this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 207 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Summary: YOUR Ph.D. means almost next to nothing, but collectively they expand the bounds of human knowledge.

[–] [email protected] 82 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Do you have to live so relentlessly in reality?

[–] Gradually_Adjusting 26 points 11 months ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 37 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Realism got you down? Here, have a fox...

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

Sometimes I wonder.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (2 children)

As a parent to five, yes. All shall join me.

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[–] S_204 74 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I know a guy with a PhD in medieval agriculture with a specific focus on cows. He's one of my brothers wife's friends.

This guy devoted his life to ye olde english cow farts.

He's struggling for employment as one might expect.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 11 months ago (2 children)

whereas I , with my bachelors degree in clowning, have been head hunted for my last two corporate jobs.

[–] Agent641 11 points 11 months ago

You are now CEO of FTX

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[–] Stuka 12 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Who even funds degrees like that?

You end up with fewer job prospects than a GED

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 11 months ago (20 children)

A PhD is not the only way to expand human knowledge. This is disregarding a lot of work done by a lot of hard working people.

[–] [email protected] 94 points 11 months ago

No one says it was the only way? But one of the requirements of getting that PhD is to expand knowledge so it's 100% applicable

[–] ReluctantMuskrat 23 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

You might be surprised to learn it doesn't actually suggest a PhD is the only way to expand human knowledge. No one was disregarded.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

I don't think it's meant to do that. Also if we substitute PhD for learning both will be true.

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 11 months ago (4 children)

I kind of hate this image. Its like a way to discredit all the learning done in the formative elementary/high school years. If I would guess, 60-70% of everything I have learned was in high school and thats with me having several published papers.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 11 months ago (3 children)

To be fair, most of "all human knowledge" is stuff like when the last time was that each person on the planet pooped.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Go make your little bump in the circle of human knowledge then!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

I made a little brown bump.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

For your paper, I'm pooping right now. You can add that to your data points

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago

Why do you think it discredis it?

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[–] drmeanfeel 50 points 11 months ago

Frustrating to say the least. I feel my PhD accelerated learning in all directions. Not from the program content itself, but the skills involved in the ingestion of high volumes of dense information. This idea that the borders of my world don't extend past some yadda yadda about some tiny subclass of a field is some silly goosery.

Can those "skills involved" be learned elsewhere? Sure, this is just the path I took. Can phDoctors be single minded or general idiots? Sure, I'm an idiot. Do we need some single minded people? Sure, amazing things can be accomplished by singular focus.

But it isn't a mandatory condition or experience of a floppy hat assed (sword in some countries) recipient of this degree.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 11 months ago (2 children)

The ratio is off. You learn a lot more from high school and bachelor's degree and you learn way less with your master. PhD is just expanding a little bit more on master.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

The visual is more about highlighting specialization and its distance from the limit of human knowledge. You often can't represent every aspect of a complex subject at the same time on a single visual. Kinda like how you can't represent the solar system distances and planet sizes to scale on a single page, you have to pick one.

[–] Poem_for_your_sprog 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

But it's all very basic knowledge.

[–] EvacuateSoul 22 points 11 months ago

Common knowledge would be more appropriate. It is known by many people, but it is not basic as in obvious. It took a long time to know what we learn in a very "basic" high school biology course.

And if you actually remember half of what you learned in that course a decade later, people ask things like, "where do you learn this shit?"

[–] three20three 37 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

One of my professors used to refer to it as:

Bull Shit

More Shit

Piled High and Deep

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[–] eran_morad 25 points 11 months ago

Eh. It was a stupid misadventure, but it led ultimately to me meeting my wife and making a good amount of money. I managed to eke out a win.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Euler giving the circle two big balls and an erection:

O3--

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Anyone knows the origin of this representation? I've seen a professor use it years ago and I thought it was his, but I guess not.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It is from Matt Might, here.

Matt Might, a professor in Computer Science at the University of Utah, created The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D. to explain what a Ph.D. is to new and aspiring graduate students.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Last cell:

What is this, a PhD for ants?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

I appreciate this picture!

[–] troglodytis 10 points 11 months ago

*image not to scale

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

Wait, how bad are bachelors' degrees in the US/anglosphere? I was contirbuting to research projects and had a specialization by the time I was done with my five year bachelors' equivalent.

In fairness, I think the system has since been reformatted so that the fifth year is now a (paid for) master's, but still. That graph makes it seem like it's high school with benefits.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

College is what you put into it. A lot of people don't get into the networking side of it because it's never really introduced to them. Mostly professors look for those who are "turned on" to bring onto projects like that, that is, those that are engaged and asking questions and curious.

Youngins, lpt: talk to your professors and let them know you are interested and ask questions. It's what you are there for- access to brains.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)

five year bachelors’ equivalent

In Germany (and Europe, I believe, since the Bologna reforms), a bachelor’s is (usually) 3 years and a master’s is 5 years. That might be why you got to do research and I didn’t. How long are your master’s courses?

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[–] drctrl 7 points 11 months ago

I love this

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago
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