Which College Major?

The most important question you've asked here is:

"Should I care more about making money or doing something that I have a "passion" for?"

And my answer is: You should care about both, approximately equally.

I would advise that you don't ever choose something that makes you want to gouge your eyes out with a metal fork just because the average yearly salary is six or seven figures. Most likely the result will not be anything like what you are visualizing (eg. early retirement, actually having time to enjoy your money, reasonable mental and physical health...) . I suspect this kind of choice tends to lead either to dropping out of your major, and thus losing both time and money, or to far too much agony when you do enter the workforce. The more interest and enjoyment you get from your chosen field, the better. In a similar vein, be wary of fields that sound cool or tolerable if you have very little idea of what the work in them is actually like. If you have some familiarity with doing whatever is done in your chosen field, that helps a lot. I majored in Computer Science, but I had been programming as a hobby for many years before that, so I already kind of knew how I felt about it. I knew about the frustrating parts, but also knew that overall I enjoy it immensely. I would definitely recommend considering which hobbies you enjoy most when you think about what you want to major in.

On the other hand, I would not ignore the importance of money. Please consider: how much would you like to have the independence to make your own decisions, because your money is your own? For me, this was very important, so I was unwilling to go into a field where the average (the mode, not the mean or median) salary was small, or where money seemed to be very unreliably distributed. For example, some fields have a few very prominent successes who make crazy amounts of money and a large number of talented, hardworking individuals who make almost nothing. Do not assume you will be one of the few prominent successes, regardless of your talent or ability to work hard. Also consider how important financial security is to you. Even if you are well off now, circumstances can change. So try to choose something where you will be able to put some of your money aside into savings (I think the amounts most people advise for this always sound a bit low...). When I was younger, there were times that money was extremely tight for my family--I knew that wasn't how I wanted to live once I was an adult, because it always felt so financially insecure. On the other hand, some people thrive on very little money, so you will need to consider how much your temperament matches mine. This is not to say I didn't take great pride in spending as little money as possible--but this was largely because I wanted the number in my savings account to be as large as possible. Because I did take this into consideration, I don't currently have to worry about money or debt, which is rather nice.

So, that's my advice. Hope you found that helpful in some way. It did at least work for me. I have a career that I can actually enjoy doing, and I don't have to live in poverty.

Paul Graham's What You'll Wish You'd Known has some good advice: I think the bit about keeping your options open is the most valuable.

In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there? I propose instead that you don't commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.

It's not so important what you work on, so long as you're not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take.

Suppose you're a college freshman deciding whether to major in math or economics. Well, math will give you more options: you can go into almost any field from math. If you major in math it will be easy to get into grad school in economics, but if you major in economics it will be hard to get into grad school in math.

Flying a glider is a good metaphor here. Because a glider doesn't have an engine, you can't fly into the wind without losing a lot of altitude. If you let yourself get far downwind of good places to land, your options narrow uncomfortably. As a rule you want to stay upwind. So I propose that as a replacement for "don't give up on your dreams." Stay upwind.

A weblog called StudyHacks has articles about passion that I think you would find interesting.

Specifically The Passion Trap and The Danger of Dream Job Delusion.

EDIT: FORMATTING

Don't try to predict the future. Read Taleb's "the Black Swan". Instead, try to prepare for an uncertain future by learning generally useful skills that will be helpful in many possible futures. Along these lines, I've decided that I'm going to get a double major in statistics and computer science (particularly something related data mining).

Advantages:

1. Generally useful. Statistics is used in a lot of fields.
2. Impact- So many studies are poorly designed and so the results are useless.
3. Comparative advantage to people with a LW mentality- I think that few people will know about Judea Pearl's "Causality" or Jaynes.
4. Cool Shit! Google's driverless car. Machines that write jokes. Siri. the movie "moneyball"
5. Make DINERO!!! See Moneyball. See wall street algorithms that make most of the trades these days. See the gambling industry.
6. Understand the world. Intellectual stimulation.

I'm also self-studying psychology. If you can understand statistics, psychology, and philosophy, you will have a very solid understanding of the world around you.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/what-are-the-odds-that-stats-would-get-this-popular/

I have a BA and MA in English from a top US university, and more than half my lifetime later I'd recommend against it unless you are really sure you want to teach it. As an undergrad I thought I wanted to teach English, but I disliked the graduate studies in the field and I didn't much like teaching at the junior college level when I tried it. Being able to write well has been an enormous help in my alternate career, but you can get that in any course of study that forces you to write frequently under direct criticism. If I had it to do over again I'd do some combination of HPS and CS with a smattering of economics; right up your alley. UBC has a good CS department for sure.

I majored in computer science and am quite happy with the choice, but I do wish I'd had CS as a minor so I could have just picked and chosen all the interesting courses and ignored the must-have-for-degree undergrad crud, and majored in something that would have made it easier for me to not call myself a programmer while still actually mostly doing programming. I suspect people are a lot happier hiring a person in their forties who calls themself an actuarian, a control engineer or a geophysicist than just a programmer.

Though we're still globally in a pretty big cultural flux about figuring out just how all the programming is supposed to fit in the job and career market space, so my intuitions might apply more to people already older than me and prove to be pretty much outdated for someone just starting university. So, just yay computer science as a minor, whatever you choose as a major, I guess.

Vancouver, Canada

Are you already coming to our meetups?

I always advise in favor of a double major with one major being something sciencey and quantitative (math, natural science, engineering, computer science, et cetera) and the other being something you care about. If those categories overlap, then you have less work to do.

Should I care more about making money or doing something that I have a "passion" for?

Depends on what your passion is. If it's something that allows you to make a lot of money, and doesn't otherwise obstruct you from taking part in other things that you enjoy, then your best bet would probably be to choose that - even if there is another, passionless option, which gives you more money.

If on the other hand the things that you are passionate about you do not make money (which will hamper your ability to produce utilons in a variety of ways), then your best bet will probably be to become wealthy by means of doing something you're not passionate about. With something like tech entrepreneurship you can become a millionaire in 5-8 years, and then focus on producing utilons at optimal exchange rates for your entire life.

Personally, I'm not passionate about any careers that make a ton of money, so my current plan is to become a millionaire through tech entrepreneurship, and then focus on studying/writing philosophy and dancing afterwards.

What else should I keep in mind?

Everyone is aware of the effect that choice of major has on labor market value, but most people neglect the effect that it has on dating market value; don't make that mistake.

After perusing advice from the comments and checking the details of the majors I listed above, the ones that seem to promise the most utility would be CompSci, Math/Mathematical Sciences, or "Economics and Mathematics/Statistics" (a single joined major, not a double major). I'm not particularly drawn to software design, so CS is an option I'd put on the backburner at this point. MathSci is a combination of CS, stats, and math; either that, or econ/stats or econ/math I think could open doors to good salaried employment (i.e., actuary, accountant, finance, various businesses(?), etc.). It would be easy to double major in one of those with HPS, or a minor in philosophy, which are flexible, and I can take cool courses like this. Studying neuroeconomics would be interesting grad work; this is motivating me to consider taking more psych/neuroscience.

On VC entrepeunership: to quote christina,

some fields have a few very prominent successes who make crazy amounts of money and a large number of talented, hardworking individuals who make almost nothing. Do not assume you will be one of the few prominent successes, regardless of your talent or ability to work hard.

Not to begrudge those of you aiming for VC success, but I don't personally see myself as the ambitious kind who takes risks with my brilliant idea and succeeds in such a field. At least, not without some collaborators, which would hardly make it my business anyways. I consider questions posed on 80000 hours about career choice and utility too, but those are separate questions I'm not prepared to answer quite yet.

Thanks for the links from Study Hacks and other sites. I'm confident enough in my skills to have a life outside of a career so that my career won't define my life, unless I happen to fall into a really fun career anyways.

We can say with reasonable confidence that internet access to information and training will stay as good as it is now or more likely vastly improve in the future. As such there is very little value to learning large amounts of information or specific skills, instead you should look for courses that give you good transferable skills, and learn other things as needed.

Personally, [with standard disclaimer against generalising from one example] I've found studying philosophy extremely good in those respects. It contains a lot of the general rationality and thinking skills we discuss on Less wrong, and a chance to practice them beyond understanding in theory. And once you have the ability to rationally assess arguments and draw out the best parts it becomes exponentially easier to learn and do well in other subjects. A good department will also emphasise clear writing and presenting your arguments persuasively. Given your stated interest in mathematics and compsci Formal Logic might be particularly god for you.

"Smart people tend to clump together, and if you can find such a clump, it's probably worthwhile to join it. But it's not straightforward to find these, because there is a lot of faking going on." P. Graham

In every field exist crackpots, but in hard science they are more difficult to find.

LW community is full of CS guys, then is natural to suggest the area. So do i. You will be a programmer sooner or later. Choose something that do math part of the time, because you need math thinking on pratically every serious subject.

In addition, everything is digital, the future is emulation. It's vague, but resume the aspirations of technological market. If you don't like the private sector, go to academia. Try to be precise, do research, and if you are not so good at math, go to business again. Avoid idealism.

Maybe you like frogs, but don't forget existential risks. A little help in a crucial question is more important than a great effort in something lateral.

Find your predispositions.

I'd suggest double majoring if at all possible, this will help keep you options open. Of course at most schools this will reduce the amount of elective classes you can take, but the end result is probably worth it. If you can find two subjects that add value to each other, but have different core markets(eg. CS & PSCY with a intent of going into HCI) thats a nice plus.

The first thing you should do is take a high-level (rigorous) math course if you can, or else the fastest prerequisites to it. It will teach you a lot that you couldn't learn in other classes, and will be phenomenally useful if you decide to take any of those majors aside from English. Plus, math and CS take the heaviest preparation, so you should find out ASAP if that's what you'd enjoy.