The illustrated guide to a Ph.D. | Hacker News Reader

The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.

matt.might.net

319 pointsjonp42 comments

This is exactly how it feels once you get over the initial elation of passing the blasted thing!

Of course, with all the Ph.D.s creating little bumps all over the place, various people have to come along and fill in the gaps between the bumps. They don't get enough credit.

various people have to come along and fill in the gaps between the bumps

Ah yes, the underpaid overworked summer students.

s/summer students/grad students/g

s/summer students/postdocs/g

s/summer students/full-time research staff/g

All true: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=701

This would perfectly be the title: Ph.D ~ Produce head Dent

Do not forget that the boundaries of human knowledge have been surpassed by a healthy amount of individuals that never went the PhD route.

It is not that you must have a PhD to push the boundaries of knowledge, it is that you must push the boundaries of knowledge to get a PhD, by definition. Nobody claimed otherwise here.

You are right about that - I merely wanted to highlight that there are always other avenues of enlarging the sum of human knowledge. Investing your mental resources into a PhD is only one path a person can choose in order to strive reaching that goal.

That is what I love about HN - Comments are dissected in a constructive manner.

The nice part about the Ph.D route is that you have guides to take you to the boundary and point it out to you.

Plenty of people think they're at the boundary and pushing but are actually stuck at a (close in) local maxima of crackpottery.

The real geniuses never even see a boundary. They just do their thing and let everyone else put labels on it later.

"Plenty of people think they're at the boundary and pushing but are actually stuck at a (close in) local maxima of crackpottery."

That is true in many cases in Academia as well.

This is the best description by far that I've seen of most PhDs. It passes the "Would my mother understand this" test.

I'll be sending this to anyone who asks what a PhD is really like.

Did you ever end up finishing yours? ;)

Great illustration.

Also why Ph.D is not for me. Too low bang/buck factor. I'd rather know a little about a lot than everything about a little. But, I'm very glad others are the opposite.

Now, add a third dimension to that diagram that describes the number of people that know any particular bit of knowledge. That's more accurately what I would describe as the "sum total of all human knowledge." It's not known if no one remembers it!

You can then view the work of a professor as a tension between adding shallow bumps to the perimeter and increasing the depth in the center.

That's where wikipedia (without the deletionist), museums, libraries come in. Putting all that old knowledge some place for some one to find them when they have been forgotten.

If it paid the bills I'd become a Computer historian. But the tech isn't old enough yet to be worth stuying ;p

> If it paid the bills I'd become a Computer historian

If you ever find a way to pay the bills this way, let me know. There's a lot of history in there.

I think it would work well as a guide for startups too, especially the "how it looks to you" (living inside the dent for the past x years) vs. "how it looks to a VC" (weighing your startup against the sum total of every other product and service in existence).

Except perhaps that only the successful startups get to make that dent.

The sum of all human knowledge probably looks more like a million dimensional koosh ball than an circle.

I always wondered: where is the list of things we (humans) forgotten/unlearned?

I doubt that there is a complete list (we don't even have a list of the books at the library of Alexandria, so we don't know which were lost only that we will never find them again).

But there is a good list at cracked (of all things) http://www.cracked.com/article_18533_the-6-most-important-th... although that is a list of things we forgot and subsequently rediscovered. There is also a list of important books that we have lost, but I can't seem to find it.

It's be more realistic if your little bump was built on top of lots of other people's little bumps.

It is, because all of the little bumps before you form the outer rim of the circle.

I like to think I've made such dents, but have never been granted a Ph.D.

I don't know how to say this without it coming across as baiting you or flaming you. I'm doing neither.

What contributions have you made to the sum-total of human knowledge? I'm really interested.

That depends how you define it.

My cat has a skin blemish on its paw. Does documenting this fact add to the sum total of human knowledge? Technically yes, but it's of no interest to anyone.

But there's an even continuum between this and academic papers of great import - what if I figure out the best strategy to defend against a Zerg rush and post it on a forum? What if I figure out a really cool new programming technique and blog about it? What if I write an academic paper on obscure characteristics of hyper-complex non-euclidian non-reimannian Q-manifolds in P-time that has no ramifications for anything and is quickly forgotten? But then what if a tremendously important application is discovered 50 years later?

Especially with the internet, what qualifies as human knowledge becomes completely blurred. Previously the qualification was probably getting published, but now anyone can make information available to anyone else and the rest of posterity.

All of your examples involve publishing, but even more incredible is the idea that that circle in the comic represents not just published knowledge but all that any human has ever known and that we can sometimes venture into entirely novel territory.

I think all of those things you list are legitimate contributions to the body of knowledge. Just the bump you added was really really small in some cases.

My dent is this comment. Suck it, Einstein!

Sure, I understand it's very easy to read that as me being arrogant (and I should've expected it). I certainly didn't mean it that way.

I've written and given away tons of code. I not-too-rarely meet new people and find out that they've been using code that I've written in their production environments.

I've also given away as much higher level information as I can in my blog posts, mailing list contributions, and on places like StackOverflow, here, reddit, etc...

I'm not by any stretch of the imagination suggesting there aren't large numbers of people smarter than I am, but I will say without hesitation that it's wrong to consider the only way to increase the sum total of human knowledge is to grant someone a Ph.D.

I will say without hesitation that it's wrong to consider the only way to increase the sum total of human knowledge is to grant someone a Ph.D.

agreed, but i don't think anyone was arguing this point, though

the contrapositive of:

PhD --> novel contribution to human knowledge

is certainly not:

!(PhD) --> !(novel contribution to human knowledge)

That's just how I read this:

    You push at the boundary for a few years
    Until one day, the boundary gives way
    And, that dent you've made is called a Ph.D.

It seems to me that calling the expansion of human knowledge a Ph.D. implies that those who don't have Ph.D.s have not dented the circle.

I didn't feel like you were being arrogant at all, believe it or not. I just thought it was a neat claim and was interested in learning more.

What's amazing to me about the PhD (and no, I don't think only the PhD) is that usually, when you're done with your research, you've actually learned something that no one anywhere has ever known before.

I imagine many of us have things like that, most of it being incredibly trivial stuff (like the cat's paw example above). It's incredibly cool to think about learning something utterly novel in an area like biology or math or physics.

Thanks for the response. I honestly meant no ill will, only curious.

Even if this isn't baiting or flaming, it does seem to reflect skepticism -- which is fair. But I do think there are likely a lot of people who have contributed to expanding human knowledge without having done a PhD. I mean, lots of undergrad and masters programs involve doing your own original research project, and many more undergrads at least assist on research projects owned by others.

My question had nothing to do with the PhD as a privileged case. I just find the idea of learning something previously unknown very cool, especially as relates to knowledge that's useful somehow.

Reminds me of Steve Blank's post "You Can't Take It With You". Congrats, you might have some deep, unique understandings that might give you a unique insight into the world, but if you haven't offered it up to others in a way that can be retained or utilized, it's worth nothing. In this way, you are a selfish little piglet.

Ph.D's are let into the ether to be consumed and used for the world. Some more efficiently than others, but nonetheless, their research undoubtedly allows for a better world than your own, internal "a-ha" moments.

http://steveblank.com/2010/07/26/you-cant-take-it-with-you/

I did not mean to imply that I kept my knowledge to myself.

Use this mirror link if you can't get to the actual site http://bit.ly/cUavpF (matt.might.net.nyud.net)

It's a great graphic, but I'll nitpick. There's an important distinction that's left out. During all the stages leading to the Ph.D., all the area covered was just learning, taking in what other people have done. The very last little bump on the other hand actually added new area, so it's a very different thing, you're discovering new knowledge as opposed to just learning about what's already known. I suppose the graphic does capture that in a way but it's subtle.

I'm afraid it's anything but subtle. The first line is "Imagine a circle that contains all of human knowledge". All learning until the Ph.D. is within that circle.

Awesome!

I get it, So a Ph.D. is like a pimple or an erection?

More like the fertilised egg (if you aim the erection properly.)

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