The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.
matt.might.net
matt.might.net
The stereotype is that research is about making every-more specialised contributions that extend existing work in finer and finer-grained ways.
What research falls outside of this stereotype? Synthesis. Theorising deeper foundations that connect disparate bits of knowledge and gives a deeper understanding of them.
Why is the stereotype damaging? It equates research with simply making more specialised extensions to existing research, which means that it's seen as "a good thing" for research to be sharply-focused on a very specific topic. In a slogan: narrowness good, breadth bad. Breadth is seen as lack of focus, trying to take on too much.
But breadth is not always bad. It depends on what kind of research you are doing. Breadth can actual simplify the task and make it easier, if your task is developing a deeper, underlying theory.
And if someone can develop a deeper theory, that work can have -- to relate this back to the diagram -- an impact that projects across and reshapes whole segments of the circle.
That reminds me of a quote attributed to Stefan Banach[1]:
Good mathematicians see analogies between theorems ;
great mathematicians see analogies between analogies.
during your phd and postdoc, and certainly while you're tenure-track, you want to be pursuing projects that will nearly guarantee you publications at top-tier conferences / journals. so you don't want to be too risky, lest you go a few years without any good publications.
This works great for some things; but a lot of work is prohibited in this way. For example, it's almost impossible to get funding for databases or other long-term projects. Researchers that do work on long term projects constantly have to apply for new grants, always presenting their ongoing work as something completely new.
At the very end of the document, the Author explains that his son is ill from a rare genetic disorder, and wishes that a cure existed.
If the author wishes to make this point more obvious, he shoudn't be effectively burying it in a footnote.
I myself have found this to be the case. Learning computer programming taught me about "debugging" experiments when they fail in the lab. We should not be afraid to immediately embrace and learn new areas of knowledge, even when we know that it may take much effort to master that new knowledge.
WOW: I just read the end of the document. Just plain "WOW".
It is necessary to extend human knowledge to get a Ph.D.
It is not necessary to get a Ph.D. to extend human knowledge.
/article author
The linked guide to PhDs made me smile, and it rings true to me for non-sciences. As an undergraduate I was a Comparative Literature major with lots of credits in Latin, Greek and Philosophy. Once I got to graduate school for Classics, my studies became increasingly concentrated in smaller and smaller areas of an already small field (Greco-Roman antiquity).
tl;dr I think literature and philosophy PhDs are also pimples of knowledge.
As for whether or not we expand human knowledge, that depends on how you define "human knowledge" and "expand", I suppose. I think it's charitable to say that (many? some?) people produce PhDs that expand human knowledge of Homer and Dante and James Joyce and Plato and Nietzsche and so on and so on. But of course if your definition of "knowledge" only makes room for numerical or quantifiable or experimental subjects, then you may disagree. I arguably expanded the world's knowledge of De Rerum Natura. My work has been cited at least once that I know of in subsequent work on the Epicureans, and not by me. (That's not just a joke: I remember reading that a large percentage of all research across disciplines is only ever cited again by the original author. I find that depressing.) I've also met a handful of people who tell me that it helped them in some other study.
That doesn't mean that philosophy and literature--and art, and music, and film, and all the other "humanities"--aren't part of human knowledge. They are, and they can have profound impacts on human society, which in turn, has significant impacts on the physical world on the Earth's surface.
When humans interact with the physical environment, we use heuristics to model the physical realities of nature in a usable way. Think of catching a baseball; we have an internal model of the Earth's gravitational field that allows us to predict the path of the ball, and place our hand in just the right spot to catch it.
When we interact with other humans we use heuristics too. These are affected by the cultural experiences we have, which include art, stories, movies, etc. When we evaluate a politician, for example, we are applying the heuristics developed by hearing, seeing, and telling stories. We think one guy looks creepy, and another trustworthy...why? Because of what we've learned about humans so far, and a lot of that comes from literature, art, philosophy, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9formation_professionnell...