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Do not forget that the boundaries of human knowledge have been surpassed by a healthy amount of individuals that never went the PhD route.
by prs 16y ago
Do not forget that the boundaries of human knowledge have been surpassed by a healthy amount of individuals that never went the PhD route.
- jerf 16y agoIt is not that you must have a PhD to push the boundaries of knowledge, it is that you must push the boundaries of knowledge to get a PhD, by definition. Nobody claimed otherwise here.
- prs 16y agoYou are right about that - I merely wanted to highlight that there are always other avenues of enlarging the sum of human knowledge. Investing your mental resources into a PhD is only one path a person can choose in order to strive reaching that goal. That is what I love about HN - Comments are dissected in a constructive manner.
- noonespecial 16y agoThe nice part about the Ph.D route is that you have guides to take you to the boundary and point it out to you. Plenty of people think they're at the boundary and pushing but are actually stuck at a (close in) local maxima of crackpottery. The real geniuses never even see a boundary. They just do their thing and let everyone else put labels on it later.
- lkozma 16y ago"Plenty of people think they're at the boundary and pushing but are actually stuck at a (close in) local maxima of crackpottery." That is true in many cases in Academia as well.