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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.
Summary: YOUR Ph.D. means almost next to nothing, but collectively they expand the bounds of human knowledge.
Do you have to live so relentlessly in reality?
As a parent to five, yes. All shall join me.
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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.
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.
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.
Good luck expanding the fields of math and science without a PhD.
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Like the guy who found this somehow important new shape not to long ago? I don’t think he has a PhD. But he did contribute. Not saying that it’s easy though.
I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I expected someone to bring up some shit like that. My point still stands.
Lookup the Einstein problem. I’m talking about the aperiodic monotile discovered by David Smith.
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I don’t think it’s meant to do that. Also if we substitute PhD for learning both will be true.
Yes but how will I feel good that I spent 140k on a piece of paper if I don’t brag about it?
most PhDs are paid a salary.
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.
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.
Great, thank you! This post was not respecting the CC-BY ;)
I appreciate this picture!
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.
For your paper, I’m pooping right now. You can add that to your data points
Go make your little bump in the circle of human knowledge then!
I made a little brown bump.
Why do you think it discredis it?
Right, but the image says it’s a small part of all of human knowledge.
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They are being incredibly charitable with the width of that column
Knowledge is a grower and a shower
Euler giving the circle two big balls and an erection:
O3–
People can make dents in the outer shell of human knowledge without having PhDs though. As in to discover something new and revolutionary, plenty of great scientists have and likely many more will continue to.
Last cell:
What is this, a PhD for ants?
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.
Or you can just make up a bunch of shit ala Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino.
Forgetting someone, bucko?
Most psychology if we’re being honest.
Wait, how bad are bachelors’ degrees in the US/anglosphere? I was contirbuting to research projects and had a specialization by the time I was done with my five year bachelors’ equivalent.
In fairness, I think the system has since been reformatted so that the fifth year is now a (paid for) master’s, but still. That graph makes it seem like it’s high school with benefits.
College is what you put into it. A lot of people don’t get into the networking side of it because it’s never really introduced to them. Mostly professors look for those who are “turned on” to bring onto projects like that, that is, those that are engaged and asking questions and curious.
Youngins, lpt: talk to your professors and let them know you are interested and ask questions. It’s what you are there for- access to brains.
