The PhD Octopus (1903) | Hacker News Reader

The PhD Octopus (1903)

la.utexas.edu

> Graduate schools still are something of a novelty, and higher diplomas something of a rarity. The latter, therefore, carry a vague sense of preciousness and honor, and have a particularly "up-to-date" appearance, and it is no wonder if smaller institutions, unable to attract professors already eminent, and forced usually to recruit their faculties from the relatively young, should hope to compensate for the obscurity of the names of their officers of instruction by the abundance of decorative titles by which those names are followed on the pages of the catalogues where they appear. The dazzled reader of the list, the parent or student, says to himself, “This must be a terribly distinguished crowd, - their titles shine like the stars in the firmament; Ph.D.’s, S.D.’s, and Litt.D.’s bespangle the page as if they were sprinkled over it from a pepper caster.”

Interestingly, this remains true. If you want to be a CS professor at a small college, your industry experience is probably more desirable than a PhD.

Just don't expect to be paid more than a 10th of what you make now, and certainly don't expect the respect of your bespangled peers ;-)

As a person with such a degree, I can tell you that getting a PhD to teach is basically like getting a Lamborghini as a daily driver. Wildly impractical, a PhD is for teaching is primarily a gate-keeping methodology which finds it's true power in the, sometimes literal, indoctrination of the future generations.

For this purpose I feel as though it is justified, however there is also a ponzification of bestowed PhDs, where novelty and published research may become so tangential or new that the field literally doesn't exist and might never be useful. For this purpose, a PhD feels like the "other" bin, the world doesn't have a name for it or the PhD holder claims that no other label fits.

When I was doing my PhD in mathematics in Romania, I had a colleague who was a high school math teacher also getting a PhD in math, so I got intrigued. I get my PhD to access better paid quant jobs in finance, can't see where you could use yours.

Turns out a high school teacher that gets a PhD in his teaching domain gets automatically promoted to the highest class of salary achievable as a teacher. My brother is also a high school math teacher, he's reasonably well paid (higher than the average salary in the country) but took him 25 years and a lot of exams to get the "grades" to get here. A PhD program takes 3 years, if you can do it it shortcuts a lot of time.

Now I should say that I'm getting 4x the salary of my brother so the paradigm "teaching pays peanuts compared to IT" still holds.

Stil pretty ubiquitous, though there are lovely exceptions like tenured MIT professor Ed Fredkin (passed away last month) with no college education at all!

Ed passed away in June month, but he's been mentioned frequently on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=fredkin

Less extreme, but Simon Peyton Jones never did a PhD.

Yet he eventually became a Lecturer and a Professor at UCL and Glasgow, respectively: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Peyton_Jones#Education

Consider the old joke...

Q: What do you call a person with 18 years of education and a freshly minted certificate declaring them a distinguished Master in their field?

A: That new guy.

If I remember the obituary correctly, Saul Kripke's terminal degree was a B.A.

Unfortunately, accreditation can make that difficult now.

Institutions like MIT (where Fredkin was) don't really care that much about accreditation. Is anyone going to doubt your degree (or deny you a PE) if MIT decided to swap out a class that the accreditation society thought should be a requirement?

I was on the board of a private (primary) school and accreditation was make or break for it. But one of the values of the high reputation institutions is that they can afford to take chances: having faculty with "out there" opinions, some unorthodox faculty choices etc.

Honestly they should be taking more chances.

Hard for it to be "ubiquitous" when 99% of schools would be risking everything to attempt it.

As alluded to in the concluding paragraph, this was a time in America where the PhD degree was just beginning to be popular in America and was seen by many as an unwelcome German import (as the PhD degree as we know it originated there).

> With many men the passing of these extraneous tests is a very grievous interference indeed

I feel seen 120 years ago

I am hopeful massive LLMs/other models will be an enabler in recognizing and fostering everyone's talents, capabilities and interests in learning with detailed nuance. We'll soon no longer need to whittle down the education experience to fit through the eye of 20-40 needles[0] which all need to be snapshotted synchronized across a classroom like when TV episodes were only available at their exact weekly time slot. We've got like, I don't know, a trillion 32-bit resolution needles to work with now, I imagine we'll find significantly more nuanced and effective ways of learning[1] and organizing hiring/work collaboration with each other.

[0]: Or as the 1890 Scantron predecessor Hollerith Electric Tabulating System called the needle eyeholes, "keypunches"

[1]: Having worked over the years often on school/learning-supporting tech, and using GPT-4 to learn new things, it feels like, FINALLY! One-on-one instruction with direct attention has always been the most OP way of teaching/learning, but extremely cost-prohibitive. This could easily enable widespread hard-to-fathom outcome changes for students otherwise falling through the cracks of the one size fits all education model.

One complaint: "chair a canon" is nothing in particular to the reader's eye, but "chair à canon" is the French equivalent, perhaps the original, of the English "cannon fodder".

Thank you! I thought it must be an OCR goof, but couldn't figure out what the actual words should be.

Note that James is distinguishing between having a PhD certificate and having a level of knowledge one typically gains in pursuing a PhD. His point is that one can have the second without the first.

PhD-level expertise can be very useful, even when just teaching undergrads. My father was a PhD in organic chemistry and sometimes taught introductory organic to pre-meds. He insisted that an MS in chemistry was not sufficient to teach even undergrad organic, because diagnosing student misconceptions and lab technique required a depth of understanding you only get from extensive research work.

Jacques Barzun--who wrote a book on William James--had a suggestion: every baby born in America should acquire a Ph.D. along with the birth certificate.

I thought this had shown up more often, but only one past submission with discussion (1 or 3 comments in the other two submissions):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13944474 - March 24, 2017 (46 comments)

If only we could revert to this form of writing once more with charm and allure. Perhaps AI could train children to think in this tonality.

Beautifully written. 120 years later and people can't write formally and poetically without either mocking something or willing to be mocked. We've lost something.

While I would question this statement in general (people definitely can still write formal and poetical content without mocking, eg recently eulogy here on HN even), but on the other hand it also seems this piece itself is mocking to some extend?

> America is thus a nation rapidly drifting towards a state of things in which no man of science or letters will be accounted respectable unless some kind of badge or diploma is stamped upon him, and in which bare personality will be a mark of outcast estate.

I dunno, James Mickens has an odd type of poetic style that’s hard to imagine being employed a century ago.

[pdf]

HTML version: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Ph.D._Octopus

TLDR:

"The Ph.D. Octopus" is an essay by William James that delves into the increasing importance and sometimes detrimental effects of the Ph.D. degree in American academic life.

James recounts an incident where a brilliant student was offered a teaching position but was later informed that he must either have his appointment revoked or obtain a Ph.D. degree from Harvard. This event highlights the growing emphasis on titles and degrees over genuine talent and knowledge.

(@gpt)

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