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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

PhD students are like startup founders. You're working for yourself, building something, racing against competitors, trying to get a foothold so that you can have the lifestyle you want in the future. That's why I think both groups get tempted to work a lot.

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Are PhD students really racing against competitors? I can imagine that in some instances they might, e.g., in the race to discover the structure of DNA, but I don't think it's true in most cases.

This is actually not such a good example I think. A better example would be that you have a small improvement to an existing algorithm, but you know that another group across the globe is also working on/with that algorithm and maybe they also found out the same improvement as you did. If that is the case, then it will be a race on who publishes a paper about that first.

If you're not first, there's no reason to publish a paper anymore. And you just lost a good paper... (And paper count is really almost all there is in academia, at least that is what it seems to me sometimes)

> Are PhD students really racing against competitors?

Often the next things to explore in research are fairly obvious from what has just been tried.

Yes, always. Consider when Pokémon Go came out, which for video game HCI researchers, was revolutionary from a social perspective. To give an idea: people standing on the street corner staring at their phone are now fellow trainers you can talk to.

Colleagues and I started data collection. Submitted a paper and were rejected as another group beat us at a prior conference because they could move just a bit faster. Sucks when a reviewer says "Unoriginal. Already saw this last month."

Why not Ingress?

Popularity.

Ingress wasn't so popular that you could assume people in the same location as you were also playing.

At the height of its popularity, you were the odd one out on the street corner if you weren't playing Pokemon Go.

> Sucks when a reviewer says "Unoriginal. Already saw this last month."

That’s a systemic problem where we end up chasing the latest fad not because it’s interesting, but merely hoping to end up before someone else. Luckily, not all fields have that short-term outlook.

If most of science is normal science where you have a tough idea what you’re doing yes. You may not know the solution to your problem but you know the problem you’re trying to solve and mostly your trying to solve it with the same tools the rest of your discipline is using. Even when that’s not true you’re trying to finish a PhD faster than other PhD students or to publish more or better work so you can get a better postdoc. There’s a lot of competition.

I don't know, a lot of major discoveries happened independently in a very short time span. The discovery of dark energy was made by two independent groups. Einstein was racing against Hilbert to formulate general relativity. The quark model was developed independently by Gell-Mann and Ne'eman. Haumea was discovered independently by Mike Brown's group and Luis Ortiz Moreno's group. The Higgs mechanism was developed by three independent groups in 1964.

At a more prosaic level, during my own Ph.D. another group published a paper very similar to one I had been working on. (By a strange coincidence the lead author on that paper had a very similar name to my own.)

There is something to the idea that it's a good thing if you have to worry about other groups scooping your work. It means that you're probably on the right track --- it means your work is relevant and that you have a reasonable path to solving an important problem.

Yes. In some fields it is known that there are research groups that are dedicated to mining the conferences for ideas that can be quickly finished and published. The grad student who gets "scooped" is at a disadvantage because they have a variety of duties, including teaching, plus they are still getting up to speed on their technique.

Students are advised to withhold their best ideas from conferences.

My spouse is in a field like this, and "so-and-so got scooped today" is a not unfamiliar dinner table conversation.

For my PhD, I was lucky that my project required a huge pile of expensive and rather unique equipment, plus I really did have a skill advantage for the work I was doing. Two other labs replicated my work using the plans that I supplied to them, but I made sure that I got there first.

It varies a lot depending on the field. I was never particularly worried about being scooped during my PhD. I think that's because there were/are few people working on the same problem.

To give an example: One idea I've been working on lately is in a very narrow field where almost no one has the background to do it. (I consider myself barely qualified.) Someone publishes something similar perhaps a few times each decade. I'm really not worried about being scooped on this. I've thought before that whatever paper I write on this is basically written for someone a decade or more in the future, as possibly no contemporary researchers will care.

100% true even for small ideas.

New ideas are worth everything in science, especially when doing experiments.

When I started my PhD in physics our group leader told us repeatedly not to talk to people from MIT or Caltech about our work too early, because there will be a postdoc who will do what will take you about 3 years in the space of 6 months.

> When I started my PhD in physics our group leader told us repeatedly not to talk to people from MIT or Caltech about our work too early, because there will be a postdoc who will do what will take you about 3 years in the space of 6 months.

Because of smarts, or because of their access to resources?

I would say experience instead of smarts, but also yes resources. Mainly the experience though: they know how to align a cavity, they know the theory, they can understand more quickly, etc.

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