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Comment by declan_roberts | Hacker News Reader

The only difference between a PhD and a hobby is money, or the presumption of it indirectly (certain jobs, etc)

Or else we just call it pursing our natural hobbies and interests. You don't need to go to school for that.

If you didn't need more money you wouldn't seek the accreditation.

In many disciplines, it is almost impossible to get oneself into an environment anywhere remotely as rich in collective expertise, resources, and academic-social interaction as a proper graduate research program. There are exceptions (e.g., aspects of tech where money can be made, aspects of social science that intersect with public policy or activism, etc.) but they are rare.

In my experience Academia lacks the resources that corporations can give you. This has been a big problem in AI. The transformers guys probably could not have pulled that off at a university.

You're exactly right. The ill-informed commenters here seem to think everything is about 'AI' and 'tech'. Of course you don't need a PhD to publish bullshit experiments on language models and unwarranted pontification — but try becoming a serious pure mathematician without a PhD.

But I guess the retort of the average tech bro HNer will be something like: 'we don't need pure mathematicians — just learn Rust and you'll make way more money'.

Some people study things that require actual equipment. People who have the money to run a nuclear physics lab in their house are very rare.

Nah. The difference is one of (learning) rigor. Intellectual and scientific. You learn a lot in the process of getting a Ph.D. about how to think, how to analyze, and how to research.

That sounds awfully generic. It doesn't sound that different from a Master's (heck, maybe even an undergrad) program that requires a thesis. Yes, there's a difference in the sense of supposedly doing novel research, but I'm not sure the degree to which you're theoretically moving the state of the art forward justifies your time investment in many cases.

I'm assuming you don't have a Ph.D. if it sounds generic to you. I think it's really impossible to explain to somebody who hasn't gone through it how much a Ph.D. changes the way you think.

Whether it's worth the time investment is another matter, however, which I'll leave alone.

The change isn’t unique to a PhD though. Plenty of people receive similar or better training in industry.

I hope that most people change after 5, 10 and 20 years of experience in industry and think in different ways than when they started...

It's a matter of degree. A _typical_ undergrad thesis is more spoon-fed from the perspective of "here's the idea, go do it". A typical masters project is still more advisor-generated than student-generated. A typical Ph.D. project is more student-generated than advisor-generated in many cases. Please add copious "not all"s to this paragraph as the variance is extremely high and everyone's case is unique. And the rigor expected increases substantially. Again, generally.

The major thing of a Ph.D. isn't really how much it moves the state of the art forward, it's how much it moves you forward. You will almost certainly approach research and your area fundamentally differently after.

That's true for me as well as a professor with respect to research: I'm pretty convinced that my largest contribution is the Ph.D. students I've mentored more than the chunks of research I've done. I'm proud of the research. But I'm more proud of the students. They've gone on to do wonderful things.

The thing it hangs on is "justifies" - financially, a Ph.D. in CS is hard to "justify." Intellectually, it's easy. Depends a lot on your individual utility function! I could have dropped out of my Ph.D. program to go be a pre-IPO employee at Google or Akamai and, ah, let's say that my financial picture would have a few extra zeros on it compared to where I am now. :-) But I'm really glad I didn't. It's been a very fun journey and I've never felt like I'm just doing the routine. That's worth a lot for me.

You don't really learn how to learn in a masters or undergraduate. You learn how to consume information, but not how to research new things, validate those and defend it to others in a rigorous way.

Whether it's worth the investment depends on ones goals in life.

If undergrad doesn't teach you how to learn at at least some level, that probably makes me question some of the value in getting an undergrad degree at all as that's one of the arguments for going through undergrad. I won't argue that a PhD isn't something of a next level but obviously there's a big cost involved, especially if PhD-type research isn't something you'll be doing.

Sure - it's just a hobby that pays money.

That and the library access, and the fact that you don't have to fit it in around a job, obviously. Kinda goes without saying.

And you get a supervisor who might point you in the right direction and keep you on track - but I'm sure you barely need that!

Of course the equipment access and technician support goes without saying. Not like anyone else is going to be letting you use their scanning electron microscope for free.

Having peers working alongside you who share your values of intellectual curiosity, working in the same field and who are your equals academically is also of little to no importance - who needs 'em?

There's the international travel for conferences, but really that's pretty burdensome. I for one don't want to traipse through airports and mess up my routine just to have conversations with world-leading experts on my topic of interest; I'd rather be at home relaxing.

I can't imagine anyone would be drawn to the 50% female working environment, with hundreds of smart, beautiful single women aged 18-22. Who gives a shit about that? Barely even a benefit really.

Other than the intellectual curiosity, the pay, the library and journal access, the time it gives you to study, the supervision, the equipment and technicians, the peers, the international travel, and all the young women - what have the Romans ever done for us?

All incredible points, but academia still doesn't appeal to people like me in the slightest. The hierarchy, the bureaucracy, the various costs, the unreliable supposed rewards, none of it was even remotely appealing enough to do an undergraduate, let alone a masters and then a PhD. Funny thing is, the hierarchy, the bureaucracy, the various costs, the unreliable supposed rewards, related to industries of technology, art, music, culture, essentially the exact same environment, did and do, and I've happily paid (in money, blood, sweat and tears) to participate in those.

I wonder what it is exactly that makes the same exact thing appealing wearing one outfit versus the other.

I feel like if we can solve that, we can restore some kind of respect for and desire for "academia", which seems like it's very much fallen out of vogue in culture lately.

I used to think that, money aside, I'd be interested in a PhD in whatever subject.

But really, I can buy the library access at my alma mater for a trivial sum. And, were I in the city, I could access a ton of the other stuff too. No, not the labs for the fields that require them for the most part--or generally discussion seminars, but there's a lot you can access for free-ish if you work at it.

It doesn't need to appeal to everyone. It's also very very lab dependent. I didn't find a lab at my European institute in my area of interest, so ended up not doing a PhD. I still do some science for fun though as a hobby.

I spent some time at Harvard as an undergrad doing research there though, and it was the most intellectually stimulating environment I've ever been in. Maybe YC is similar, but it's a lot about money in those environments and most startups aren't that interesting either.

> I can't imagine anyone would be drawn to the 50% female working environment, with hundreds of smart, beautiful single women aged 18-22. Who gives a shit about that? Barely even a benefit really.

I recall that hitting on undergraduates as an early 20-something graduate student was considered a pretty serious no-no, and barring some tenured professors that feel they're above the rules, it certainly seemed like consequences both socially and formally probably increased the older and further up the chain you got (as they should). It's honestly pretty creepy to talk about them like you do.

Even at what was probably one of absolute best institutions in the world for accelerator physics, which I was interested in, I recall very early on being told by some faculty member that maybe 1 in 10 of us would ever land a tenure track faculty job. Almost everyone I have kept up with that wound up at the best graduate institutions for physics in the world have left, and are all basically doing the same shit I am (doing meaningless shit with computers), almost all of them worse for the wear, especially those who are now leaving after a postdoc or two.

I still have easy access to the local state university's library in its entirety, that is useful, but you don't need an academic job for that. I met plenty of other physics and math graduate school/postdoc drop outs in industry, you can't go far in our field without running into a lot of them everywhere, and most of plenty happy to talk about academic stuff. I don't have the same sort of access to faculty and expensive physics equipment that I did in the past, but given that I was able to actually buy my own home in my 20s with no help, support my own family and not generally have to worry about money and my own future in the same way that almost all of my peers still in academia did and still do, I can't fathom why outside of the absolute most brilliant focused 1 in 100 million minds would bother taking the risk of beating their head against the academic treadmill unless you were already very wealthy. Any justification just feels like massive amounts of cope for not wanting to leave the academic nest.

> I recall that hitting on undergraduates as an early 20-something graduate student was considered a pretty serious no-no

If you're a 24 year old grad student and they're a 22 year old undergraduate in a different department? No big age gap, no power over them like grading their work, no problem.

And as you get towards 27 obviously you won't want to date 18 year olds - but even if the grad students in your department are mostly male and you don't want to create an awkward environment for the female minority, there are grad students in plenty of other departments too.

Is meeting your future wife in grad school super-professional? IDK, maybe not? But it's relatively a lot more professional than trying the same thing at a sausagefest Silicon Valley tech company.

Hardly a quality of the working environment then. You get the same just by working in the vicinity of the institution.

You're still not really internalizing the fact that academia is status-economy job, like being a celebrity. There are orders of magnitude more people willing to be there (under worse circumstances than you) than there are available positions.

How you move socially is going to be one of the biggest factors that can kill opportunities for you or spin you out of academic work entirely. Everyone is out for themselves -- knives out.

As such, you're probably living very dangerously trying to navigate intimate relationships anywhere in the orbit of campus. Sure, it happens, but doesn't always end well.

I'm sorry but you must be confusing something. You're talking about a bachelor's degree when everyone else is talking about PhDs. The vast majority of people do not have the qualifications for a PhD at 18.

I would assume there would be more structure and outside requirements to a phd than a hobby. More feedback and more requirements in general to do things you wouldn't do as part of a free form hobby where you could just avoid the undesirable aspects.

If you want to be reductionist, the only difference between eating at a restaurant and cooking at home is money (and also that they’re fundamentally different things). That doesn’t mean that people do one or the other for purely financial reasons.

Also is it still a PhD by your definition if you pay tuition? Or only if you’re paid a stipend?

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