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I meant "employability" of the PHD is useless. and I do not agree with any body of academic work being 'important for the advancement of our society'. looking d
by ousta 11y ago
I meant "employability" of the PHD is useless. and I do not agree with any body of academic work being 'important for the advancement of our society'. looking decades back and now i can guarantee you that a lot of bodies of academic work contributed to make our society regress rather than advance. Computer science is even one example of this, where litterally some guys spend two years of PHD to look where to put a "next button" on a UI.
I know many people that did a PHD on the sole basis to become a teacher as this was the best they could aim for in terms of pay/benefits.
- cup 11y agoDo you have the thesis or publications of their findings. I'd be interested to see what they discovered after two years.
- cfallin 11y agoI'd be interested in seeing a citation for that "next button" work, too. In general HCI is a serious (and useful) field. And while I agree that there's high variability in quality of work, both between and within disciplines, I would argue that there have been mountains of really fundamentally useful things that have come out of CS academia (and EE / computer engineering academia to support it), both historically and recently. Everything from programming language theory and optimizing compilers, to modern computer architecture, to all of the fundamental algorithms and data structures, to the basis for modern machine learning and distributed systems and ... I could go on. Industry applies and polishes it, but (in my experience at least) there's simply no way that most of industry would tolerate the multi-year risky projects that lead to useful breakthroughs.