[HN Gopher] The illustrated guide to a Ph.D. (2010)
___________________________________________________________________
The illustrated guide to a Ph.D. (2010)
Author : CaliforniaKarl
Score : 145 points
Date : 2021-11-07 11:38 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (matt.might.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (matt.might.net)
| zohch wrote:
| Rather tone deaf to still refer to it as a masters degree.
| amcoastal wrote:
| I think master is less offensive in this context since it's not
| also coupled with something called 'slave'.
| zohch wrote:
| It was not coupled with something called slave in git either.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| Eh?
| Hendrikto wrote:
| Stupid sjw bs. Just ignore that.
| tomrod wrote:
| I assume you're "tone deaf" comment refers to recent societal
| relations in the US, and the response from organizations like
| Github to rename master branch to main branch. The master/slave
| duality is certainly an important notion to be worked through
| in the US. Respectfully, in the context presented here I
| disagree the "master" context always requires a slave to be a
| complete concept.
|
| This has a good discussion on it:
| https://www.etymonline.com/word/master
|
| It's simple to ban (antithesis) the status quo (thesis), but
| ultimately embracing the nuance leads to a more useful harmony
| (synthesis) that helps society grow and expand
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic)
| bob229 wrote:
| Sjw dross
| seoaeu wrote:
| > ultimately embracing the nuance leads to a more useful
| harmony (synthesis) that helps society grow and expand
|
| Conversely, derailing conversation with calls for nuance is a
| good way to maintain the status quo. (Though without seeing
| the -- now flagged -- parent I can't see which your comment
| is doing)
| zohch wrote:
| I said: "Rather tone deaf to still refer to it as a masters
| degree."
|
| Which apparently is forbidden to do. Maybe it hit's a bit
| too close to home for comfort around here.
| zohch wrote:
| > The master/slave duality is certainly an important notion
| to be worked through in the US.
|
| I have never seen a slave branch in Git, have you?
| tomrod wrote:
| Would stating my experience or view make a difference in
| opening your mind? If so, I am happy to discuss.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| Stop creating problems where there are none. Homonyms exist,
| words have multiple meanings. A master is " a person who shows
| a lot of skill at something".
|
| https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...
| zohch wrote:
| > Homonyms exist, words have multiple meanings.
|
| Homonyms can exist and this can still be tone deaf.
|
| > Stop creating problems where there are none.
|
| Since when is the consequences of slavery not a problem?
| gsich wrote:
| True, but why the shitshow with "master" in a number of git
| repos and other fields?
|
| I know why. Virtue signalling. "Masters degree" is too hard
| to change.
| zohch wrote:
| > "Masters degree" is too hard to change.
|
| Only if you don't care about the hurt it causes people
| every day.
| gsich wrote:
| Citation needed. US slavery ended in 1865, which means
| that nobody has (or knows) a living relative/person that
| was affected by it.
|
| If you are unhappy because of that word, work on
| yourself.
| whatever1 wrote:
| The Ph.D. is a piece of paper that shows that for 5+ years you
| were able to consistently push towards a (previously considered)
| unattainable goal.
|
| It is gruesome, the idea might not work, nobody else can help you
| because nobody else has tried, nobody cares about the myriad
| things that you tried and failed.
|
| You will literally become a different person after the phd
| experience. But trust me, these 2-3 nights over the span of 5+
| years, when pieces somehow come together and the goddamn thing
| works, are really worth the effort.
| apohn wrote:
| >a (previously considered) unattainable goal.
|
| I've got a PhD. Personally, I'd say "unrealized" instead of
| "unattainable." Unattainable makes it seem like a dissertation
| topic is always some magical effort.
|
| Lots of PhD work is a investigating some mundane area that
| somebody else hasn't (due to lack of time or interest)
| investigated yet. I wonder how many dissertations come from a
| random comment by a professor saying like "Well here is some
| minor tangential topic I/somebody should look into."
| dnautics wrote:
| my PhD was "hey guys all the research that was done in this
| field is bullshit, because you are using a terrible technique,
| here is a better technique, look at all the things that it
| fixes and enables if you don't faff around". People are still
| using the bullshit technique though, even citing my seminal
| paper, because it's less of a pain in the ass.
| huijzer wrote:
| This is exactly my experience as well. Old techniques are
| easier approved by peer review, I guess so there is little
| incentive to change?
| yodsanklai wrote:
| My experience of PhD is more mundane. I didn't discover
| anything particularly meaningful, or hard, or even useful.
|
| Basically, I read papers until I understood the field well-
| enough so that I was able to make tiny contributions worth
| publishing and presenting in conferences. That led to a few
| papers that I eventually compiled in a thesis.
|
| I certainly got something out of the experience, but I can't
| say it made me a different person, or that it gives me an
| advantage of any sort at my current job (software engineer).
| apohn wrote:
| >My experience of PhD is more mundane. I didn't discover
| anything particularly meaningful, or hard, or even useful.
|
| Agreed. I feel the same about my PhD. I did write a book that
| I could use to put myself to sleep though :)
| fwilliams wrote:
| I was a software engineer briefly before starting grad
| school. During that time, I found I didn't have the time to
| sit down and learn about topics that interested me. I also
| wanted to be in research-y roles where I could build things
| that were more experimental and less well understood.
|
| During my PhD, I got to spend time learning, and attending
| talks/seminars/conferences. Gaining deeper background
| knowledge in my field as well as learning how to quickly
| evaluate and explore new ideas gave me the tools to have the
| type of job I wanted. I'm a research scientist at an
| industrial lab now and quite enjoy it.
|
| That being said, I agree with the grandparent post that doing
| a PhD can be a grueling experience. I had to carry the bulk
| of the work for many of the papers I submitted. If I took a
| day off, nobody would pick up the slack. Tight deadlines
| meant the only way to succeed was putting in long hours. My
| advisors were also spread very thin so it was difficult to
| get a lot of time with them. There were times when I felt
| very alone. This was a really stark contrast to how
| collaborative engineering in industry was and I don't think I
| ever fully adjusted to it. My current job feels like a happy
| middle ground. I publish papers alongside other people and we
| split the work.
| downrightmike wrote:
| That's the positive sum game. To gain something, a lot of
| people have to put work in to move us all in inch further.
| That's progress.
| djenendik wrote:
| All PhDs are not equal. As mentioned by others in this
| thread, generalizing probably means fitting to noise.
| tibyat wrote:
| this is how Pixar would paint it, but I dont think the reality
| is anywhere close.
|
| 99.99% of what takes up your time has been done millions of
| times before. The rounding error is just the next steps laid
| out for you by your PI, postdocs, etc. A grad student isn't a
| mad scientist, they're much more like a fawn awkwardly learning
| to walk.
| named-user wrote:
| It's not though is it. It's a piece of paper to say for 2 years
| or so you worked as a researcher employed by the university, at
| least that's my experience in the UK.
|
| Much better off just going in to industry. People praise PhDs
| too much. No one at work knows of mine. It's not on my CV
| either.
|
| What is awful is when someone with a PhD in, say, biology uses
| this as leverage in a completely unrelated field (data
| science). Malicious ambiguity...
|
| You're not an authority on something just because you have a
| PhD, certainly not an authority on everything. This is,
| damagingly, how many behave... You're barely scratching the
| surface at that level. It warrants a lifetime of work to get
| anywhere near the level of respect some put up on them. I guess
| that speaks volumes to the general level of insight into
| education by most..
| analog31 wrote:
| Oddly enough, early on when "data science" was becoming a
| thing, I thought that being a scientist would give me an edge
| in data science. I no longer believe that.
| named-user wrote:
| In many situations it's much more an art than a science.
| Oftentimes you see "we multiplied independent variable X by
| independent variable Y and that is what we attribute this
| increase in Z to"...
|
| But it's wrapped up in such complicated rhetoric that no
| one questions it (perhaps less cares...)
|
| I shouldn't berate it though. It pays the bills..
| whatever1 wrote:
| In UK the PhD is mostly an extended masters degree. In the US
| it is 5+ years of effort.
|
| Even if you have a masters in the US, the only benefit you
| get as a PhD student, is having less core courses in the
| first two semesters of your program.
| analog31 wrote:
| Because PhDs are still relatively few and far between, most
| people have never interacted more than superficially with a small
| handful of them. And if they happen to meet one who's an asshole
| or an idiot, that becomes memorable.
|
| What if generalizing about PhDs is impossible? What if that's
| partly the case because the _point_ of the PhD is to let someone
| establish their own character as a researcher or scholar? Things
| that deliberately try to elude generalization, are hard to
| generalize about. If you took me and my lab-mates in grad school,
| and followed us through our careers, I doubt that any common
| theme would emerge.
|
| What if generalization is further complicated by confounding
| variables? For instance, PhDs are more common in some fields than
| others. At my workplace, all of the PhDs have degrees in math or
| the physical sciences, even if they are working as engineers or
| programmers. There are no engineering or CS PhDs.
|
| Disclosure: Physics PhD
| dang wrote:
| Some past threads:
|
| _The illustrated guide to a Ph.D. (2010)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13381843 - Jan 2017 (46
| comments)
|
| _The illustrated guide to a Ph.D._ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5385881 - March 2013 (49
| comments)
|
| _The illustrated guide to a Ph.D._ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1588727 - Aug 2010 (42
| comments)
| Twisol wrote:
| Original by Matt Might at https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-
| school-in-pictures/.
|
| I'm not sure what this version adds. It mostly seems to copy the
| original wholesale. And there's more than a little bit of
| humanity after the copied part that's been left off:
|
| > If you zoom in on the boundary of human knowledge in the
| direction of genetics, there's something just outside humanity's
| reach:
|
| > [image with isolated dot labeled "Knowledge to save my son's
| life"]
|
| > My wife and I chose to start funding these graduate students
| after we learned that our son has a rare, fatal genetic disorder.
| wheybags wrote:
| Just clicked through and read his blog post[1] about
| identifying the genetic disorder his child has. Jesus, that was
| an emotional read :(
|
| 1: https://matt.might.net/articles/my-sons-killer/
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I didn't realize it had been so long ago. I went looking for
| a follow up. The boy died just over a year ago:
|
| https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/03/bertrand-might-matt-
| migh...
| [deleted]
| Radim wrote:
| As a dad - heart breaking!
|
| _> ...Once the shock of the A-T diagnosis wore off, we
| started researching. Within days, we were convinced that
| Bertrand did not have it._
|
| _> ...In Bertrand 's case, the cause of long QT turned out
| to be erythromycin, which had been used to treat his
| infection in the hospital._
|
| Yet many doctors will actively discourage patients from doing
| their own research. "Amateurs!" I found that a very familiar
| part in Matt's otherwise unique story. I've seen two similar
| stories unfold in my family.
|
| Here in the Czech Republic (ex-communist Eastern Europe),
| many doctors (esp. older ones) still cultivate that _" don't
| speak to us, mere mortal!"_ aura and I hate that. I'm sure
| doctors have their reasons, but as soon as you fall outside
| their "typical bucket" of symptoms and causes, best do you
| own due diligence and remain proactive.
|
| I now view doctors more as steam rollers - very efficient,
| backed by some impressive technology. But once off the beaten
| path... they're not that far from where you stand, as a HN
| reader capable of complex abstract thought, reasoning and
| research synthesis. Too many people put doctors on a pedestal
| (scientists too BTW, I'm saying as one).
| Ryoung27 wrote:
| I believe it adds a very bad website design and typos.
| hemmert wrote:
| I totally agree.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| _> I 'm not sure what this version adds._
|
| Links to an opportunity to pay for almost certainly useless
| immigration advice. They're plagiarizing to get good SEO so
| that they can prey on young people hoping to immigrate to the
| USA.
|
| (e: I'm highly supportive of skilled immigration and think
| there should be more of it... these "services" are a pox.)
| myself248 wrote:
| It would be good to change the URL, this is unquestionably a
| better source.
| tomrod wrote:
| Indeed. The Happy Schools source wholesale copied Matt's
| pictures and thought.
|
| On top of that, introducing people to Matt's work is a
| pleasure and a joy.
|
| Consider my input as voting for the Matt Might source to
| replace the HappySchools link.
| docflabby wrote:
| Looks like a good case for a DMCA (but we all know that's not
| what they are for) it's pretty much copy paste rip...
|
| You wouldn't steal a car......
| jholman wrote:
| This page is clearly consistent with the license granted at
| Matt's site.
|
| It's still an inferior site, but it's kinda wild to accuse
| someone of theft when they're not stealing.
| [deleted]
| chubot wrote:
| Yeah I suggest flagging this as blog spam.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| I was hoping this would be a guide on how to make that dent
| because I'm four years in and so far I've got nothing to show for
| it beside personal growth ... which is nice but you can't put
| that in a thesis.
| orforforof wrote:
| That can be really difficult. Having just read the fantastic
| addendum in the blog post, "HOW TO: Get tenure", I think there
| is good information in there for finishing a PhD too. My advice
| is to not be afraid to bring new ideas to the table at this
| stage; do what your advisor says to do, but also add in your
| own ideas. In my experience it is normal for a PhD to follow a
| course of minor progress for 4 years, followed by major success
| in year 5 once the student hits on a good direction and (more
| importantly) is able to recognize that for themselves and push
| forward, while taking on the risk and responsibility that goes
| with that. Then things start to click into place, your advisor
| learns to see you as "ready", you start executing as a team,
| and stuff gets done fast. Maybe this has no relation to what
| you're struggling with, but just my 2c.
| techcode wrote:
| This totally skipped the fact that some (or most of the world?!?)
| a while ago started to split applied from theoretical
| sciences/studies.
|
| So in that circle - they would go into slightly different
| directions.
| andrewclunn wrote:
| Were all degrees teaching actual real knowledge, and only those
| in the academic system able to acquire new knowledge, this would
| be correct. These "charts" are arrogance posing as humility.
| cupofcoffee wrote:
| People that have spent their entire lives in academia consoling
| themselves for their wasted years with fancy graphics. :)
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Why post something so negative like this?
| tonytuttle wrote:
| You should really look Matt Might up. He was an entrepreneur
| while working on his PhD. While he was a CS professor he had a
| child who had an extremely rare genetic disorder. He pivoted
| his entire life and focused all of his energy on learning about
| his son's condition. Since then he has become the Director of
| the Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute at the University of
| Alabama. Hardly a career of "wasted years" of an "entire life
| in academia".
| shagie wrote:
| > While he was a CS professor he had a child who had an
| extremely rare genetic disorder.
|
| From January of this past year:
|
| https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210126/Genetic-
| interacti...
|
| > In 2012, four-year-old Bertrand Might became the first-ever
| patient diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder called
| N-glycanase (NGLY1) deficiency. The discovery of this
| condition and Bertrand's diagnosis allowed doctors to look
| for other children with the same genetic defect. Since then,
| more than 60 additional patients have been found.
|
| > The disease affects every system of the body and is
| characterized by low muscle tone, seizures, developmental
| delays, and an inability to produce tears.
|
| > Sadly, Bertrand passed away in October at the age of 12.
| Although his life was cut short, his legacy will benefit
| children around the world. Through their website, NGLY1.org,
| Bertrand's parents collect and share a wealth of research and
| family stories to help educate and inform the community. As
| more patients have been identified, it's become apparent that
| even though the same gene is deactivated in all of them,
| their symptoms and severity of disease vary widely.
| bob229 wrote:
| Unless your phd is in critical race or gender studies and your
| endeavours actually reduce the totality of human knowledge
| inetsee wrote:
| My first job after college was as a laboratory assistant at the
| university where I'd gotten my degree. My minor was in computer
| science, so my job was doing computer programming for the
| professor I'd done my senior thesis with. The plan was to work
| for a year or two, then start graduate school.
|
| The nice thing about this plan was that I got to see what
| graduate school was like without actually going to graduate
| school. After a couple of years I got a job as a programmer at
| another company (not at another university). I never did go to
| graduate school.
| k__ wrote:
| In that image the master is longer than the bachelor, but I
| learned so much more in my bachelor than in my master.
| learc83 wrote:
| The bachelors is the whole pink part not just the bump. It
| looks like more volume overall than the masters. It's meant to
| represent the additional breadth.
|
| But yeah masters programs do vary widely. When I was in
| undergrad there were students doing a CS masters coming from
| other disciplines. They mostly took classes with us and had to
| write maybe an extra paper to "make it a 6000 level class"
| (granted I did take more of the theory heavy CS classes than
| was required).
|
| In that case their masters was basically equivalent to just the
| bump from the bachelors.
| 0xB31B1B wrote:
| IMO the PhD description here isn't really useful for STEM fields
| and is too simple/idealized. What you learn in a PhD is how to do
| science. You learn about: experiment design, getting funding in
| your field, writing papers in your field, using the tools to
| understand data, learning who are the people in your field you
| want to work with/for to achieve your personal research goals
| etc. It's not "you make a dent in the universe of knowledge", its
| "you learn the stuff you need to know to make a dent in the
| universe of knowledge". Actually making the dent is ancillary.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| You do learn those things, but at the end of the day, you're
| not going to graduate without having some novel research in
| your thesis.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| It's also learning to manage how to live on a criminally low
| salary. If I were to give advice to my kids, that would be a
| resounding - don't get a PhD. You can do research in industry
| while getting paid extremely well and most likely your work
| won't go waste. The only problem is that industry only hires
| PhDs for serious research - this needs to be reformed. There
| should be a possibility of allowing non-PhDs learn the process
| of research while they're working there.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Salary/stipends vary significantly with country and research
| area. I can tell you that in Sweden for example a PhD student
| earns significantly above median wage and more than a teacher
| for example. In engineering you earn about on the same level
| as a masters graduate (slightly below typically).
| localhost wrote:
| I certainly pushed the boundaries of knowledge by a tiny amount
| during my PhD - that's what publishing is all about. Sure,
| you're learning how to write the paper, how to conduct the
| research, how to think about science, etc. but you're also
| __researching__. Matt gets it exactly right in this
| description.
|
| I remember many years ago a friend's father commenting on my
| PhD by saying "isn't it wonderful to be the only person in the
| world to know about this thing that you're working on?" That's
| the moment when you have your unusual observation, something
| that nobody else has seen before (or at least nobody has
| published before) and it truly is a wonderful feeling. You rely
| on your advisor to tell you work to look initially, and
| eventually you get good at finding those places to look
| yourself.
|
| As Frank Westheimer once said (paraphrased) "Science starts
| with an unusual observation. When you have an unusual
| observation, one of two things has happened: you've made a
| discovery or you've made a mistake.". That's also an important
| lesson, and one that formed the core of my PhD.
| achillesheels wrote:
| Sir or Madam, isn't the ultimate motivation for the pursuit
| of scientific knowledge to enlighten humanity with the
| experience of wisdom? If so, how enlightened has humanity
| become thanks to your contributions? I ask because your
| subjective "wonderful feeling" of possible arcanum may be as
| pointless as, say, a science of coffee tables, to human
| progress.
|
| I suppose this is the reassurance of being educated in the
| engineering sciences: the results speak for themselves.
| localhost wrote:
| Here's a link to my paper - judge for yourself:
| https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ja00151a001
| mrbukkake wrote:
| Yeah the results speak for themselves alright - mass
| surveillance, hideous pollution, oceans of pointless junk.
| Get a grip man
| bumby wrote:
| > _pushed the boundaries of knowledge_
|
| I agree this _should_ be the goal, but I'm not sure it's
| consistently realized in practice. It seems an awful lot of
| research is derivative or auto-cited, so I'm not not sure it
| would fall into the "pushing the boundaries" category.
| localhost wrote:
| I can only speak to my personal experience here, I'm
| certainly not an expert in how effective PhDs across all
| disciplines are at pushing back the boundaries of
| knowledge.
|
| What's interesting is that the chemical reaction that was
| described in my paper that I linked elsewhere in this
| comment section [1] was originally discovered by some
| Japanese scientists in 1970, and we referred to their work
| as the "Oka Fragmentation". They too pushed back the
| boundaries of knowledge a little bit as well and we built
| on top of that. Also, my paper was arguing against
| conclusions made by a different team at Johns Hopkins - our
| work was ultimately shown to be correct as born out by
| subsequent experiments from our research group and others.
| So that contributes to the boundaries of knowledge by
| showing that some other body of work isn't correct. Who
| knows, perhaps our work will be shown to be incorrect in
| some future research.
|
| I guess what I'm trying to say here is that it's very
| difficult to discern impact at the time that you do the
| research - the impact can only truly be seen through the
| lens of history looking backwards.
|
| [1] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ja00151a001
| dahfizz wrote:
| Sure, but if you learn all that stuff without actually making a
| dent, you don't get granted your PhD. All the procedural stuff
| you learn along the way is necessary, but that's not what the
| PhD is.
| btrettel wrote:
| I'm glad to see that several other commenters here are picking up
| on the fact that many PhDs don't actually make novel
| contributions, contrary to the suggestions of the article
| [0][1][2].
|
| To add my own 2 cents, I think many people with PhDs _believe_
| they pushed the boundaries of knowledge, but many actually did
| not. As dahart indicated, the boundaries of knowledge look
| different to different people. Given that, one frequently
| "reinvents the wheel" because they think they're at the boundary,
| but they are not. There's this idea that science is incremental,
| but I don't think it is. It's more of a random walk. And given
| that much (if not most) research is conducted by relatively
| ignorant people (PhD students) who do not have much experience in
| their fields, we should expect people to be starting far from the
| boundary and "pushing" into areas already explored. The advisor
| is supposed to provide more knowledge, moving people closer to
| the boundary, but again, I don't see that happening as often as
| it should. Too frequently I see exploring previously seen
| territory while thinking it's unexplored or just accepting ideas
| about previously explored territory that are wrong.
|
| Reinventing the wheel is becoming increasingly likely in my view
| as the number of published documents increases dramatically, but
| search technologies, strategies, and habits (most PhDs don't do a
| comprehensive search or use good search strategies) aren't
| keeping up.
|
| While I do think I had some actually novel contributions during
| my PhD, I view myself as more of an "intellectual janitor",
| cleaning up the mess/technical debt that previous researchers
| left behind. Unfortunately this sort of work is perceived by many
| researchers as not research. My own PhD advisor was not a fan of
| this aspect of my work.
|
| I tried to be aware of the literature far more than most PhD
| students. Many people seem to be _offended_ when I point out that
| their "novel" idea isn't actually novel. In my view, novelty
| should not be required to get a PhD or publish a paper. One
| should never be _offended_ that their ideas aren 't novel.
| Disappointed, sure, but offended, no. The only way to have high
| confidence that an idea is novel/pushes the boundaries is to do a
| comprehensive search, and even then you can't be 100% sure that
| you're not missing something. Most PhDs spend far too little time
| on this aspect.
|
| 0xB31B1B got it right: A PhD is training. Because PhD students
| are so inexperienced, they should not be expected to produce
| novel research or even recognize what novel research looks like.
| I think the US should greatly decrease the amount of funding
| available for PhD positions while increasing the amount of
| funding for permanent research positions. Total researcher
| headcount would decrease, sure, but a smaller number of more
| experienced researchers with stable positions would do a better
| job overall in my view.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29139842
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29139567
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29139621
| Derbasti wrote:
| Very true. Regrettably, janitorial work is extremely hard to
| publish, as I had to find out. Mostly because reproducing other
| people's work, or comparing methods, is bound to find
| unfavorable conditions where a method does not work as well as
| published, or error measures that highlight common problematic
| behavior. At least in my area of research, such findings were
| unpopular with reviewers, to say the least. Probably not least
| because the reviewers tended to be the very people whose work
| was reproduced.
|
| Which is sad, because this sort of work is well-suited to get
| PhD students acquainted with a field, and provides real
| scientific information.
| soumyadeb wrote:
| Mirrors another popular quote.
|
| After bachelors, you feel, _you know everything_. After masters,
| you feel, _you know nothing_. After PhD, you feel, _noone knows
| anything_.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| What on earth did they study that left them with the impression
| that they knew everything after a bachelor's degree? I and most
| people I know were left with the impression that we had merely
| scratched the surface. I studied applied physics in the 70s if
| that is relevant.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I must have skipped the "know everything phase". I've always
| felt like I know nothing. I have also discovered that no one
| knows anything (only have an MS, no PhD). Maybe it's just due
| to the nature tech - even if I know it know it in one tech
| right now, the tech changes and I dont know it in the other
| tech.
| soumyadeb wrote:
| Well, that's your humility. Most undergrads I have come
| across (me included) feel top of the world after the
| bachelors and landing a tech job. The better the job offer,
| more the feeling of _you know everything_
| giantg2 wrote:
| I felt that in a different way after starting my first real
| job. I thought I was making good money and had a great
| career ahead. Now 10 years later and a MS, I realize I was
| underpaid, and likely still am, with a job and not a
| career.
| gsich wrote:
| *Mains
| zohch wrote:
| Like really, how hard is it to rename a degree, get with the
| times people, it's 2021.
| dahart wrote:
| Geophysicist David Chapman once told me a story that has stuck
| with me for life...
|
| There's a boundary of what you know, and a boundary of what you
| _think_ you don't know. Not the limits of all knowledge, but a
| belief about where that limit is.
|
| When you're a kid, you already know you don't know everything,
| but you see the radius for the rest of it as not that far off,
| maybe achievable some day.
|
| As you grow and learn and go to college and keep studying, the
| radius of what you know increases proportionally, accumulating
| little by little. And the radius of what you start to realize
| that you don't know increases faster and faster, not just
| multiplied by the population of the earth, but also by the
| dawning realization that we collectively know very little.
|
| The take home message being that your relative size of knowledge,
| the more you learn, shrinks asymptotically to zero. In a strange
| way I find this more comforting than believing that graduate
| school research is at or even pushing the boundary of collective
| knowledge; the reality is that most advanced degrees aren't
| broaching the boundary nor feeding into the collective.
| MayeulC wrote:
| You're alluding to, without naming it, the "Dunning-Kruger"
| effect: you need to be knowledgeable enough to determine the
| complexity of a field. Beginners will often overestimate their
| ability.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
| dahart wrote:
| No no no!! Oh man, I'm really sad my comment invoked DK, I
| don't think this is the same thing at all, and I have a
| strong dislike of this paper because it's both misrepresented
| and almost universally misunderstood. (And the authors are
| complicit in encouraging this misunderstanding, because the
| paper made them famous.)
|
| The paper did not show confidence being inversely
| proportional to knowledge or skill as many people believe. It
| shows a _positive_ correlation between confidence and skill.
|
| But the paper itself is very hyperbolic and draws invalid
| conclusions that are unsupported by their own data IMO. You
| should read the actual paper, it's enlightening to look at
| what they actually tested, and compare that to how they wrote
| about it. They didn't test high skill tasks. And they didn't
| test incompetent people. They tested only Cornell undergrads
| who were volunteering for extra credit. They didn't control
| for this completely skewed population sample in any way.
|
| They also didn't test people's estimation of themselves
| either. Not at all. They asked people to rank themselves in a
| group of others, without knowledge of the others' skills.
| This simply means people were guessing, not that they were
| overestimating themselves!!
|
| This is a great post explaining what's most likely happening
| with DK: regression to the mean.
| https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-
| dunning-...
| kkylin wrote:
| Reminds me of two things that readers of this post may also
| find interesting:
|
| https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/dont-
| prematurel...
|
| https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/be-sceptical-
| of...
|
| Tao is specifically speaking to mathematicians, but some of
| the lessons carry to other fields (and perhaps other areas of
| life).
| achillesheels wrote:
| Hear hear! The "doctorate" is a blank paper compared to its
| former grandeur. It's astonishing to me, for example, how
| unmotivated so many disciplines which rely upon human
| biological phenomena, eg the social sciences, do not actually
| mandate knowing cellular biology, let alone its electromagnetic
| phenomena (I'm looking at you medical schools!). It's not like
| the knowledge is absent - it's the will power to continue to
| learn, as opposed to secure a salary, that is absent. This is
| the largest divergence between aristocratic and proletarian
| science: the pursuit of knowledge for its very sake.
| mrbukkake wrote:
| This comment is pretentious gibberish. What are you actually
| trying to say? The only concrete critique you seem to be
| making is that people don't learn "cellular biology" or its
| "electromagnetic phenomena" at medical school which is just
| laughably wrong. The second sentence doesn't even make
| grammatical sense
| pc86 wrote:
| Shocking that comment by someone quoting Seneca, in Latin,
| in their profile would be pretentious!
| mdp2021 wrote:
| It is normal for many. Learnt at school, met quite often
| during their studies. It is an implicit part and a normal
| experience of many curricula of studies: it was of common
| use until only a few centuries ago. So, no exceptional
| display: normal like French for old diplomacy and
| international exchange in general in a not so distant
| past.
| johan_felisaz wrote:
| I'd advice reading the famous article "More is different" by
| P. W. Anderson. It takes condensed matter physics as a
| counter example that knowledge is a pyramid, and that e.g.
| biology is just applied chemistry, which is just applied
| physics, which is just applied math and so on. I am glad
| social science people do not need to know quantum physics,
| nor medecine does group theory ; their fields are dense
| enough on their own sake ...
| throwawaygh wrote:
| Blatant plagiarism by a website that's being used as a sales
| funnel for immigration attorneys. Kinda gross and exploitative.
| Maybe change the link to https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-
| school-in-pictures/
| amelius wrote:
| Until some Ph.D. student invents the AI that will make dents
| everywhere and in rapid succession ...
| 0xTJ wrote:
| This does depend on where you are. I think that in the US
| master's degrees are different that they are in other many
| places. It also depends a lot on the master's degree. Some
| degrees are just more school. Some are a little school with new
| and innovative research.
| spyremeown wrote:
| Very true in my experience. In Brazil, for example, the common
| engineering curriculum is 5 years and requires an internship
| and a dissertation, which is gonna be basically a master's
| thesis - in a good university, which is not the norm around
| these parts, so I'm very biased -.
|
| Many colleagues of mine go to Germany for their master's and
| get surprised when they realise they already studied most of
| the material in their undergrad education here.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Today PhD is just demonstration that you can do research and be
| understood by other researchers. Maybe 1 in 100 PhD's is
| meaningful contribution.
|
| Postdoc research is where people truly become experts and expand
| their knowledge.
| billfruit wrote:
| What if one makes an small contribution through independent
| study? Will that be sufficient to be granted a Phd?
|
| I do hear that some universities offer a PhD by publishing,
| wherein they grant a degree for already published work.
|
| Perhaps a bit like the film making model whose name presently
| eludes me, where instead of trying to get a funding from a studio
| to make a film, the filmmakers make it out of their own resource
| arrangements, and later try to sell the finished film to studios
| (perhaps for a profit).
| xen0 wrote:
| In a previous job, I knew a scientist colleague who obtained
| their PhD in this manner. The number of Universities that allow
| this is quite small, I believe he said 'two' (in the UK), and
| he still had to undergo a viva/defense.
| BenoitP wrote:
| An addition I'd like to make is that this circle is a high
| dimensional sphere (>300 dimensions IMHO in our current age).
|
| Another one is that an alternate representation of this circle
| can be made by having theta as the x axis, and r as -y. In this
| representation, a PhD would sort of look like a T: a horizontal
| bar for general knowledge, and a vertical one going deep down for
| the PhD.
|
| That's the T shape Valve refers to in their handbook [1]. Enough
| generic knowledge to communicate with your peers, and a deep
| enough specialty to make an impact.
|
| Other areas of specialty would make it look like paint-drip.
|
| I believe such a map can be build for an individual through a
| series of ML-chosen Questions and Answers (ML because this is the
| tool to explore that high dimensional space), but I don't have
| time to try to build it :/
|
| I believe one could also assign economic value to some paint-drip
| patterns. The biology + deep learning paint drip seems to be very
| hot right now.
|
| [1] p.46
| https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployee...
| blueflow wrote:
| Don't take the model itself too seriously - its a helper for
| our brain to conceptualize a few situations, but like all other
| models, it has its limits.
| seahawks78 wrote:
| This is mostly accurate and true. A PhD degree is basically
| "knowing absolutely everything about practically nothing".
| rosetremiere wrote:
| In my experience (math, small european university), this is the
| romantic idea of a Ph.D. more than how it ends up being in
| practice. In my case (and quite a few others around me), a
| Ph.D. is some research of varying novelty and complexity, far
| from making you an expert in the subject(s) at hand, but
| hopefully enough for your committee to think you deserve the
| title. In the cases I'm talking about, you're far from becoming
| this idealized "expert in your specific subfield" with new
| insights and that further researchers will base their work on;
| it's mostly grabbing whatever small questions you can try to
| explore and if possible answering them. Still, I think the
| idealized version _does_ hold for quite a few people, if not
| all of us.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| I think it depends on the field, and on factors like quality
| of advisor, quality of peers, how much teaching you have to
| do, etc.
|
| In CS, for example, people definitely come out as experts in
| some niche of their research. Of course, there's a difference
| between their expertise and that of an experienced professor,
| but both are quite far from a normal person's knowledge of
| the field.
| rosetremiere wrote:
| Good to know. I just wanted to express the (quite
| disappointing) fact that not all Ph.D.s match what's being
| proposed here.
| morelandjs wrote:
| While learning the process that enables you to do that.
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