Comment by denhaus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by denhaus | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Personally, as a phd candidate in STEM I think this is awesome. I do not care that he “skipped steps” in getting a PhD. His contribution to the body of scientific knowledge was deserving of a doctorate as determined by experts in the field, no? Who cares if you publish 3+ papers if each of those never got cited more than 10 times in 10 years and they never had any real scientific impact? I know PhDs who simply went through the motions at some of the best doctoral STEM programs in the US and never made a real scientific contribution despite checking off all the boxes.

I guess determining if he “deserves” a PhD depends on what you think a PhD is for. If it’s for checking off boxes, sitting in a room for N years, publishing K papers, taking M number of classes etc, then yes, he doesn’t deserve it. If you think it’s about learning how to be an independent researcher and making significant scientific contributions, it seems to me like he’s done quite a bit.

>His contribution to the body of scientific knowledge was deserving of a doctorate as determined by experts in the field, no?

This is what I dont agree on. A doctorate is not a prize for the best scientific work from a student that year.

The guy as noted had/has already published papers in renowned journals, and that was a reason for the PhD (see last few sentences). I don't think this guy skipped any fundamental steps. He probably should have been admitted/applied to a PhD to begin with.

You can look him up on Google scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=baVVmaoAAAAJ&hl=en In 2020/2021 he has at least 3 first author papers and a number of co-authored papers and apparently he wrote an impressive thesis. Even if he wanted to continue in academia, in a number of STEM fields, it would be sufficient for a degree. It's not a question of putting in time, it's about output.

Indeed, degree programs as we know them have a shady history where they were often just nonsense credentials the general public was too ignorant to invalidate, but they were secular, and gained popularity as religions has faded.

There’s a long history of payola in university. IMO our entire accreditation and credentialing system has so much corruption, anything but reproducible STEM education should be treated as being of suspect value.

The credential is earned due to social hoop jumping, and very specific. It doesn’t really say much about general intelligence or worker skill. I’ve worked with PhDs that were so obtuse nothing was accomplished.

It’s like trying to make a simple knife by first bootstrapping a universe to mine engineered carbon steel of the purest quality.

In the end political network effects dictate reality. And that realm is clearly rife with delusions of grandeur.

> ... anything but reproducible STEM education should be treated as being of suspect value.

I'm not sure I disagree, or at least not by much. But your statement seems rather odd for an account named (I presume) after Chomsky, since he isn't exactly STEM.

You should familiarize yourself with his actual research career and not just his popular political commentary.

He also advocates for science based social policy all the time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com