The illustrated guide to a Ph.D. (2010)
matt.might.net
matt.might.net
It is gruesome, the idea might not work, nobody else can help you because nobody else has tried, nobody cares about the myriad things that you tried and failed.
You will literally become a different person after the phd experience. But trust me, these 2-3 nights over the span of 5+ years, when pieces somehow come together and the goddamn thing works, are really worth the effort.
Basically, I read papers until I understood the field well-enough so that I was able to make tiny contributions worth publishing and presenting in conferences. That led to a few papers that I eventually compiled in a thesis.
I certainly got something out of the experience, but I can't say it made me a different person, or that it gives me an advantage of any sort at my current job (software engineer).
Agreed. I feel the same about my PhD. I did write a book that I could use to put myself to sleep though :)
During my PhD, I got to spend time learning, and attending talks/seminars/conferences. Gaining deeper background knowledge in my field as well as learning how to quickly evaluate and explore new ideas gave me the tools to have the type of job I wanted. I'm a research scientist at an industrial lab now and quite enjoy it.
That being said, I agree with the grandparent post that doing a PhD can be a grueling experience. I had to carry the bulk of the work for many of the papers I submitted. If I took a day off, nobody would pick up the slack. Tight deadlines meant the only way to succeed was putting in long hours. My advisors were also spread very thin so it was difficult to get a lot of time with them. There were times when I felt very alone. This was a really stark contrast to how collaborative engineering in industry was and I don't think I ever fully adjusted to it. My current job feels like a happy middle ground. I publish papers alongside other people and we split the work.
It's specialized training that's great for some fields, and completely orthogonal to the requirements of many others.
Much better off just going in to industry. People praise PhDs too much. No one at work knows of mine. It's not on my CV either.
What is awful is when someone with a PhD in, say, biology uses this as leverage in a completely unrelated field (data science). Malicious ambiguity...
You're not an authority on something just because you have a PhD, certainly not an authority on everything. This is, damagingly, how many behave... You're barely scratching the surface at that level. It warrants a lifetime of work to get anywhere near the level of respect some put up on them. I guess that speaks volumes to the general level of insight into education by most..
But it's wrapped up in such complicated rhetoric that no one questions it (perhaps less cares...)
I shouldn't berate it though. It pays the bills..
Even if you have a masters in the US, the only benefit you get as a PhD student, is having less core courses in the first two semesters of your program.
In the US a PhD is 2 years of unrelated taught classes and teaching work, and 3 years of actual research.
In the UK you only do the research part. So they’re the same in terms of the actual research part.
Within 12 months you are expected to do full time research regardless of what other obligations / selective classes you have.
So more like 4+ years of full research. Many schools have avg PhD program durations way over 6 years.
In UK post doc is almost a must for those who really want to dive deep.
Day one of my UK PhD I was shown to my desk, told to start researching, and that was it. I didn't waste any time with any classes or teaching (I did actually teach for a couple of hours as a favour.)
As long as you can produce top-tier papers during your PhD then you're meeting the international standard.
Yep this is where the gruesome part of the American PhD comes. And that is why in the first two years of the program the attrition is huge. In my class 50% had dropped by the end of year 2.
I've got a PhD. Personally, I'd say "unrealized" instead of "unattainable." Unattainable makes it seem like a dissertation topic is always some magical effort.
Lots of PhD work is a investigating some mundane area that somebody else hasn't (due to lack of time or interest) investigated yet. I wonder how many dissertations come from a random comment by a professor saying like "Well here is some minor tangential topic I/somebody should look into."
There’s a boundary of what you know, and a boundary of what you think you don’t know. Not the limits of all knowledge, but a belief about where that limit is.
When you’re a kid, you already know you don’t know everything, but you see the radius for the rest of it as not that far off, maybe achievable some day.
As you grow and learn and go to college and keep studying, the radius of what you know increases proportionally, accumulating little by little. And the radius of what you start to realize that you don’t know increases faster and faster, not just multiplied by the population of the earth, but also by the dawning realization that we collectively know very little.
The take home message being that your relative size of knowledge, the more you learn, shrinks asymptotically to zero. In a strange way I find this more comforting than believing that graduate school research is at or even pushing the boundary of collective knowledge; the reality is that most advanced degrees aren’t broaching the boundary nor feeding into the collective.
Especially in a forum ("intellectual curiosity" intended) where many are engineers, one will suppose imbecility ("lack of proficiency in the use of the stick": again Latin, of course, as it builds a good share of the language) a countervalue. This place is called 'Hacker's news': you look inside things and not your own language, hacker?!
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/dont-prematurel...
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/be-sceptical-of...
Tao is specifically speaking to mathematicians, but some of the lessons carry to other fields (and perhaps other areas of life).
The paper did not show confidence being inversely proportional to knowledge or skill as many people believe. It shows a positive correlation between confidence and skill.
But the paper itself is very hyperbolic and draws invalid conclusions that are unsupported by their own data IMO. You should read the actual paper, it’s enlightening to look at what they actually tested, and compare that to how they wrote about it. They didn’t test high skill tasks. And they didn’t test incompetent people. They tested only Cornell undergrads who were volunteering for extra credit. They didn’t control for this completely skewed population sample in any way.
They also didn’t test people’s estimation of themselves either. Not at all. They asked people to rank themselves in a group of others, without knowledge of the others’ skills. This simply means people were guessing, not that they were overestimating themselves!!
This is a great post explaining what’s most likely happening with DK: regression to the mean. https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-...
The idea that certainty and confidence is some kind of tell that reveals incompetence is just something people really want to believe. It feels good, but it’s specious and not actually true. Everyone knows someone who’s been arrogant and wrong, and it feels so good to think that science somehow backs the idea that arrogance shows someone is faking their expertise. Unfortunately, the only science that Dunning & Kruger did shows the opposite, that higher confidence is associated with higher skill, regardless of the fact that “skill” and “confidence” weren’t measured in any of the ways people would naturally assume when they read those words.
I don’t blame @MayeulC for believing what Dunning & Kruger claimed, especially when there’s a Wikipedia article backing it up and making it seem like an accepted and solid idea. I feel bad they got downvoted because of my comment, maybe throw an upvote their way if you feel like it.
I might have been a bit too direct referencing DK, and I think I understand your concerns. I haven't read the original paper, and I'm willing to accept your criticism of it at face value for now.
However, what I named (and what I believe is widely understood as) the DK effect is quite similar to what you pointed out in your original post. Even if that's not what the original authors intended, I believe that giving names to such psychological phenomena/cognitive biases is valuable to contextualize a discussion: "we're going to discuss the Dunning-Kruger effect" is shorter than a full introduction. Those who don't know what DK is can look it up (or read the full introduction).
Moreover, I have myself experienced what you describe multiple times, so I am willing to give additional credit to the idea (that I was describing as DK), even if quantifying cognitive biases is probably a lost cause.
> certainty and confidence [...] reveals incompetence
That is certainly not a conclusion that I am willing to make, nor something that I have ever seen expressed anywhere. The only thing I associate DK with is underestimating the deepness and breadth of a topic when you know it only superficially. And finding examples of this is quite easy.
> The authors spun the narrative very carefully to imply or seem like high confidence is suspect
Again, I was not aware of this, nor I am under the impression that this is a conclusion that people jump to (it really seems like a stretch). At least in my circles. I will document myself a bit more, and decide if I should keep calling this DK or not, thanks for bringing this to my attention.
I don’t think it’s related to what I was talking about because DK does not show people with less knowledge overestimating themselves, and it just doesn’t have anything to do with the ratio of how much you know vs how much you don’t know… it’s not hypothesizing at all about unknowns or about the boundary of knowledge, so the results can’t be seen as providing any evidence for that topic.
Subsequent papers to DK’s have tried to reproduce the effect, but using skills that require more expertise than what DK tested. Some of them found no such effect, and some found a complete reversal of the effect -- they found the experts underestimating themselves! (Impostor syndrome might be slightly closer to what I was talking about at the top, and impostor syndrome is opposite of DK). I believe the studies showing the opposite of DK are mentioned in the blog post I linked to, which I can’t recommend enough if you’re curious about DK.
The DK paper tested a total of 4 “skills”: the ability to get a joke (I’m not kidding), some basic grammar, some basic logical reasoning questions, and last but not least the ability to know how well you did on the previous questions relative to other people. The questions they actually asked aren’t in the paper, we don’t know what they were, but they did not test things that most people normally accrue expertise in like law, engineering, dance, architecture or medicine.
Only the 4th task - estimating others - is the one where they claim that people overestimate themselves. But remember these are undergrads who were asked to rank others, not to gauge their own ability (to, e.g., get a joke) in any absolute sense. Underestimating other people is not the same thing as overestimating yourself! And yet that’s exactly what they’re claiming.
The whole study had a little over 60 Cornell undergrads volunteering for extra credit in a psych class. The part where people ranked themselves only had half the participants, about 30, and it was done several weeks after the first three questions. Ignoring the potential problems with non-native English speakers, just think about how crazy it is to declare you’ve discovered a meta-cognitive bias for all of humanity after testing only 30 kids of all the same age and roughly the same background in a single Ivy League school in the US. Kids who go to Cornell are often rich, and often told they are smart for their whole lives, validated by getting accepted to an elite school. Why wouldn’t they overestimate themselves? Kids volunteering for extra credit doesn’t include the kids who were doing well enough that they decided not to volunteer, nor of the kids who were doing poor enough that trying to get extra credit was a waste of time. How do they know the kids volunteering for this study even took it seriously? They got the extra credit by showing up, not by being accurate. There are so many problems with the population sample, it seems nuts to draw any conclusions.
Here a link to the paper so you can read it and compare to Tal Yarkoni’s blog post. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12688660_Unskilled_...
The main question to ask yourself as you read it is “is this the only possible explanation for the effect they’re discussing?” Take special note of how they prime the reader with suggested outcomes before they describe the methodology. They have a hypothesis from the beginning and appear to test the hypothesis, but did absolutely nothing to try to disprove it. I don’t think this paper would be publishable by today’s standards, and compared to hundreds of other papers I’ve read, this one stands out for how much it jumps to conclusions and waxes philosophical without enough evidence.
Another one is that an alternate representation of this circle can be made by having theta as the x axis, and r as -y. In this representation, a PhD would sort of look like a T: a horizontal bar for general knowledge, and a vertical one going deep down for the PhD.
That's the T shape Valve refers to in their handbook [1]. Enough generic knowledge to communicate with your peers, and a deep enough specialty to make an impact.
Other areas of specialty would make it look like paint-drip.
I believe such a map can be build for an individual through a series of ML-chosen Questions and Answers (ML because this is the tool to explore that high dimensional space), but I don't have time to try to build it :/
I believe one could also assign economic value to some paint-drip patterns. The biology + deep learning paint drip seems to be very hot right now.
[1] p.46 https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployee...
Many colleagues of mine go to Germany for their master's and get surprised when they realise they already studied most of the material in their undergrad education here.
After bachelors, you feel, you know everything. After masters, you feel, you know nothing. After PhD, you feel, noone knows anything.
The illustrated guide to a Ph.D. (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13381843 - Jan 2017 (46 comments)
The illustrated guide to a Ph.D. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5385881 - March 2013 (49 comments)
The illustrated guide to a Ph.D. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1588727 - Aug 2010 (42 comments)
I remember many years ago a friend's father commenting on my PhD by saying "isn't it wonderful to be the only person in the world to know about this thing that you're working on?" That's the moment when you have your unusual observation, something that nobody else has seen before (or at least nobody has published before) and it truly is a wonderful feeling. You rely on your advisor to tell you work to look initially, and eventually you get good at finding those places to look yourself.
As Frank Westheimer once said (paraphrased) "Science starts with an unusual observation. When you have an unusual observation, one of two things has happened: you've made a discovery or you've made a mistake.". That's also an important lesson, and one that formed the core of my PhD.
I suppose this is the reassurance of being educated in the engineering sciences: the results speak for themselves.
I agree this should be the goal, but I’m not sure it’s consistently realized in practice. It seems an awful lot of research is derivative or auto-cited, so I’m not not sure it would fall into the “pushing the boundaries” category.
What's interesting is that the chemical reaction that was described in my paper that I linked elsewhere in this comment section [1] was originally discovered by some Japanese scientists in 1970, and we referred to their work as the "Oka Fragmentation". They too pushed back the boundaries of knowledge a little bit as well and we built on top of that. Also, my paper was arguing against conclusions made by a different team at Johns Hopkins - our work was ultimately shown to be correct as born out by subsequent experiments from our research group and others. So that contributes to the boundaries of knowledge by showing that some other body of work isn't correct. Who knows, perhaps our work will be shown to be incorrect in some future research.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that it's very difficult to discern impact at the time that you do the research - the impact can only truly be seen through the lens of history looking backwards.
I do hear that some universities offer a PhD by publishing, wherein they grant a degree for already published work.
Perhaps a bit like the film making model whose name presently eludes me, where instead of trying to get a funding from a studio to make a film, the filmmakers make it out of their own resource arrangements, and later try to sell the finished film to studios (perhaps for a profit).
In CS, for example, people definitely come out as experts in some niche of their research. Of course, there's a difference between their expertise and that of an experienced professor, but both are quite far from a normal person's knowledge of the field.
But yeah masters programs do vary widely. When I was in undergrad there were students doing a CS masters coming from other disciplines. They mostly took classes with us and had to write maybe an extra paper to “make it a 6000 level class” (granted I did take more of the theory heavy CS classes than was required).
In that case their masters was basically equivalent to just the bump from the bachelors.
What if generalizing about PhDs is impossible? What if that's partly the case because the point of the PhD is to let someone establish their own character as a researcher or scholar? Things that deliberately try to elude generalization, are hard to generalize about. If you took me and my lab-mates in grad school, and followed us through our careers, I doubt that any common theme would emerge.
What if generalization is further complicated by confounding variables? For instance, PhDs are more common in some fields than others. At my workplace, all of the PhDs have degrees in math or the physical sciences, even if they are working as engineers or programmers. There are no engineering or CS PhDs.
Disclosure: Physics PhD
I’ve met people with PhDs who didn’t have to write a dissertation. I’ve met PhDs who have who I wonder with true amazement how any institution granted them a PhD.
It’s absolutely wild what the variation in quality is for the same piece of paper (if you ignore the name of the institution).
I was stirred to write a post about the message here and what I believe the message should be. https://telegra.ph/On-Cynicism-11-08
So in that circle - they would go into slightly different directions.
The nice thing about this plan was that I got to see what graduate school was like without actually going to graduate school. After a couple of years I got a job as a programmer at another company (not at another university). I never did go to graduate school.
One can simply self-study a particular topic to gain more knowledge and become an expert.
To add my own 2 cents, I think many people with PhDs believe they pushed the boundaries of knowledge, but many actually did not. As dahart indicated, the boundaries of knowledge look different to different people. Given that, one frequently "reinvents the wheel" because they think they're at the boundary, but they are not. There's this idea that science is incremental, but I don't think it is. It's more of a random walk. And given that much (if not most) research is conducted by relatively ignorant people (PhD students) who do not have much experience in their fields, we should expect people to be starting far from the boundary and "pushing" into areas already explored. The advisor is supposed to provide more knowledge, moving people closer to the boundary, but again, I don't see that happening as often as it should. Too frequently I see exploring previously seen territory while thinking it's unexplored or just accepting ideas about previously explored territory that are wrong.
Reinventing the wheel is becoming increasingly likely in my view as the number of published documents increases dramatically, but search technologies, strategies, and habits (most PhDs don't do a comprehensive search or use good search strategies) aren't keeping up.
While I do think I had some actually novel contributions during my PhD, I view myself as more of an "intellectual janitor", cleaning up the mess/technical debt that previous researchers left behind. Unfortunately this sort of work is perceived by many researchers as not research. My own PhD advisor was not a fan of this aspect of my work.
I tried to be aware of the literature far more than most PhD students. Many people seem to be offended when I point out that their "novel" idea isn't actually novel. In my view, novelty should not be required to get a PhD or publish a paper. One should never be offended that their ideas aren't novel. Disappointed, sure, but offended, no. The only way to have high confidence that an idea is novel/pushes the boundaries is to do a comprehensive search, and even then you can't be 100% sure that you're not missing something. Most PhDs spend far too little time on this aspect.
0xB31B1B got it right: A PhD is training. Because PhD students are so inexperienced, they should not be expected to produce novel research or even recognize what novel research looks like. I think the US should greatly decrease the amount of funding available for PhD positions while increasing the amount of funding for permanent research positions. Total researcher headcount would decrease, sure, but a smaller number of more experienced researchers with stable positions would do a better job overall in my view.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29139842
Which is sad, because this sort of work is well-suited to get PhD students acquainted with a field, and provides real scientific information.
I'm not sure what this version adds. It mostly seems to copy the original wholesale. And there's more than a little bit of humanity after the copied part that's been left off:
> If you zoom in on the boundary of human knowledge in the direction of genetics, there's something just outside humanity's reach:
> [image with isolated dot labeled "Knowledge to save my son's life"]
> My wife and I chose to start funding these graduate students after we learned that our son has a rare, fatal genetic disorder.
On top of that, introducing people to Matt's work is a pleasure and a joy.
Consider my input as voting for the Matt Might source to replace the HappySchools link.
You wouldn't steal a car......
It's still an inferior site, but it's kinda wild to accuse someone of theft when they're not stealing.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/03/bertrand-might-matt-migh...
> …Once the shock of the A-T diagnosis wore off, we started researching. Within days, we were convinced that Bertrand did not have it.
> …In Bertrand's case, the cause of long QT turned out to be erythromycin, which had been used to treat his infection in the hospital.
Yet many doctors will actively discourage patients from doing their own research. "Amateurs!" I found that a very familiar part in Matt's otherwise unique story. I've seen two similar stories unfold in my family.
Here in the Czech Republic (ex-communist Eastern Europe), many doctors (esp. older ones) still cultivate that "don't speak to us, mere mortal!" aura and I hate that. I'm sure doctors have their reasons, but as soon as you fall outside their "typical bucket" of symptoms and causes, best do you own due diligence and remain proactive.
I now view doctors more as steam rollers – very efficient, backed by some impressive technology. But once off the beaten path… they're not that far from where you stand, as a HN reader capable of complex abstract thought, reasoning and research synthesis. Too many people put doctors on a pedestal (scientists too BTW, I'm saying as one).
Links to an opportunity to pay for almost certainly useless immigration advice. They're plagiarizing to get good SEO so that they can prey on young people hoping to immigrate to the USA.
(e: I'm highly supportive of skilled immigration and think there should be more of it... these "services" are a pox.)
Postdoc research is where people truly become experts and expand their knowledge.
From January of this past year:
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210126/Genetic-interacti...
> In 2012, four-year-old Bertrand Might became the first-ever patient diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder called N-glycanase (NGLY1) deficiency. The discovery of this condition and Bertrand's diagnosis allowed doctors to look for other children with the same genetic defect. Since then, more than 60 additional patients have been found.
> The disease affects every system of the body and is characterized by low muscle tone, seizures, developmental delays, and an inability to produce tears.
> Sadly, Bertrand passed away in October at the age of 12. Although his life was cut short, his legacy will benefit children around the world. Through their website, NGLY1.org, Bertrand's parents collect and share a wealth of research and family stories to help educate and inform the community. As more patients have been identified, it's become apparent that even though the same gene is deactivated in all of them, their symptoms and severity of disease vary widely.