Day 400: Having thoroughly described a universal theory of everything, we set out to build an experimental apparatus in orbit at a Lagrange point capable of detecting a universal particle which acts a mediator for all observable forces in the known universe.
You find out your idea has been tried, five different ways, all of them failed. Two of your follow up ideas were already done, and had some impact but not as much as expected. Finally you have an idea nobody has done, you try it and it flops—maybe somebody had tried it before but their results were so bad they couldn’t publish.
Then in the end you have done a tiny increment over the state of the art, and you want to persuade the PhD committee this is enough and they should let you graduate.
That shouldn't ever be a thing. As long as your methods are sound, it should never matter whether your results are just completely random noise; that's still an important result.
That is already something people would call a project.
You could achieve things yourself if you tried!
Like, if you stay focused, is it even really a side project?
Which is why my 2d top down sprite-based rpg now has a 3d procedural animation engine, a procedural 3d character generator with automagic rigging, a population simulator that would put Europa Universalis to shame if I ever get around to finishing it (ha!) a pixel art editor, a 2d procedural animation engine using active ragdolls.........
You might wonder why a 2d game needs 3d procedural animation, well...
The scope creeps in mysterious ways
I believe the answer is buried in this submission:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47902525
Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish (matthewbrunelle.com) 228 points by speckx 12 hours ago | flag | hide | 122 comments
To produce better looking assets for the 2D top down world?
Day 1: we aim to demonstrate the role of myosin II in the initiation of adhesions in migrating fibroblasts
Day 1047: we aim to get one preparation of fibroblasts to express GFP-myosin and survive long enough to film, just one, come on, please, twenty cells is enough, is that too much to ask
I heard academic research described like this: Imagine yourself inside a balloon. The body of research in your field is represented by the current size of the balloon. Now put your fingertip on the wall of the balloon and push. That little indentation is your Ph.D.
Another analogy is a lake: The lake is the current body of research, you walk up and dump in an additional bucket of water. That's your Ph.D.
I'm sure there are many others.
Illustrated nicely by https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
How else does one stand up and proclaim that the fruits of years of labor and expense of a small fortune is an incremental improvement ?
While working on a project for a class, I once found a solution to a particular problem that hadn’t been really solved. Got to do a conference poster. Someone asked if it was my PhD topic (it wasn’t). I felt it was too silly to even count toward such. The problem likely had not been unsolved because very few ever cared.
(I eventually dropped out)
Instead I write software mostly with no UI that nobody ever sees. But I enjoy the work and can convince myself that someone finds it useful.
Any advice on how to mitigate this?
If it helps anything at all: It's normal. At this point, you've already proven you're smart and knowledgeable. Now, the universe wants to see if you can also finish what you've started. That's the main thing a PhD proves: That you can take an incredibly interesting topic and then do all the boring stuff that they need you to do to be formally compliant with arbitrary rules.
Focus on finishing. Reduce the scope as much as possible again. Down to your core message (or 3-4 core messages, I guess, for paper-based dissertations).
Listen to the feedback you get from your advisor.
You got this!
When I did my MSc thesis he told me it was a pretty good PhD. (Before giving me a months work in corrections.) I didn’t understand back then, but I understand now. It was small, replicatable and novel (still is)! Just replicate three times and be done with it. You’ve proven your mastery. Now start something serious.
My professor once told me he presented at a small conference, the whole audience everybody had PhD in mathematics and maybe 2 of the 50 or so people in the audience could follow along. The point he was trying to make is at some point the people in the audience were not really interested in what was being presented because it is difficult to just follow along some really niche topic.
He discussed this topic and how generally it's left to those who are more notable in a field to ask the 'dumb' questions everyone else is afraid to ask. And such questions often need to be asked to get the audience on board and open the floodgates with areas of niche research - the speaker themself is often too far into the rabbit hole to discern the difference between opaque and obvious.
So it stands to reason, at smaller conferences this would be a big problem, with fewer thought leaders in attendance whose reputations are intact enough that they wouldn't mind looking foolish.
in my field this would be terrible advice. instead you need to be doing something that your audience actually will give a shit about.
If there is something interesting enough to qualify, then reduce the scope as much as possible. It should go without saying that you shouldn’t throw out the interesting bit.
When you get on the industry job market nobody cares if it took you 3 years or 7 years to do the work, they only care if it’s meaningful.
But there's some things to remember that are incredibly important
- a paper doesn't *prove* something, it suggests it is *probably* right
- under the conditions of the paper's settings, which aren't yours
- just because someone had X outcome before doesn't mean you won't get Y outcome
- those small details usually dominate success
- sometimes a one liner seemingly throw away sentence is what you're missing
- sometimes the authors don't know and the answer is 5 papers back that they've been building on
- DO NOT TREAT PAPERS AS *ABSOLUTE* TRUTH
- no one is *absolutely* right, everyone is *some* degree of wrong
- other researchers are just like you, writing papers just like you
- they also look back at their old papers and say "I'm glad I'm not that bad anymore"
- a paper demonstrating your idea is a positive signal, you're thinking in the right direction
Combine that with the publish-or-perish paradigm and I think we got significant coverage. People don't even consider diving deeper into things and are encouraged to take the route of "assume paper is correct" because that's the fastest way to push out research. But if the foundation is shaky, then everything built on it is shaky too.
Which, that's a distinction in the hard and more formal fields like math and physics. They have no issues pushing out papers that may have errors in them because the process is to attack works as hard as possible. Then whatever is left is where you build again. You definitely have people take advantage of this, like Avi Loeb publishing about aliens, but it is realistically a small price to pay. And hey, even Loeb's work still contributes. If at some point it actually is aliens, then there's work existing that can be built upon. And when it continues to not be aliens, there's existing work to build on since really his problem is more that the papers just end up concluding "and this is why we can't rule out aliens!" (-__-)
Anyways, long story short, my advice is to just remember that you, and everybody else, is a blubbering idiot and it is a absolute fucking miracle a bunch of mostly hairless apes can even communicate, let alone postulate about the cosmos. At the end of the day we're all on the same team, seeking truth. Truth matters more than our egos and if we start to forget how dumb we are then we'll only hinder our pursuit of truth.
Acknowledge it is normal? Attempt to buy deeper into the delusion ("Yeah my work is awesome and unique!"). Use stimulants to force enthusiastic days every once in awhile?
Uhh... unless you plan to stay in academia? Then, this is a terrible idea.
You’ll almost never see a PhD thesis that has anything particularly interesting, novel or directly applicable to the sciences.
This is definitely the wrong way of going about a research project, and I have rarely seen anyone approach research projects this way. You should read two or at most three papers and build upon them. You only do a deep review of the research literature later in the project, once you have some results and you have started writing them down.
Replicating existing results doesn't meet that criteria so unknowingly repeating someone's work is an existential crisis for PhD students. It can mean that you worked for 4-6 years on something that the committee then can't/won't grant a doctorate for and effectively forcing you to start over.
Theoretically, your advisor is supposed to help prevent this as well by guiding you in good directions, but not all advisors are created equal.
It’s as if a committee of middle managers got together and said, “how can we replicate and scale the work of people like Einstein?”
> It’s as if a committee of middle managers got together and said, “how can we replicate and scale the work of people like Einstein?”
Or are they trying to require enough rigor and discipline so that out of 100,000 people who want to be the next Einstein, the process washes out the 99,000 who aren't willing or able to do more than throw out half-baked 'creative' ideas and expect the world to pick them up and run with them.
There's only finite attention and money for funding research, so you gotta do SOMETHING to filter out the larpers who want to take it and faff around.
I think at this point the system has eaten its own tail a bit, but there's good reason to require some level of "show me" before getting given the money to run your own research.
Moreover, I am not suggesting you don't look at other papers at all. But google scholar and some quick skimming of abstracts and papers you find should suffice to check if someone has already done the work. If you start fully reading more than a handful of papers, your ideas are already locked in by what others have done, and it becomes way harder to produce something novel.