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Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic (2010)

economist.com

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Re: Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic (2010)

#41

Post by andrewcooke »

VLM wrote: post #36
recursive wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal satisfaction is one of the best outcomes I can imagine. What's more important than personal satisfaction?

Health and safety of your kids and spouse? I could have gone academic, in fact I could toss it all away and go academic right now. However ... I would never voluntarily make my wife and kids suffer like that. Maybe after I retire it would be safe to go academic. It boils down to you might be able to fire me up enough to eat ramen and live in a cardboard box because of topic X, but I'd have a hard time looking my kids…

i know plenty of academics with healthy, safe, spouses and children. they eat just fine.

Re: Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic (2010)

#42

Post by beambot »

chrisrhoden wrote: post #22
manaskarekar wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of 'The illustrated guide to a Ph.D' - http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

What a perfectly delightful piece of academic propaganda. I'm sure that I am overreacting, but the suggestion that a PhD is the first and only time that you will experience original knowledge in your life seems quite smug.

Matt is making an "A implies B" argument: PhD's by definition must contribute original knowledge. He didn't address the converse (that non-PhD's don't or can't).

Re: Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic (2010)

#43

Post by srean »

VLM wrote: post #36
recursive wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal satisfaction is one of the best outcomes I can imagine. What's more important than personal satisfaction?

Health and safety of your kids and spouse? I could have gone academic, in fact I could toss it all away and go academic right now. However ... I would never voluntarily make my wife and kids suffer like that. Maybe after I retire it would be safe to go academic. It boils down to you might be able to fire me up enough to eat ramen and live in a cardboard box because of topic X, but I'd have a hard time looking my kids…

I think the parent's point was all of this is subsumed by "personal satisfaction".

Re: Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic (2010)

#44

Post by dcalacci »

chrisrhoden wrote: post #22
manaskarekar wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of 'The illustrated guide to a Ph.D' - http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

What a perfectly delightful piece of academic propaganda. I'm sure that I am overreacting, but the suggestion that a PhD is the first and only time that you will experience original knowledge in your life seems quite smug.

A PhD is definitely not the only time that a person can delve into original research or knowledge, you're right.

But I don't see any place where Dr. Might suggests that it's the _only_ experience that can lead to original research.

I think a PhD is definitely one of the only experiences where upon completion you are required to have contributed to the world of original and new knowledge in some way, though.

Re: Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic (2010)

#45

Post by VLM »

kaeluka wrote: post #14

I'm so sick of economists/journalists/outsiders implying that the reason to study or, more general, to learn is income. I do it because it's giving me the chance to pick problems I find interesting, try to solve them as best as possible and learn a lot about myself along the way. Also, where I'm doing my PhD, a starting salary as a PhD student is comparable (slightly lower) with entry level programmer salaries. edit:…

"I'm so sick of economists/journalists/outsiders implying the reason to"

They're not implying reasons, they're reporting it. Its all about how much your culture values people with PHD / in the pipeline to get one. You may not like what your culture is saying about you, but no point in blaming the messenger.

Rotate into a (hopefully) nonpersonal analogy. Say a statistician reports that your average ex-con makes 25% less than someone who hasn't been punished yet. The proper response isn't against the statistician, or that the point of prison isn't to make money, or that ex-cons used to make more money in the good old days, the point is to observe that our culture doesn't particularly value ex-cons, much less than most assume, and much worse than it used to be.

Like being a black sheep? Nothin wrong with being an individual. But don't give someone a hassle for reporting the emperor has no clothes.

They're reporting outcomes, not processes. Reporting actual measured price not self perceived value.

IF they were morally or ethically attacking because academia leads to poverty etc etc ... you'd know. The tone of the article wouldn't be "hey guess what"

Re: Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic (2010)

#46

Post by gchpaco »

sgt101 wrote: post #8

It takes a certain poverty of mind to quantify the value of an education in terms of earnings. I don't earn a huge amount, but I have a fantastic job, I live in a wonderful place about 5 minutes from my office and doing my Ph.D. was the best thing that I ever did. I agree that you don't need one, and many people with one that I have met and employed are fairly hopeless (in comparison to razor sharp and super talented…

I spent seven years doing a PhD in Computer Science. It was an unpleasant experience from about year three or four on and I would have gotten the masters' and left before finishing if I knew then what I know now, and probably a) not gone through a suicidally depressive period b) have done more interesting work c) traveled more since I could afford it and d) also been paid more.

The educational aspects of a PhD, at least in my program, were essentially equivalent to the educational aspects of getting a masters degree in the same subject area. The difference between them was after you finished the educational aspects you were now expected to produce between 3 to 6 papers a year corresponding roughly to the important conferences in your field and get most of them published. Speaking personally it takes me about three to four weeks to write a good research paper assuming I already have the results, so I worked out at one point that I had about two weeks to generate meaningful work to write about if I was to publish to that schedule. It is impossible to do anything more than the famous Least Publishable Increment of Work in that environment, and as a result most papers in Computer Science aren't especially compelling. A healthier field (say, chemistry, physics, mathematics) has you write perhaps one or two a year, with actual data.

Re: Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic (2010)

#47

Post by shriphani »

chrisrhoden wrote: post #22
manaskarekar wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of 'The illustrated guide to a Ph.D' - http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

What a perfectly delightful piece of academic propaganda. I'm sure that I am overreacting, but the suggestion that a PhD is the first and only time that you will experience original knowledge in your life seems quite smug.

You used the wrong syllogism.

Re: Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic (2010)

#48

Post by dumitrue »

tjr wrote: post #35
wmf wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't read the literature because it's behind a paywall that you can't afford, it's very likely that any papers you write will be rejected for poor form, lack of proper citations, and possibly being entirely redundant. I think there are much bigger problems trying to perform research outside "the system", but access to the literature is an issue.

(Not necessarily directed at wmf...) In a lot of HN conversations pertaining to computer science research, it appears to me that a lot of folks equate doing computer science research with publishing papers. I suppose that if your job is to work as a researcher, or as a grad student, or as a professor, perhaps publishing papers is very important. But in the context of doing research independently (as this subthread se…

Sending a paper for review can help with identifying whether

(1) What you're solving has already been solved

(2) You have a bug in your solution

(3) You can get feedback from the reviewers such that the system is ultimately improved (this happens more often than you think)

(4) You have actually shown that it works better or just deluded yourself into thinking it does (because you happen to have done a lot of work and are convinced that it was good work).

Submitting a paper for publication is essentially independent verification and validation from (hopefully, but not always) impartial people. If you can convince a committee of peers that what you do is the state of the art and you can show this on some public benchmark, then it's a very different proposition from beating some internal benchmark, which may or may not be well-constructed/biased/etc.

The downside is that you have to write a paper, go through the reviewing process etc (i.e. what a boss at most companies would consider a waste of time).

Re: Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic (2010)

#49

Post by tychonoff »

I obtained a PhD in pure math 30 years ago, and promptly went into computing with no programming skills.

Mathematics allowed me to see things in a more general light, appreciate the importance of elegant code, and work on interesting problems that others might find difficult (eg. graph-theoretic constructions, encryption, etc.).

And it's really nice to formulate and prove your own theorems just to make your code work.

Putting a $ figure on higher education is like setting the value of a hair transplant.

Re: Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic (2010)

#50

Post by dcalacci »

drobilla wrote: post #23

Someone needs to write a "why getting a job in industry is a waste of time" rebuttal to this tired argument to illustrate how ridiculous it is to evaluate everything with a single (and shallow) goal structure. After all, it typically doesn't contribute anything new or meaningful to scientific knowledge, therefore it is a waste of time (...). I guess I shouldn't expect any better from The Economist, but not everyone i…

Totally on point. I don't think it's useful to compare the value of a successful PhD experience to some amount of money. This is especially true for the people who would be considering a PhD in the first place.

I agree that people value the environment they work in, but I think that to the people you outline, working in a culture that values original ideas and open discourse is more important than having workplace perks like free sodas.

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