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Comment by aristophenes | Hacker News Reader

This is a good cautionary lesson. Problems like collusion rings in computer science are more serious than they appear. If left unchecked for a decade or two, the cheaters will rise to the top and take the positions of power in the field, and then it's going to be almost impossible to fix the system.

Relying on altruistic tendencies for people in academia is not adequate. Everyone starts out in academics as school children, and get filtered out or filter themselves out pursuing other things. Those who remain will be the ones who love to learn and teach, those who just cannot accept loss/failure, and, sadly, those who are afraid of change. The more competitive the field becomes, the harder it is to succeed, the more we select for the hyper-competitive or fearful over the altruistic.

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I looked at doing my PhD. I was really interested in startup failure and wanted to research that.

The system I was presented with would have meant my supervisors got more say in what I spent my time on than I did. They heavily skewed to supporting existing psychological models of entrepreneurial failure which I wasn't interested in.

The bureaucracy, authoritarianism and endless hoop-jumping around it was a total red flag for me. I opted out.

My conclusions:

PhD grads aren't smarter than others. They're just more willing to put up with bullshit, conform to meaningless rules, and jump through hoops.

Academic research is rarely about the things it says that it's about, and seems to be more about maintaining/improving the career prospects of the academics.

Academic research is heavily affected by political spats with other academics that have nothing to do with the actual subject, but more to do with ego, pride and interpersonal dislike.

My brother abandoned his PhD at CMU just before his defense (which would have gone fine). He was intensely passionate about his topic area, logical frameworks, which is very academic stuff indeed. Not really something you could pursue in industry. As he was wrapping up his PhD he also got his top choice for a post doc position at Inria, but the amount of political maneuvering he had to do to get it made him so angry he abandoned his dream of staying in academia. He just couldn't stomach the idea of having to do that politicking over and over again all his life. So he went to a hedge fund to work a little bit more than a decade, got his magic number of millions, and is a full time dad now.

Humanity as a whole is losing out on some potentially amazing long term research and researchers because of this dynamic.

I have no idea how to fix it systematically.

You're not wrong, but you're attributing the conclusions (e.g., grads aren't smarter) to the wrong reasons (willing to put up with bullshit).

PhD grads aren't smarter, they're playing a different game. There's bullshit everywhere, you just chose a different pile to call home -- probably because it smelled better to your reward/bullshit tradeoff.

Why would PhD's choose that pile of bullshit of yours? ...

As you say, "Academic research is rarely about the things it says its about" is a good observation. The reason is that most of the time grants are awarded to professors to try a method (their specialty) to a problem (the thing the grant is about). This looks like the professor is padding his career, but honestly, that's the point.

We would ideally have a huge set of professors with perfect specializations such that a combination of professors could solve any problem. Science funding is ensuring that deep, old expertise is preserved in case it is useful. Grants are a way to simultaneously test that usefulness for modern problems and expand it a little towards modern problems by producing new phd's with slightly mutated expertise. This is why PhDs endure their own type of bullshit, because they want to be part of this particular kind of knowledge legacy. There are other ways of doing this. A problem-first (vs solution-first) approach is kind of better for a different kind of venue, like business, NASA, etc.

Political spats? Absolutely. No contest there. Turf wars are a thing.

I was more addressing the "you've got to be really smart to complete a PhD" trope. From what I saw, the primary qualification is the ability to jump through pointless hoops because an authority says you should.

You're totally right that academia doesn't have a monopoly on this kind of bullshit. But few other places get away with it so much, and manage to maintain a (rapidly crumbling) reputation of not being 90% bullshit.

Yes, the "PhD's are smart" trope doesn't give enough air to smart non-phd's. But I think, at least around here, equivalent experience is just as useful as a PhD, but PhD's have the benefit of being extremely vocal / public about their experience in the form of state-sponsored projects and publications.

I would suggest that your own rapidly crumbling opinion of academia is probably not endemic. The top universities still produce top-tier R&D, and top-tier candidates that go on to do top-tier work for large and small companies.

It's definitely ok and understandable that some (or even many) people would feel differently, but my own opinion (coming from a mid-tier school) is that my training was absolutely of inestimable benefit to my job prospects, and was 100% enabling of my current career in robotics R&D. And I'm guessing that getting admitted to MIT would, without fail, make anyone happy in the entire world. (Though I didn't go to MIT obv)

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