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Comment by peterkelly | Hacker News Reader

> Look, a PhD is for one thing, and one thing only: Teaching you to be a researcher.

I disagree - there's tons of skills you learn in the process which are useful in other contexts - the most important, in my opinion, is learning how to write well and communicate complicated ideas to others.

If you go into industry, then depending on what you studied and what kind of job you have, the knowledge of a given field (networking, graphics, compilers, computer vision etc) can be extremely helpful.

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Two good reasons but (especially outside of the hard sciences) a third reason is possibly even more relevant than supporting a research career or a teaching skills. That "Doctor" title is prestigious. Your employer can pay you more, you can get higher positions as e.g. a consultant on projects, you will automatically get more of a certain type of respect and get listed to more. I am thinking of a management consultant type career here, but I suspect it is reasonably universal. Hell in some cultures I imagine it can even help you get a better choice of marriage partner. (I know it is a little bit fake, but often people's perception is more important than reality)

Academics write well? Have you heard of the word 'academese'? Honestly, I suspect a PhD brainwashes you into becoming a bad writer. These days I'm impressed by any academic who's not a horrible writer.

The "academese" tends to be worse in the softer fields, and isn't as bad in computer science. A large part of my job is helping students express themselves clearly -- it's part of learning to think clearly. That's not to say that all of our papers are shining examples of clarity, but they should aspire to be so.

Most academic writing isn't meant for public consumption--papers are communications between researchers, so the jargon etc. is a more of a convenience than "bad writing". Good researchers can talk very plainly about complex things, though this usually happens in talks and conversation.

Totally agree. The reason is simple: you can't count on the goodwill of your audience, you have to write in a defensive manner expecting an adversarial audience (at least the reviewers, probably the people you have in mind when you write your paper; but possibly beyond). See this: http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Academics-Writing-Stinks/14...

There are several types of academic writers, for sure. Some are amazingly clear in their writing. Those people are fantastic, and really do help to advance the spread of new ideas.

But some (many) use long words and convoluted sentences, seemingly for no reason other than to make their reader feel less intelligent. I know someone in the latter category; while he's a very bright guy, I haven't the foggiest idea what he's saying in any of his papers.

Which does indeed demonstrate that a PhD doesn't necessarily make you a great writer. I had been writing professionally for a decade before I started my PhD, and this had far more to do with my clarity of writing than any feedback I got in grad school.

And of course, don't forget the gibberish, automatically generated papers that were accepted: http://www.ibtimes.com/fake-research-papers-how-did-more-120...

Well, give me academese over patentese anytime :)

Being able to write something coherent quickly about a very technical subject is really, really hard. If someone needs to use "academese" to get there, power to them.

The quietest part of the Physics library at the university I went to was where the PhD tomes went to never be read ever again. Some unfortunate professor type of person had to read these turgid things once but that was about it, no wider audience. Why write for one to two people? That is what happens to most 'thesis' efforts, nobody reads them. Ever. I doubt anyone on here has plans to read a thesis or two by teatime, or to stock up on a few for some holiday reading. Real, valuable information is on the internet, peer reviewed by people in things like 'comment' threads and endorsed by 'links'. None of those tomes of dead tree in the Physics library made it to the internet, they are lost rather than 'search engine optimised'.

I did some work helping Msc and PhD students many aeons ago and I felt that people hid in academia at that time because there was a recession and few initials after the name were better than a spell of unemployment for those with daddies that could afford it.

Typically the thesis is based on a series of peer-reviewed papers submitted by the PhD student during grad school. These papers are actually read by people (at least for PhD students in good programs who will need to submit to good journals). The thesis is just proof to your thesis committee that you can write a comprehensive treatment of your area, and to put all of your results in one place for their convenience. It doesn't matter if only a few people read it. It is a little strange to store them all in a library somewhere, given that they won't really be read again, but I suspect this is just a carry-over from a different time when this made sense (eg. before Google made it so easy to find all of someone's papers).

The above is based on experiences in STEM, probably things are different for liberal arts people.

>the most important, in my opinion, is learning how to write well and communicate complicated ideas to others.

you also learn this while working for a company, which has the added benefit of not treating you like an indentured servant.

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