Ask HN: I'm interested in so many disciplines, but what can I do with that?

I wrote a general comment in response to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30930012

You've made the strongest case I've seen for some knowledge flexibility by bringing up tech freelancing, but this generalization is still ensconced in tech specialism. The last two posts have lost sight of the bigger picture.

The conversation began with the OP talking about wide cross-disciplinary pursuits.

"A couple of years back I started dabbling in the social sciences and humanities (my background is in ecology / evolutionary biology), and became interested in one discipline after another. From psychology to history of science to anthropology and sociology, to economics and politics, to philosophy and religious studies and cultural studies, etc."

My post was a reply to a response to "Refuse to Choose" and the concept of a "Scanner", someone who is looking at many different disciplines that do not all immediately relate to one another.

And my original post was to the effect of "Yes, being a scanner is a weakness if you can't synthesize your cross disciplinary knowledge into extremely valuable non-obvious insights and/or awe-inspiring products".

Basically, think of ideas as being distanced apart from each other. Some of them are in your head, others in mine, some are in a book, or a movie. If we are specialists working together on a project, then to access and synthesize ideas that exist in both our heads we need to have a meeting, which takes significant time. To access it from media, we're going to need to consume media and study, which takes even more time. A helpful analogy would be the memory hierarchy if you know a bit about computer architecture.

But, if many different ideas exist already, only in one person's head, no meetings are needed. They can just work, synthesizing as they go. That is where the "Scanner" emerges from their cocoon and inverts what has been up to then a weakness sapping the ability to excel in one field, instead becoming what one might call "A Renaissance Man".

Become a software engineer and solve problems in the areas you are interested in.

Another question, if you don't mind: What sort of things do you think I could write as a novice in these fields?? I don't think I'm interested in writing study notes or summaries etc. I think I'm more inquiry-inclined, something more critical, more engaged.

I read your post in good faith and respond in kind. There are certainly very important details I did not elaborate in a quick post, but I assume you understand that the question under consideration is how someone pursuing a full-time career might partake in (non-STEM) higher academic degrees. While I regret using the expression “rest of the world”, I don’t believe it’s just hyperbole to say that this is easier in Europe.

You are correct that people pursue different paths after US PhDs. However, as you say, a US PhD contains heavy course work and (outside STEM, where I have few data points since most researchers I knew dropped out to work for startups/FAANG) the average full-time program duration is only going up. There are exceptions of course, but admissions are centered around a personal scholarly narrative rather than a particular project and pricing is generally under the expectation of grant funding. Again, there are further details we could write books about, but I don’t think this is far from a general picture of US PhDs in the humanities and social sciences.

In Europe, MAs and PhDs are separated as many have noted. I know most about the UK context, where MAs are affordable and can be taken part-time, completed in two years with one class a semester. PhDs, which are research only (I agree with the you and would indeed change “writing” to “research” if I wrote the post again), can also be done part-time over eight years for a very nominal cost (about 5k a year for an international student). Systems have become more standardized in the EU after the Bologna accords towards the more professionalized three year track, but I’ve known PhD students in Germany to take 10+ years writing their dissertations. Unless policies have changed in the past few years, the same goes for France.

Again, comparing post-graduate education between US and EU, let alone between EU countries, is a complex topic. I have attempted only to show that there is a substantial regional difference and that, at least outside STEM, the EU system is more accessible for those with full-time careers, who do not plan to work in academia.