201–210 of 220 posts
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In Europe you won't get hired if you only have an undergrad degree.
Putting aside the fact that this is clearly untrue, what does it have to do with the parent or GP comment?
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"Is it possible to attain a phd and rely mostly on rote memorization?" No, but it's possible to just be a research serf to the professor, and the professor will carry you more or less to completion - very little indepenent thought needed. You do need to be able to do lots of (well defined, but tedious) work.
It's a shame that completing a mountain of well-defined, but tedious work with little independent thought is considered an original contribution to the field.
What are the politicians there for then? I'm not being facetious here. Politics is one of the primary avenues of bringing about social change. Ditto civil service. A PhD should be about novel contributions that increase the sum total of human knowledge.
Ok but we shouldnt pursue knowledge haphazardly for knowledge sake. There are an infinite number of interesting avenues of inquiry we could send our academics down that would be completely useless. The paths we choose should be guided by the needs of practical application. How else can we value information if not practical application?
I agree that we should prioritise STEM, but within STEM the research areas should be decided by the scientists themselves.
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> Meritocracy. The mathematicians at Princeton University are going to be producing potentially more valuable pure math research than a professor at name state university 145. On average, maybe … but, if we just axe those at NSU 145, then we're definitely not going to be funding the proof of the bounded-gaps conjecture. Now, Zhang managed to prove it anyway ( https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2013/05/bounded_gaps_…
Zhang is an outlier. From what I followed when his proof came out, there were actually very similar ideas being developed by Terry Tao at UCLA and by a PhD student at Oxford. The sort of places you'd expect. And IIRC, Zhang actually come from the top math department in China. He just had trouble getting a good job in the U.S. It is also fair to wonder just where this twin prime conjecture is leading us in terms of us…
Well, sure, and that's my point; there will be outliers. They'll probably have some indicators, like coming from good schools, or prior good work, even if they are currently in lower-ranked places. Every time an outlier comes along, one can certainly retroactively find something that reveals all along that he or she was going to excel; the challenge is finding the people with this potential in advance. (You don't want to fund only the people who have done good work; eventually you'll just get an unduly privileged class of people who did a lot of good math now and no longer can.) So we should have some way of finding these outliers by evaluating their academic history and apparent future potential … and that's a grant committee. (Hey, I hate to find myself defending them! I'm an academic and grant writing is low down on my list of favourite things to do; but it's better than being told that, since I'm not at Princeton, I won't even get a chance to seek funding.)
> From what I followed when his proof came out, there were actually very similar ideas being developed by Terry Tao at UCLA and by a PhD student at Oxford.
I don't know about the Ph.D. student at Oxford, but (although I can't find it now) I am pretty sure I remember reading a post on Terry Tao's blog in which he was much more charitable than this; essentially, his view (I believe, though I can't find it) was that commonalities could be found between his work and Zhang's, as there always can between even the most revolutionary work and its predecessors, but that Zhang's work represented a genuinely new idea and huge step forward.
> It is also fair to wonder just where this twin prime conjecture is leading us in terms of usefulness. I know it's hard, but we should be able to draw direct comparisons to how something like RSA panned out.
RSA took essentially from the dawn of recorded mathematics (Euclid) to about 70 years ago; it's now the prototypical example (second, perhaps, to Riemannian geometry) of apparently "purely pure" mathematics that turned out to have applications. I think that's an excellent argument for taking the long view.
It's such an absurd assertion when you consider that different people have different ideas on how to improve society.
When you look at the stats, it’s hard not to conclude that the current PhD system is fundamentally broken. Mental health issues are rife: approximately one-third of PhD students are at risk of having or developing a psychiatric disorder like depression. The high level of dropouts is similarly worrying – and possibly another symptom of the same problem. Research suggests that on average 50% of PhD students leave gradu…
> A newly-minted bachelor's student without research experience has no preparation for the frustration, isolation, and sense of futility that real researchers face. Don't you need a master's degree to be eligible for a doctorate program? > If you're an undergraduate and harbor the slightest ambition to get a PhD, drop what you're doing right now and start looking for a research group to join. How does undergraduates…
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I won't claim to understand the topic better than this author but one thing I know: important is an incredible subjective concept. So I will quote the perspective of another writer. In Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind there's a chapter dedicated to research ( the Sugar Daddy of Science ). The short version is you have limited resources. You can't invest in every research project. You are more…
I agree that the problem of selecting which research to fund is difficult and (usually but not always) subjective. While a very interesting question, it's not actually relevant to what I was arguing. I'm getting the impression that you didn't understand one of my points, so I'll restate it in more detail. > While this is an admirable academic exercise, is it better than any other study that produces in the end a more…
That may be perfectly right but I think we're both right only when taking it to an extreme. A purchaser might as well understand the technology very well. Just as a researcher could be a manager at some point.
The problem lies with "pure" researchers and bureaucrats. They will always see just their way so there's no middle ground. The perfect situation happens just by accident, where the researcher's curiosity happened to intersect with the bureaucrat's ideal money maker. And much of this is down to how each one communicates the expectation: the scientist doesn't know how to state his goal in terms of benefits that the bureaucrat can understand, and the bureaucrat doesn't know how to ask for things in therms that the scientist would understand.
But take the military for example. Their currency is power. And they are perfectly able to drive research in that direction even without being driven by scientists.
And yes, bureaucrats don't trust the researchers with their money. It's because a manager investing in research is like a bet with long odds, where you don't know what exactly you're betting on, and the bookie is a gambler himself. Scientists get guaranteed money without guaranteeing a result. And "worse", a success for the scientist doesn't really mean success for the manager. You are happy you have an interesting result, or a confirmation. The manager is happy if his investment was worth it in terms of time and money.
A more practical example would be if you paid someone to build you a manor and after years of work he comes with a hangar. Unless you're able to monetize on that it's a failure.
Every one of my former colleagues learned to sell their knowledge in terms of benefits a manager understand. It's easier for you to understand their language than for them to understand yours.
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> AFTER a PhD is finished they can go on and try to influence society using their skills, or not. Exactly this. The primary skill developed during a PhD (for me, and those around me), is knowing the difference between: 1. solutions that can be pulled from literature (bake), 2. solutions that should be easy to assemble from existing solutions (buy), 3. what technology requires a small-to-medium delta above and beyond…
If all three of these are research, what is engineering?
When you look at the stats, it’s hard not to conclude that the current PhD system is fundamentally broken. Mental health issues are rife: approximately one-third of PhD students are at risk of having or developing a psychiatric disorder like depression. The high level of dropouts is similarly worrying – and possibly another symptom of the same problem. Research suggests that on average 50% of PhD students leave gradu…