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I'm quitting my PhD

blog.derhagen.eu

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Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#371

Post by [deleted] »

bumby wrote: post #369
chrisseaton wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My claim is that you do not Yes, some people are naturally talented enough to do research without training, or with training other than a PhD. But if you aren't exceptional, then promoting this is not realistic and is setting people up for disappointment. Some people can learn to play an instrument without a teacher... most would be better served with some structure and guidance for an experienced tutor.

You seem to imply that a PhD program is the only way to have researchers get tutored/trained. I.e., that PhD programs have a monopoly on developing the skillset; I'm saying they have a monopoly on the credential but not the skillset. Maybe I've had good employers but there's always been an emphasis on training junior employees in research, regardless if they had a PhD or not. Maybe that's the seat of our difference i…

[deleted]

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#372

Post by chrisseaton »

bumby wrote: post #369
chrisseaton wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My claim is that you do not Yes, some people are naturally talented enough to do research without training, or with training other than a PhD. But if you aren't exceptional, then promoting this is not realistic and is setting people up for disappointment. Some people can learn to play an instrument without a teacher... most would be better served with some structure and guidance for an experienced tutor.

You seem to imply that a PhD program is the only way to have researchers get tutored/trained. I.e., that PhD programs have a monopoly on developing the skillset; I'm saying they have a monopoly on the credential but not the skillset. Maybe I've had good employers but there's always been an emphasis on training junior employees in research, regardless if they had a PhD or not. Maybe that's the seat of our difference i…

I think I'm pretty qualified to talk about training people outside a PhD.

I had a high-school intern who worked with me and hit the top of Hacker News with a new compiler optimisation she invented.

I still think a PhD is the best for most people in most cases, if you want to be doing genuine research.

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#373

Post by bumby »

chrisseaton wrote: post #372
bumby wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to imply that a PhD program is the only way to have researchers get tutored/trained. I.e., that PhD programs have a monopoly on developing the skillset; I'm saying they have a monopoly on the credential but not the skillset. Maybe I've had good employers but there's always been an emphasis on training junior employees in research, regardless if they had a PhD or not. Maybe that's the seat of our difference i…

I think I'm pretty qualified to talk about training people outside a PhD. I had a high-school intern who worked with me and hit the top of Hacker News with a new compiler optimisation she invented. I still think a PhD is the best for most people in most cases, if you want to be doing genuine research.

I'm interested enough that I could change my mind (although I thought it was curious that you said "I can't be convinced"). But your responses are somewhat vague and defensive in the tone of "I know what I'm talking about" without the specifics as to what I'm actually asking. To be specific, what do you think an PhD course offers that training through other means does not? For example, what do you define as "genuine research"? How does the training differ?

IMO, employment research offers many advantages. For one, it forces somebody to focus on the application and how it would genuinely be of value, so that one doesn't get bogged down into "neat" but ultimately impractical efforts that are little more than academic exercises. IMO, it opens the projects up to more interesting problems because they don't get cornered into the "publish or perish" paradigm. People easily get paid 3-4x (or more) what they would as a TA. They have daily access to experts in their field rather than relying on piecemeal meetings with their advisors. It also tends to open one up to larger resources for their investigation; for example, the people in PhD programs at my last job were given ample access to multi-million dollar rocket test stands and the anonymized data from them; if that were a university resource it would be hard to gain that same level of recurring access. Now I'll grant that there are certain PhD programs that are better suited to specific types of fundamental research that would otherwise be difficult to get funding while an employee. Nuclear physics would be one example. But I would venture that the majority of research is on the applied sciences/engineering side.

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#374

Post by matthewdgreen »

btrettel wrote: post #363
matthewdgreen wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think tarring the entire field of scientific research by saying "I claim I found serious flaws in a few unnamed papers" is pretty meaningless. Provide specifics!

Based on conversations I've had with tenured academics like yourself, providing specifics won't convince you. You could simply say that you aren't qualified in my field so you can't evaluate what I've said, or deny that I've identified enough problems. Those are reasonable counters, but they won't be convincing to me either. The most effective thing I can do is encourage you to find problems in published papers yours…

Let me understand this: you found an error in a paper published in 1998, over 24 years ago. Based on this finding you were able to publish a critique and partial solution in a more recent conference or journal, which seems like an absolutely first-class scientific outcome. (I can only assume that very few people were relying on this stupid model, since the flaw wasn’t noticed for decades.) And yet despite this reasonably good outcome correcting an ancient and apparently little-studied result, you feel that this error indicts the entire field of scientific research… because people have cited the paper?? (Most likely, given the number of citations, without relying on the model and simply listing it in “previous work” sections.)

You are also unhappy that you can’t get a response from the first author [initially I read their Google scholar as indicating they’d left the field, but they haven’t and that was my mistake reading Google Scholar in Korean.] Meanwhile you have not contacted the third (typically senior and advisory) author, who appears to have publications as of 2022?

Yet even if you do the basic legwork here and contact all the authors, I’m not sure quite what result you want from this? I presume you’d like an acknowledgement that an old paper has errors? You’ve already received that through the acceptance of your own paper. Would an admission by the third author help? Do you demand a retraction of that ancient paper and every single paper that cited it since? And how is this the devastating critique of all science that you seem to think it is?

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#375

Post by btrettel »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #374
btrettel wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on conversations I've had with tenured academics like yourself, providing specifics won't convince you. You could simply say that you aren't qualified in my field so you can't evaluate what I've said, or deny that I've identified enough problems. Those are reasonable counters, but they won't be convincing to me either. The most effective thing I can do is encourage you to find problems in published papers yours…

Let me understand this: you found an error in a paper published in 1998, over 24 years ago. Based on this finding you were able to publish a critique and partial solution in a more recent conference or journal, which seems like an absolutely first-class scientific outcome. (I can only assume that very few people were relying on this stupid model, since the flaw wasn’t noticed for decades.) And yet despite this reason…

I'm not sure we're having a productive conversation. Perhaps I've been unclear, but I didn't say this was a "devastating critique of all science". I said that I thought my field was "for the most part [...] okay" and I think that's true for science broadly. My main point is that peer review as currently practiced is not as good at quality control as you seem to believe.

My link was just one example. As I indicated, I don't have time to give more examples, and I didn't expect to convince you. I think few academics are actively looking for errors, so unless you are, you may not notice them as often as I have.

> I can only assume that very few people were relying on this stupid model, since the flaw wasn’t noticed for decades.

There are quite a few papers that directly use the criticized model, from the 90s until recently. It does seem that many people blindly accepted a clearly wrong model. With that being said, the other model in the paper is responsible for most of the citations.

> You are also unhappy that you can’t get a response from the first author [...] I’m not sure quite what result you want from this?

The first author is the senior author here. (The conference paper version does not have the other two authors.) I contacted them because if I'm wrong, I wanted them to tell me how so that I could avoid making a fool of myself in my paper. I don't want their paper to be retracted, though a notice that it has severe errors would be helpful to readers.

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#376

Post by temp_anne_12345 »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #27

I feel for the student writing this piece and I'm sad that they've developed some bitterness at their advisors and the entire field (which I read in the piece, even if it wasn't the intent.) Everyone needs to understand something important: a PhD is first and foremost an apprenticeship. It is your opportunity to study under someone who has done a specific kind of research, and learn from that person. If that relation…

"It is your opportunity to study under someone who has done a specific kind of research, and learn from that person. "

That is what is it supposed to be, but I must interject that for many, myself included, the advisor is effectively absent. In a lab without postdocs or other students what I personally ended up with is an apprenticeship in learning from myself.

If you are seeing your advisor more than once or twice a year, and or if there are other people in your lab to discuss your work with then you are doing your PhD in easy mode.

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#377

Post by derhagen »

NotOscarWilde wrote: post #370
sva_ wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt they can edit their comment at this point. If you really want it removed, reach out to hn@ycombinator.com for (accidental) doxxing.

Indeed there is no longer a possibility to edit or delete for me. I was careful not to include names or places, and all this information is easily searchable starting from the author's username on HN or the website name. So while I maintain that I made my comment in good faith, I hereby acknowledge that it is okay if it gets deleted, should HN moderators be requested to do so. Update: I will contact the HN moderators…

Thanks a lot!

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#378

Post by BeetleB »

JanisErdmanis wrote: post #244
holyra wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a harsh reply. I also had the same issue as the author: absent supervisions. I had only two meetings during my phd and they never reviewed my papers (I tried everything to motivate them and I finally gave up). I did everything on my own. It was very hard. I learned the hard way (try and fail... do it again...). I finally finished my phd with great appreciations from the jury. However this ends with a consider…

> I had only two meetings during my phd and they never reviewed my papers This sounds unreal. How did your supervisor managed his subordinates so they wound not spend their time in leisure activities? > However this ends with a considerable cost I can relate to that. Broken aspirations, depleted ambition and energy and lack of interpersonal relationships sometimes make me feel sad.

> How did your supervisor managed his subordinates so they wound not spend their time in leisure activities?

They are not there to babysit, and many want self motivated people. If you spend your time doing leisure activities, you will either spend too much time getting the PhD, or simply not get it.

Also, in large enough research groups, the advisor delegates almost everything to postdocs. I knew one guy who, every time he met his advisor, would have to answer the question "So what was your thesis topic again?"

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#379

Post by JanisErdmanis »

BeetleB wrote: post #378
JanisErdmanis wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I had only two meetings during my phd and they never reviewed my papers This sounds unreal. How did your supervisor managed his subordinates so they wound not spend their time in leisure activities? > However this ends with a considerable cost I can relate to that. Broken aspirations, depleted ambition and energy and lack of interpersonal relationships sometimes make me feel sad.

> How did your supervisor managed his subordinates so they wound not spend their time in leisure activities? They are not there to babysit, and many want self motivated people. If you spend your time doing leisure activities, you will either spend too much time getting the PhD, or simply not get it. Also, in large enough research groups, the advisor delegates almost everything to postdocs. I knew one guy who, every t…

This seems very much US and academic field specific. Here in Europe when I did my PhD in physics the supervisor is the boss designing the project and giving out orders on tasks to be accomplished. As somewhere in this thread one mentioned it is a true apprenticeship.

It is though very much opposite of what new PhDs expects judging that from my own experience, conversations and confronting my supervisor who eventually frankly said that “academic freedom is not for PhDs”. This created an environment which reinforced itself.

This made me look PhD as a job which I tried to treat as such looking through cost/benefit lense. Probably, if my supervisor would not keep up with regular meetings I would have done less (after being introduced with concept of “academic freedom” for PhDs).

I would not look in that as lack of self motivation. In contrary at the beginning many PhDs were quite curios on what they do and what happens around them. But by the end of it many my colleagues went away from academia to work it in finance because it pays and frankly many have said that PhD is just a job. Thus I would assert that self motivation does not make PhD thesis alone unless if someone cares about it.

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#380

Post by JanisErdmanis »

holyra wrote: post #285
JanisErdmanis wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I had only two meetings during my phd and they never reviewed my papers This sounds unreal. How did your supervisor managed his subordinates so they wound not spend their time in leisure activities? > However this ends with a considerable cost I can relate to that. Broken aspirations, depleted ambition and energy and lack of interpersonal relationships sometimes make me feel sad.

> This sounds unreal. How did your supervisor managed his subordinates so they wound not spend their time in leisure activities? Self-pressure? I cannot spend my work time in leisure time, otherwise I ashame. It is pretty even the opposite that I experienced: I felt ashame in my leisure time to not work to get more progress on my phd. We were only two phd students supervised by the same pair of supervisors. In fact w…

Yeah, I have seen many of my colleagues to feel ashamed to take all vacation time (around 28 workdays in a year) to go home or on vacation. It sometimes felt like unarticulated competition who takes less. Perhaps, it can explained by insecurity that your name is going to be taken off the paper you are coauthoring with others.

I guess in your situation the supervisors were present in taking care of your self motivation and checking your commitment to your PhD when having informal conversations. Also, it sounds you were in control of your PhD project and could set up goals and strategy achieving them yourself.

I am curios, in what field did you do your PhD?

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