Mimetic Traps

I’ve been a graduate student in physics for almost three years, but I only recently figured out why. I’d never given physics much thought at all before my senior year in high school — but once I was surrounded by other physics students, competing for the same pool of grades and research positions, I could think of little else. It decouples the social reward signal from the rest of objective reality — you can spend years ascending ranks in a hierarchy without producing anything that the rest of humanity finds valuable.

Source: briantimar.github.io