applications. Generally, they get paid for being right, not just for being published, so they put respect and money into people that help get correct results.
I think this is a much wider problem than just in academia/research. Really any area where software isn't the primary product tends to have fairly lax software standards. I work in the embedded firmware field and best practices are often looked at with skepticism and even derision by the electrical engineers who are often the ones doing the programming^[1].
I think software development as a field is incredibly vast and diverse. Programming is an amazing tool, but it's a tool that requires a lot of knowledge in a lot of different areas.
^[1] This isn't universally true of course, I'm not trying to be insulting here.
There are a few standardized definitions. The most succinct bring “quality is the adherence to requirements”.
As an example, if your science has the requirement of being replicable (as it should) there are a host of best practices that should flow down to the software development requirements. Not implementing those best practices would be indicative of lower quality
Most of the codes I am developing alone. No one else looks at them ever. My supervisor also develops the code alone and never shows it to anyone (not even members of the group).
In other cases, a couple of other researchers may have a look at my code or continue its development. I worked with 4+ research teams and only saw one professional programmer in one of them helping the development. Never heard about a "dedicated software assurance team".
The second case. However I am hesitating to ask to look at the code of my supervisor. How would I explain why I need it (if it's not needed for my research)? It's also unlikely user-friendly, so it would take a lot of time to understand anything.
I think you touched on something important. Researchers are most concerned with “getting things working”.
One of my favorite points from the book Clean Code was that professional developers aren’t satisfied with “working code”, they aim to make it maintainable. Which may mean writing it in a way that is more clear and concise than we are used to
> I’m curious, are dedicated software assurance teams a thing in your research area?
Are these a thing in any research area? I've heard of exactly one case of an academic lab (one that was easily 99th+ percentile in terms of funding) hiring one software engineer not directly involved in leading a research effort, and when I tell other academics about this they're somewhat incredulous. (I admittedly have a bit of trouble believing it myself -- I can't imagine the incentive to work for low academic pay in an environment where you're inevitably going to feel a sense of inferiority to first year PhD students who think they're hot shit because they're doing "research".)
I can say there are some that have the explicit intent but it can often fall to the wayside due to cost pressure. For example, government funded research from large organizations (think DoD or NASA) have these quality requirements but they can often be hand-waved away or just plain ignored due to cost concerns
The creatures you listed were necessary for the development of a human. They are also a part of the fragile balance of nature which keeps the living conditions on Earth. I am not saying everything has a meaning (I do not know). But I disagree that this is "an ill posed question".
So was the transistor [necessary] for the development of the CPU. It's also a part of fragile timing nature of electric signals. What's the point?
By ill-posed I simply mean it assumes something under the hood. Like when someone says "how do you catch X criminals" without first establishing that X is a crime. It's kind of a trick of language.
The point is that there may be a meaning. You questions do not prove its lack.
I do not like your parallel. The question about the meaning of life can also have the answer "there is no". It does not assume anything under the hood.
You are talking about objective versus subjective meaning I think. Objectively life is meaningless according to the Nihilism school of thought but subjectively life can have plenty of meaning it all depends on how you "frame" your experience of life.
Meaning to me for example is conquering my existential problems (anxiety, depression), pushing past boundaries and percieved limits in life, seeking love and obtaining goals. These examples provide substantial meaning for me, where I'm currently at in this point of time. So meaning to some degree are what you value, subjectively speaking.
I'm actually coming from the Buddhist/meditation school of thought. It's neither about subjective nor objective meaning, it's about the emptiness of this word "meaning". For a lack of better language available - "meaning" does not mean anything. It's like pondering over the liar's paradox without defining truth (see Tarski's undefinability theorem for a strict mathematical example).
Just ask yourself - what does it mean that the "meaning" of X is Y? In the "meaning" sense that this thread is about.
The very fact that anything is happening, that there's something rather than nothing can be all absorbing. The "meaning" as people usually put it is typically a case of mis-wanting, trying to fit the reality to the language of thought, rather than the other way around, and a lack of focus on the present. In particular the religious concepts of heaven and hell are the most prominent members of this category (throughout the written history, and perhaps much earlier).
If there is a meaning of life, we did not find it yet. Therefore it must be beyond our current scientific knowledge. Now, science becomes the new meaning, because it may give us the original meaning. Therefore I devote my life to science. (It is not necessary to be a scientist. Any possibility to help science counts for me.)
If there is no meaning at all, then I personally do not understand why people would continue struggle in life. I just cannot accept such situation. I would rather search for the meaning.
What is the struggle if there's no meaning? In my opinion, you struggle only, because there are actually things that mean to you. You cling to things, you yearn for things, and you don't get them. That's the struggle. If you don't want anything, where's the struggle? If you don't want life, you would just fade away, with no struggle.
It's self-deceptive to think you don't yearn for things. Maybe it's a way to protect yourself.
If you're stuck, try to see the underlying assumptions you have about life, and break them. That, in my opinion, let's you take steps forward.
