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Katla ungratefully believes her undergraduate studies could have been better, and that those of many of her acquaintances could too. Even without them being something other than undergraduate studies. She demands I let her warn future students. Here is her advice.

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Consider far away universities. The task of choosing may be significantly more difficult if you open up the competition to places not in your home state, but it will probably be worth it.

There is no particular reason the best university will be in your city or nation, but it seems many people use such borders as the bound for what to consider.

Don’t worry much about where your friends are going. If you are normal enough to have friends by the time you are leaving for college they are probably easily replaceable. Your brain probably says they are not, but it is lying. That’s how friendship works. It is harder to replace your family, but families don’t seem to be that easy to lose track of even when people devote a lot of attention to it.

If you are moving away from everyone you know, this is a good time to review your personality.

Don’t use the apparent altruism of a course or degree as a strong sign of its usefulness for the world. Apparently altruistic courses are the ones  concerned with climate change or poverty or species extinctions or social stigma or genocide or so on. Many people are apparently altruistic as an excuse for not doing difficult courses, and the coursework will be designed accordingly. Part of designing coursework for people who aren’t up to difficult courses is understanding that they do not need tools for solving important problems in the world, but rather for getting a job at all.

Also, courses about problems such as climate change or third world development naturally will not include much material on how to solve these problems, as they have not been solved. Instead you and your ‘altruistic’ acquaintances will probably have to discuss how to solve them yourselves, or if your teacher recognises that you are not up to this, to learn to describe how difficult and complex they are. On the upside, solving the problems will be easy because you are probably too ignorant to constrain them much. On the downside, your solutions will not improve the world.

If you have some particular ambition, for instance to be a lawyer, find a lawyer or several and see what they are actually doing and if it is at all related to your imaginary career. Ask them what kinds of experience or degrees or talents will be useful rather than listening solely to the advice of people who are not successful at anything remotely similar to what you want to do, such as probably your teachers and parents. Hardly anyone seems to do this, so maybe there is some large downside Katja is missing, but then wouldn’t someone have mentioned it in the comments?

Ask a prospective university to put you in contact with students who study what you are considering studying. Ask them what they do, what they enjoy and loathe, and what particular second thoughts they are having about the whole thing.

How prestigious a university you go to matters a lot for many things. If you have any ambitions about things that fit this category, or think you might one day, don’t go for a less prestigious one because it’s closer to your mother’s cooking or has a better bar. This is common knowledge, but surprisingly not among high school students in many places.

Course descriptions tend to describe courses in the most optimistic light possible, or even more optimistically. If you are just starting university, your interpretation of course descriptions will probably add further shades of optimism. Try to imagine the worst course that could be semi-plausibly described in a given way. The real course is probably somewhere in the middle.

The fact that everyone else is partying hard every night probably doesn’t mean that doing so is much healthier than you thought. Some of your friends will be noticeably worse for wear by the end.

In case you actually want to learn things, it is not clear whether university will help or hinder this on average. There seems to be a lot of variation between people. If you are unsure whether having someone talk at you for hours at a time while you struggle to write down what they said ten seconds previously helps you learn, sit in on some lectures before you sign up. Doing so is usually free.

If you are ambitious and/or idealistic, and like being so, realise that university seems to often destroy these characteristics. Or perhaps that’s just the adult world. Anyway, be wary of accidentally picking up the impression that ambition and idealism are arrogant naivete inappropriate to the subjective, intellectually impenetrable real world, in which a person as small as yourself should be eternally grateful if someone finds them worthy of pushing papers. Unless you see good evidence for it of course, or would find it useful for enjoying your career in paper pushing.

Eliezer Yudkowsky:

Have I ever remarked on how completely ridiculous it is to ask high school students to decide what they want to do with the rest of their lives and give them nearly no support in doing so?

Support like, say, spending a day apiece watching twenty different jobs and then another week at their top three choices, with salary charts and projections and probabilities of graduating that subject given their test scores? The more so considering this is a central allocation question for the entire economy?

I’ve been meaning to remark how surprised I am that not even the students themselves seem interested in researching such things, or to even think of it. Similarly for their families. It’s not expensive to phone a few people who are doing your dreamed of career, and I expect many would be happy to talk or show you the ropes. Even if high school students aren’t that strategic or farsighted, I would expect a given one to have at least one e.g. great aunt who would think to say ‘Stop! This is a really important decision! Maybe you should research it beyond your ridiculously naive imaginings and a the stereotyped impression your lay-parents have given you!”.

It would make sense for not many people to do this entering college because they didn’t have much idea what they wanted to do yet, but it doesn’t look like people do it later either. And even if you are entering college without knowing what you want to do later, it would probably make sense to at least contact some current students doing your proposed degree and find out something about what that is like. I did neither of these things, I’m not sure why. So far I’m confident the latter would have helped. I don’t know of anyone else doing much research, but maybe they just don’t talk about it. What’s going on?

Doctors in a study preferred treatments with more chance of death over those with more chance of suffering for themselves more often than for their patients. Robin hypothesises*:

Avoiding death is a primary goal of medicine. Avoiding side effects of treatment is a secondary goal.  So it makes sense that in a far mode doctors emphasize avoiding death, but in nearer mode avoiding side effects matters more

An alternative hypothesis*: the vividness of death doesn’t increase as much as that of suffering in near mode because it is relatively hard to imagine in detail. It basically consists of you not being there, which is pretty nonspecific with regards to other details, and the details you can picture are not ones you have ever experienced or anticipate experiencing. Suffering on the other hand is a very familiar experience with details generally considered too vividly memorable. Particularly when the suffering is of a specific kind, such as the chronic diarrhea used in the study. I expect most people can picture chronic diarrhea in much more horrible detail than they can ceasing to exist.

How to tell between these hypotheses? I expect advisors make the same kinds of trade offs for themselves and others in situations where avoiding death and avoiding injury both seems like secondary goals, for instance in sports coaching and military tactics.

*Based on construal level theory – the idea that we think differently about things that are near and far from us. See more about how we think differently here. See also the potential relevance of this to cryonics, procrastination and euphemisms.