Summary: YOUR Ph.D. means almost next to nothing, but collectively they expand the bounds of human knowledge.
this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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Do you have to live so relentlessly in reality?
Don't we all?
Sometimes I wonder.
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I know a guy with a PhD in medieval agriculture with a specific focus on cows. He's one of my brothers wife's friends.
This guy devoted his life to ye olde english cow farts.
He's struggling for employment as one might expect.
whereas I , with my bachelors degree in clowning, have been head hunted for my last two corporate jobs.
You are now CEO of FTX
Who even funds degrees like that?
You end up with fewer job prospects than a GED
Degrees like that aren't about a paycheck. It's about more important things than that. They ought to be subsidized by government if anything.
A PhD is not the only way to expand human knowledge. This is disregarding a lot of work done by a lot of hard working people.
No one says it was the only way? But one of the requirements of getting that PhD is to expand knowledge so it's 100% applicable
You might be surprised to learn it doesn't actually suggest a PhD is the only way to expand human knowledge. No one was disregarded.
I don't think it's meant to do that. Also if we substitute PhD for learning both will be true.
As their specialised knowledge reaches the edge of the circle, their general knowledge updating should retract.
Everyone has met a PhD that is almost entirely clueless in other areas. Not their fault though, don't get me wrong.
Edit: The person that downvoted must be Dr. Climate Change Denier. Dr. Covid Denier has joined the fray.
It's funny but you see the same thing in sports, or I see it specifically in hockey. Phenom kid gets drafted and at 18 has the social skills of the hockey puck he's playing with. By the time he's 36 he's not the player he once was but is a more well rounded individual with age and experience. When you focus all your energy to become the best at something, like a PhD, athlete, musician, whatever, you sacrifice some things along the way for sure.
When u look at most people I feel like the trending alternative at 18-50 y is personality of a hockey puck and also skills of a hockey puck, with the reasoning ability of the hockey puck.
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That's not universally true. I know several people with PhD who have encyclopedic knowledge completely outside their specialisation. Some people are just super intelligent, talented and have enormous memory. The world is not fair.
Presumably you could meet the boundary with "a dollah fifty in late fees at the public library" and find a way to push through from there. You'd have to find a way to publish or share your new knowledge. Studying at uni gives you access to experts in their own thing that likely have knowledge that could help you with your thing as well as a system designed to churn out these papers when you eventually find your thing.
Every day people discover new things but it takes attention, effort, and will to PROVE it's a new thing and more yet to share that with the world. Too bad you can't get an honorary PhD for doing that, at least not reliably.
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The ratio is off. You learn a lot more from high school and bachelor's degree and you learn way less with your master. PhD is just expanding a little bit more on master.
The visual is more about highlighting specialization and its distance from the limit of human knowledge. You often can't represent every aspect of a complex subject at the same time on a single visual. Kinda like how you can't represent the solar system distances and planet sizes to scale on a single page, you have to pick one.
But it's all very basic knowledge.
Common knowledge would be more appropriate. It is known by many people, but it is not basic as in obvious. It took a long time to know what we learn in a very "basic" high school biology course.
And if you actually remember half of what you learned in that course a decade later, people ask things like, "where do you learn this shit?"
I kind of hate this image. Its like a way to discredit all the learning done in the formative elementary/high school years. If I would guess, 60-70% of everything I have learned was in high school and thats with me having several published papers.
To be fair, most of "all human knowledge" is stuff like when the last time was that each person on the planet pooped.
I would read that paper.
Go make your little bump in the circle of human knowledge then!
I made a little brown bump.
For your paper, I'm pooping right now. You can add that to your data points
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Why do you think it discredis it?
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Frustrating to say the least. I feel my PhD accelerated learning in all directions. Not from the program content itself, but the skills involved in the ingestion of high volumes of dense information. This idea that the borders of my world don't extend past some yadda yadda about some tiny subclass of a field is some silly goosery.
Can those "skills involved" be learned elsewhere? Sure, this is just the path I took. Can phDoctors be single minded or general idiots? Sure, I'm an idiot. Do we need some single minded people? Sure, amazing things can be accomplished by singular focus.
But it isn't a mandatory condition or experience of a floppy hat assed (sword in some countries) recipient of this degree.
One of my professors used to refer to it as:
Bull Shit
More Shit
Piled High and Deep
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Euler giving the circle two big balls and an erection:
O3--
Eh. It was a stupid misadventure, but it led ultimately to me meeting my wife and making a good amount of money. I managed to eke out a win.
Anyone knows the origin of this representation? I've seen a professor use it years ago and I thought it was his, but I guess not.
It is from Matt Might, here.
Matt Might, a professor in Computer Science at the University of Utah, created The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D. to explain what a Ph.D. is to new and aspiring graduate students.
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*image not to scale
I love this
Neil deGrasse Tyson explained.
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