Lessons from my PhD • Hacker News Board

Re: Lessons from my PhD

#91

Post by mcguire » Wed, Dec 29, 2021, 10:34 PM UTC

rabbits77 wrote: post #75

tasogare wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience failing my PhD it's not so simple. The head of my lab have a bunch of topics he want to (make other people under him) investigate, sometimes really precise. One of the PhD student literally got his thesis question handed down after an experimented researcher worked on it for 6 months. Other like me had to found one themselves. It's obvious that the first student got a head start of about a year. Th…

I recall the same things. I remember being bitterly envious of students that seemingly were given topics to examine while I had to spin my wheels for a good year or two coming up with my own ideas to explore. Looking back my perspective is very different. First of all, my ideas generated a minor spike in publications for the lab all centered around my work. After I graduated I continued to advise new students to cont…

"A specific example, my advisor would use my conference paper acceptances to fund their own personal travel and vacations; I was not allowed to present my own first author papers."

That's really very bad. Learning to present to your peers is an important part of the process, as is getting your name and face out in the field.

Re: Lessons from my PhD

#92

Post by jpeloquin » Wed, Dec 29, 2021, 10:35 PM UTC

zebraflask wrote: post #41

xab31 wrote: post #38

My big eye-openers (some from postdoc) were more about the sociology of science than the day-to-day productivity: - Even the most blatantly wrong and illogical published work can only be displaced by another publication that explains/does the same phenomenon better; i.e., people are going to keep believing in phlogiston until someone shows them oxygen. If you simply point out inconsistencies in phlogiston theory, in…

That seems to ring true, but - it also seems a bit defeatist, don't you think? "Never question a scientific superior?" Not parsing that concept, please elaborate.

The presentation is cynical, as xab31 themself attests, but I don't think it's defeatist.

1. Bad work only being displaced by good work: everything works like this. To replace some useless commercial product (take your pick) someone has to come up with something better. Same goes for information.

2. Nobody liking criticism can be rephrased as it being important to attack ideas, not people, when you have to work with those people.

3. "Never question a scientific superior" is the first piece of advise I think is too cynical. As a warning against undermining a colleague in public when you need their support, I agree, and that's kind of a restatement of #1 and #2. But science really does have a culture of publicly debating contentious ideas. You can definitely be more critical in an event specifically held as a debate / open forum than in a presentation Q&A though, and at a social event it's polite to be at least vaguely supportive.

Kind of a tangent to the later points: Day to day scientific research is mostly chasing dead ends and other activity that is (in hindsight) mostly useless, but there is genuine societal value in having a large body of skilled workers available. That is, science spends a lot of time spinning its wheels trying to figure out the right question to ask, and once this becomes clear there is rapid progress. This means the papers published in between the breakthrough periods aren't really worth paying attention to unless you work in that area. Having a lot of scientists and engineers in the workforce so we collectively have a decent chance at obtaining and exploiting next breakthrough is the point, the papers are just a byproduct.

Re: Lessons from my PhD

#93

Post by wanderingmind » Wed, Dec 29, 2021, 10:38 PM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #85

wanderingmind wrote: post #82

The author became a professor unlike the 90% of the other PhD graduates, so you need to take all the lessons with a heavy dose of selective bias. Most of the things the article talks about is the effective processes the author has learned during PhD. This is definitely useful in any work where agency is involved. However, these effective routines can be learned from a decent job in a good organization and does not ne…

" Most of what I learned during my PhD had nothing to do with my dissertation topic, grad school, or even computer science. " These lessons are so ingrained into me now that I'm shocked when I find out that not everyone knows them! I think they can be applied to virtually any office job. " Taking a job that provides some agency is harder than it sounds. As is starting a company and failing without jeopardizing one's…

You can LC for a few months closed door to get a decent SWE job in a good company that can provide you enough agency. PhD on the other hand requires spending 5+ years in a lab cutoff from reality and ending up with no skills to get a real world job. Yes you lose some money (mostly other people money) if a company fails, but the learnings are well worth the loss of money. Its definitely not the case with a PhD.

Re: Lessons from my PhD

#94

Post by myle » Wed, Dec 29, 2021, 10:48 PM UTC

jrumbut wrote: post #86

xab31 wrote: post #38

My big eye-openers (some from postdoc) were more about the sociology of science than the day-to-day productivity: - Even the most blatantly wrong and illogical published work can only be displaced by another publication that explains/does the same phenomenon better; i.e., people are going to keep believing in phlogiston until someone shows them oxygen. If you simply point out inconsistencies in phlogiston theory, in…

> The incentive structure of scientific publication is such that there are big rewards for being right on an important question, bigger the earlier you are to the party, and little to no penalties for being wrong, so long as the error cannot be provably and directly linked to fraud. This is fantastic insight and I'd like to thank you for sharing it with our group. Would you agree that the model of rewards for correct…

Are you trying to provide an example for many of the points of OP above or am I overreading this?

In your message I observe, very careful criticism, uncalled praise, admission and defense of a system that excludes most criticism...

Re: Lessons from my PhD

#95

Post by ixnus » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 12:18 AM UTC

Great article. I especially loved the parts about presenting, greying out the boring stuff makes a ton of sense.

What is the appeal of posting your daily progress on a public form? Do you not feel this to be a kind of invasion of your privacy? Is there some benefit that isn't immediately clear?

Re: Lessons from my PhD

#96

Post by skj » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 12:38 AM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #83

xab31 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very early on, I noticed that graduate students tend to be idealistic, postdocs extremely cynical, and faculty ruthlessly pragmatic perhaps to the point of occasional shortsightedness. Clearly, something about this progression is expected and normal. I'm a postdoc now, so I'm right on schedule. I think the way it ultimately works is that you have to be disillusioned from the grade-school fairy tales told to the publi…

" People above you in that chain will accept limited feedback on methods to attain their chosen goals and will greatly resent questions about whether their selected goals are worthwhile/realistic/rational, or whether their gestalt vision of the field's conventional wisdom is correct. " Corporate management has the exact same situation.

Yeah but it's a lot easier to not care.

Re: Lessons from my PhD

#97

Post by robotresearcher » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 1:01 AM UTC

behnamoh wrote: post #35

simonbarker87 wrote: post #6

Two things I would add to this that I learned early on in my PhD: 1. Presentations aren’t really about conveying information. I sat though so many dull presentations, they were very informative but I can read a paper quicker than they can badly present the same information. The best presentations were the ones that covered the whys of the work, the applications, the next steps, the specific problem areas - often thes…

While I agree with no. 2, I think part of the reason that makes me not do it is realizing that I will have to do it all my life if I become a faculty. I have seen my friends graduated from Ph.D. and they literally told me that their life is basically the same, except that they now have service tasks to do on top of research. To think that I will always have to plug away and not have enough time for family or relation…

Research, teaching, and service.

As a faculty member, each of your three constituencies is almost completely invisible to the others. So each one thinks you work hardly at all. Only your family sees the total hours, and only your tenure and promotion committee sees the total contributions (and typically they up-weight research, so don't skimp there).

Re: Lessons from my PhD

#98

Post by bangkoksbest » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 1:08 AM UTC

dhd415 wrote: post #59

xab31 wrote: post #38

My big eye-openers (some from postdoc) were more about the sociology of science than the day-to-day productivity: - Even the most blatantly wrong and illogical published work can only be displaced by another publication that explains/does the same phenomenon better; i.e., people are going to keep believing in phlogiston until someone shows them oxygen. If you simply point out inconsistencies in phlogiston theory, in…

In addition to ringing true, this seems largely in line with Thomas Kuhn's thesis in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions [0], a book which despite its shortcomings, should be required reading for anyone in a STEM field. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...

Kuhn's thesis doesn't have a lot space for the sociology of science to have this kind of influence. Of the classical theses of scientific progress, this comes closer to Lakatos' thesis of research programs.[0][1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_program

[1] Lakatos, Imre. (1978) The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes: Philosophical Papers (J. Worrall & G. Currie, Eds.). Cambridge University Press.

Re: Lessons from my PhD

#99

Post by lambdatronics » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 1:29 AM UTC

xab31 wrote: post #38

My big eye-openers (some from postdoc) were more about the sociology of science than the day-to-day productivity: - Even the most blatantly wrong and illogical published work can only be displaced by another publication that explains/does the same phenomenon better; i.e., people are going to keep believing in phlogiston until someone shows them oxygen. If you simply point out inconsistencies in phlogiston theory, in…

The sociology of science is so interesting. (Not the field, but the subject.) Here are some of my favorites quotes/thoughts:

This one is a direct contrast to your advice (which speaks volumes about what's wrong with academia): "A good scientist, in other words, does not merely ignore conventional wisdom, but makes a special effort to break it. Scientists go looking for trouble."[0]

This was written about physics at Caltech, but applies more broadly. It explains why the ability to 'manage up' is so critical for early-career success. "[...] departments are run, for better and worse, by the professors who often lack managerial experience. Worse, they are generally unaware of this shortcoming, assuming incorrectly that management is trivially easy compared to their topics of study and merits minimal effort. We have now seen the consequences of this lack of attention." [1]

Academic politics is a great reason not to stay in academia: "Look for environments where competitors see themselves as playing a game, rather than fighting for survival — this prevents rankings within the hierarchy from becoming an existential problem." [2]

This book has a great chapter of career advice, here's a gem: "Don't build a pyramid. Everyone seems to build one pyramid per career. A pyramid is an ambitious system that one person really cares about and that winds up working well, but then just sits in the desert because nobody else cares the same way. This happens usually just after leaving graduate school." [3]

"In general, status-conscious places are miserable for everyone, and the more, the worse." [3, next page]

Gatekeeping is predictable from the incentive structure: "For all the high-level talk about how we need to plug the leaks in our STEM education pipeline, not only are we not plugging the holes, we're proud of how fast the pipeline is leaking." [4]

"So why am I not an academic? There are many factors, and starting Tarsnap is certainly one; but most of them can be summarized as 'academia is a lousy place to do novel research'." [5]

"...whereas Newton could say, 'If I have seen a little farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants,' I am forced to say, 'Today we stand on each other's feet.'" [6]

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

[1] https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/08/09/caltech-astrop...

[2] https://www.briantimar.com/notes/mimetic/mimetic/

[3] Phillip Hobbs, "Building Electrooptical systems: making it all work" 2nd Ed, p392

[4] https://danluu.com/teach-debugging/

[5] http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2020-09-20-On-the-use-of-a-l...

[6] Richard Hamming 1968 Turing Award lecture, Journal of the ACM 16 (1), January 1969, p. 3–12

Re: Lessons from my PhD

#100

Post by jrumbut » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 1:59 AM UTC

myle wrote: post #94

jrumbut wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The incentive structure of scientific publication is such that there are big rewards for being right on an important question, bigger the earlier you are to the party, and little to no penalties for being wrong, so long as the error cannot be provably and directly linked to fraud. This is fantastic insight and I'd like to thank you for sharing it with our group. Would you agree that the model of rewards for correct…

Are you trying to provide an example for many of the points of OP above or am I overreading this? In your message I observe, very careful criticism, uncalled praise, admission and defense of a system that excludes most criticism...

I'm joking a bit with the style and my limited experience leads me to agree with the OP.

The middle paragraph includes my sincere response that a system where discovery is rewarded, failure forgiven, and dishonesty punished is ideally suited to the mission of science.

So I was left wondering if the OP would expand on what their thoughts were about the interesting consequences.