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The word "science" is ambiguous. It denotes two very different kinds of activities.

The first is the lofty intellectual ideal of solving a major problem, winning a Nobel, and getting your name in the history books. The second is the daily grind of reading other people's papers, providing peer review, writing grant proposals, and generally interfacing with other humans as a cog in a grand machine. The second is in some sense "easier" than the first. It's a lot more work, takes a lot more time, but it's a relatively straightforward (if often tedious) process that pretty much anyone can do with enough diligence. The first is a lot more fun, can often be done while showering, but is also fraught with risk and dependent on luck. You have to find just the right problem at just the right time under just the right circumstances. You can spend your time slogging, or you can spend your time buying intellectual lottery tickets and hope that lightning strikes, but you can't do both, at least not at at the same time.

The good news is that engaging in the daily slog is often (but not always) good preparation for and improves the odds of having lightning strike. So as a practical matter, that is often a good place to start. You might feel as if you're wasting your time reading everybody else's bullshit papers instead of writing the next Nobel prize winner yourself, but you're not. You're actually an essential part of the process even if you don't end up with the glory. And some day you just might be facing a really hard problem and go, "Wait a minute, this seems kinda like that thing I remember Dr. Arglebargle talking about three years ago, except that he missed this one detail..." and that's when the magic happens.

> When someone asks me if it's worth doing a PhD I tend to say that you need to like the direction in which science is going. If you don't like it and are rather rebellious, it's better to start a company.

Right. I got an MSCS from Stanford in 1985. That was about when it was becoming clear that expert systems were a dead end. The Stanford faculty was heavily invested in expert systems at the time, and were in serious denial. This was the beginning of the "AI Winter". I could see this, because I'd been doing proof of correctness work, where machine-powered predicate calculus could deliver results. It was clear to me that those methods were too brittle for the real world, although they worked fine on the rigid world of computer programs. Hammering the real world into predicate calculus only works if you already almost know the answer. (Drew McDermott's essay, "Artificial Intelligence meets Natural Stupidity" is the classic commentary on that.)

There were some neural net people around, but they were stuck, too, partly because they needed a few more orders of magnitude more compute power before that approach started working. Neural nets had been around for decades, and on a good day in 1970 you could recognize handwritten numerals, slowly. Computer power wasn't increasing that fast in those days. In 1970, there were 1 MIPS mainframes, and in the early 1980s, there were 1 MIPS VAXes. Success with neural nets lay many orders of magnitude in compute and several decades ahead.

So, instead of academia, I did some stuff for a little company called Autodesk.

I never expected computer science to be captured by the ad industry.

Much of the foundational science we learn about in the history books was done by bored rich people. Becoming a bored rich person is still a great strategy if you want to do foundational research. The risks you need to take in order to do that kind of work are too onerous for someone who needs a job to put food on the table.

Someone who needs a job to put food on the table is going to take 4-5 years off to do a PhD?

That doesn’t make sense. PhD salaries in most places can barely support one person , if that.

I think you and your parent comment are saying the same thing.

Well, if it is any help, the guy who made this forum once published a book with a collection of his essays. Various topics, including how to become a rich person, in what ways graduate studies are helpful in creating software. Might make sense of putting worldly things in this perspective.

I did so after college, had no money, parents were immigrants with no money but always told me to "follow my dreams". PhD payed enough to eat and live a decent life as a 20-something with no dependents. As I got older, I realized the financial burden I was taking, saw my family get into more and more financial trouble and I felt like a helpless selfish brat "chasing dreams" while my parents were trapped and fighting a losing battle... I finished as fast as I could and got a job in tech.

Those who are actually desperate to put food on the table are not going to spend extra years to finish as fast they can, they just leave. Or they don’t start in the first place.

The only person I know who successfully employed the "Bored rich person" strategy is Stephan Wolfram.

I very much doubt that Stephen Wolfram is bored.

Has he done any foundational science either ?

Yes.

Why is this downvoted? I agree: Yes. His Wiki page[1] says:

    > Working independently, Wolfram published a widely cited paper on heavy quark production at age 18 and nine other papers. Wolfram's work with Geoffrey C. Fox on the theory of the strong interaction is still used in experimental particle physics.

And:

    > In 1983, Wolfram left for the School of Natural Sciences of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton.

As I understand, IAS is all about fundamental physics research.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wolfram

You should watch his "live CEO'ing" videos for Mathematica. They're pretty good. He'll be personally testing something out for an upcoming release, something will break and he'll call up whoever was in charge of that function or module and start asking a bunch of questions.

hmm, I think the entire FIRE movement is basically about this, no? Some people want to just do gardening or whatever, but if your hobby is science, that's totally fine too. Not every kind of science can be done on the cheap, but basically any theoretical work can be.

That's why I have high hopes for humanity once we get closer to post scarcity (if we ever get close). Sure..some people will just watch TV all day, but I'd expect I'd start sitting down with math books and eventually finally learn the stuff I never had the time for when trying to put food on the table.

The rich person life back in the day was having personal tutors at a young age teaching you Latin, Greek, rhetoric, mathematics, music, and so on. Then if you were really good you'd just work on whatever problems you fancied, while the rest of the family probably took care of the fortune. That's my very limited understanding for how it worked for some anyway. They would correspond with other scientists, but mostly focus on their work. There's some advantage to the university system, but the administrative beauracracy is intense. Writing government grants or proposals and so on is an enormous time suck. If you didn't need money, you could focus 100% on whatever you want.

I love sitting down an reading math books. Problem is, it's hard to do after a long day's work where I've been exercising my brain a lot. Especially when I have far more important and time sensitive things to do like cooking, eating, and cleaning up the messes I've made in the day. Sure, that doesn't take all the time, but between that and some time to be human, there's often not enough time + energy left. I think it is clear why so many people get so much knowledge when they're in school. Because your job is to learn. Why you can do so much in a PhD (sometimes, maybe not the best example) because you spend all day doing this. Now just imagine what OSS projects would be if people were doing it full time and not in addition to their jobs? Would the xz incident have happened? Would xz only have "two" maintainers?

I chose an ambitious/important topic for my PhD. Perhaps it is because stories usually have happy endings, causing us to be overly optimistic, but I imagined that if I just worked really hard on it then eventually I would solve it. In the end I did enough to get the degree, but I didn't solve the problem in any real way. It was five years of struggle that didn't produce any interesting results. The biggest learning for me from the PhD was that it made me more humble and caused me to doubt that something is possible unless a clear path to it is already visible.

That is also a difficult problem - how do you know beforehand, that a problem is worthwhile? That someone else thinks it is important? Or how high is "ambitious" if you never tried to do a thing? There is a lot of luck in that system.

I don't know you, neither your life, but if a university granted you a PhD you must have made some headway on the problem. It is possible that you made a bunch of progress but "not enough" from your perspective. We have some evidence that you did good work (your PhD) and no evidence (afaik) that your struggle didn't produce any interesting results.

I think you might be being too harsh on yourself.

If you work hard for five years you are going to have some tangible things to show for it. To me it sounds like he didn't accomplish as much as he originally hoped, and he suspects the opportunity cost of continuing with the work is too high.

Considering on how many people are routinely influenced by the sunk cost fallacy when making their decisions, perhaps even that awareness on when to fold is a part of the critical process a good academic goes through in the course their research. The economy and politics have forced me to pivot and without enough self-awareness to realize when to leverage some other skill or the ability to learn another set of skills based on my prior education, even if it meant moving or changing to a field that isn't immediately obvious. I think it's a useful sanity check at times.

That is sort of the point of a liberal arts education broadly, no? It's not a trade school (although I did spend my 20s at a glorified one and worked in what really was a fancy service industry gig - the law - that is partially obstructed by the sort of things at stake that we deal with, but is fundamentally a service and very much one that is customer-facing. I was one of the first few to quit from those in my graduating class that I kept touch with as well.) Owners of sports franchises, worth billions of dollars, fail to understand concepts like this. Those in charge of large companies, with externalities being constraints that we might not see in fairness but still having control of the narrative more or less, fail to demonstrate this. The government and policymakers either ignore or are ignorant of this on more occasions than one can count. Although it's hard to say what would've happened in the alternative, the initiative does alter the dynamics one would eventually have with their new situation, speaking personally. At least I'm not routinely putting in 75-80 hour weeks which is liberating in its own way even if it was routine enough that few bat an eye when put in that position at the start, judging from what my friends mostly ended up doing and not doing.

But the imposter syndrome thing does haunt as well. It takes a while to realize that one hears about plane crashes because planes not crashing do not make the news, after all, and the actual rate of crashes, incidents, and near-misses can be and usually ends up haphazardly reported at best if one doesn't dig into the official quotidian, and jargon-filled language of official reports, and I don't think that it's part of society's expectation for the average person even if it's both an apt analogy and something to look up if one has the time.

It is well-known that PhD theses are made out of the fragments of broken life dreams.

Similar experience here. My PhD research was in a niche (but unhyped) field where it was easy to pump out low-impact papers. My peers who went into more hyped fields had much more citations and much better job outcomes, whether in academia or in industry.

If you want to do high-impact research in the long run, you need to have a strong foundation, which means a solid bed of high-impact papers to point to when you need funding, opportunities, etc.

Just like undergraduate work, your PhD thesis is practise. For the PhD, in the mechanics of doing large scale research and participating in the community. Save the novel and profound stuff for post-doctoral work.

I had a different experience. I aimed for what your colleague did, but none of my work was good enough for top tier conferences, so I ended up with neither novel nor top-tier work.

So I think both options really depend on what you can deliver and in what timeframe.

> Their approach was basically to look at publications from the previous conference, apply some delta that they had an advantage over other teams and publish this in the next round.

I think that's it for most PhD students. Look at recent papers from your advisor (or their co-authors). Once you understand that specialized area well-enough, you should be able to find an epsilon that can be added, or to apply some results to a different use case. A 2-3 papers in somewhat decent conferences should be enough to be able to graduate.

Most people won't solve interesting open problems. They will find questions that nobody has asked before, so they can be the first one to answer it.

This mentality is the reason why the ratio of funding to groundbreaking work is a disaster compared to the previous century.

Very similar experience here, and I ended up going directly into industry instead of a postdoc because I had the same realization. I'm glad I did it that way, though, because I'm very proud of my research and I think we did something very interesting and novel.

So who enjoyed and got more out of their research, you or the one doing trivial twists in the latest saturated field?

What about pursuing a PhD if you aren't planning to stay in academia? Would its lack bar you from industrial R&D positions? Assuming we're talking about a Computer Science/Engineering discipline.

I would say it really depends. There are certainly specialized area where a PhD is important, but it's hit or miss.

For instance, my team (in a big tech company) has people with very diverse backgrounds. Some tasks require more expertise, but most of the work will fit a generalist profile. Some teams who are more "researchy" have probably more PhDs. I feel doing a PhD gave me more time to learn things, while my current position is more fast paced and I can't afford to spend 2 weeks just learning new things.

Financially, it didn't make sense to do a PhD. It's not even super clear what I learned is helpful now but I'm glad I've had this experience. It gave me a bit more perspective and culture of the field. I don't regret doing it. However, I regret going into academia. Being a professor didn't suit me for many reasons. I'm happier in industry.

Get into the PhD, publish a paper, get internships, and then once you've gotten an internship with a group you're happy with, ask if you can drop out and join them.

Industry is more than willing to look past a lack of a degree given a good track record. Two of the smartest people I know didn't have undergrad degrees. One started as a lineman for AT&T, and learned programming by tending a computer in a field office, and worked his way up to working at some of the biggest tech companies. Your web browser uses technology he wrote (being cagey, as I'm not sure its commonly know that he doesn't have a degree).

Even academia is willing to look past a lack of a degree for the right person -- my ex-wife's PhD advisor's advisor didn't have a PhD himself (but did foundational work in the field).

> Even academia is willing to look past a lack of a degree for the right person -- my ex-wife's PhD advisor's advisor didn't have a PhD himself (but did foundational work in the field).

These seems like more than a generation ago. Things were very different back then. I think now attaining a PhD (or enrolling in one) is the first step towards even starting out in foundational research. Academia today seems to be more about restricting access to the Ivory tower, rather than democratizing it.

> It's not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack.

> When someone asks me if it's worth doing a PhD I tend to say that you need to like the direction in which science is going. If you don't like it and are rather rebellious, it's better to start a company.

While this feeds into the founder kool-aid we all drank as founders, it also speaks volumes of truth to me to this day: I rejected where biology/ecology was going even when supposedly favourable paradigms--Al Gore's inconvenient truth and Carbon Credits were a thing as I was wrapping up my undergrad and I was appalled by both--were standing in front of progress and the most obvious solutions if you could take the small amount of time to familiarize yourself with emerging technology outside your gradschool bubble. Something I don't think academics are actually capable for fear of seeming to reveal themselves as hyper-specialized in one aspect only rather than the polymath they may seem/convinced themselves that they are.

Also, it is my experience most academics are tone-deaf and incredibly petty individuals: a visit with the tenured faculty was enough for me to run for the hills of the debt-laden, financial crisis impacted work-force.

I still visit my Biochemistry professor from time to time, who did well getting into Bitcoin, when I launched my startup working with the Hemp Industry; and I'm super proud of playing a part in that since we both got hit hard during the 2008 financial crisis. But I'm glad I turned down his offer to work in his lab and get my Masters and went through boot-strapping hell to launch my startup after working in many Industries just to get by.

It was interesting white boarding about the bio-chemistry of CBD (and other cannabnoids for that matter) infused drinks/food I could pitch to my clients as profitable avenues of growth after struggling to make it to class and 'only get a B-' because I just didn't 'fit' (read: rebellious) the school model at all despite having both honors and letters of recommendation to join two labs.

I'm in Grad school now (almost 20 years since starting my undergrad) for CompSci now, but only because I'm working to transition into Big Data and I already work on the large Data Centers spurred on by the AI hype; luckily it's a non-thesis program for experienced and working professionals (I'm currently on assignment for a sub-contractor in WY).

> most academics are tone-deaf and incredibly petty individuals

Yep, their egos get inflated from interacting with students all the time.

If you have been teaching the same subject for 10 or more years, and you are constantly interacting with people who are learning it for the first time and struggling, it's easy to become arrogant.

I'll go 1 step further and say that most of the advice academics give out in terms of learning has been counterproductive for me.

There have been some exceptions, but I have been disappointed for the most part.

Yep. I regularly interact with a seasoned academic who is easily one of the top minds in his area. Having him understand that this doesn’t mean that he is an expert in all areas a constant uphill battle.

If you're used to being the alpha, it's complicated and difficult to accept a new role... We're all human

Interesting take, thanks

And yet programmed love rehashing arguments from 1973.

I wonder sometimes, how many of the people arguing endlessly and religiously about concurrency primitives realize that they are debating “religious” texts from the same prophet, Sir Tony Hoare. But as you say, the lack of immediacy does seem to mess with our heads.