4 ms·
You're not wrong, but you're attributing the conclusions (e.g., grads aren't smarter) to the wrong reasons (willing to put up with bullshit). PhD grads aren't
by jvanderbot 5y ago
You're not wrong, but you're attributing the conclusions (e.g., grads aren't smarter) to the wrong reasons (willing to put up with bullshit).
PhD grads aren't smarter, they're playing a different game. There's bullshit everywhere, you just chose a different pile to call home -- probably because it smelled better to your reward/bullshit tradeoff.
Why would PhD's choose that pile of bullshit of yours? ...
As you say, "Academic research is rarely about the things it says its about" is a good observation. The reason is that most of the time grants are awarded to professors to try a method (their specialty) to a problem (the thing the grant is about). This looks like the professor is padding his career, but honestly, that's the point.
We would ideally have a huge set of professors with perfect specializations such that a combination of professors could solve any problem. Science funding is ensuring that deep, old expertise is preserved in case it is useful. Grants are a way to simultaneously test that usefulness for modern problems and expand it a little towards modern problems by producing new phd's with slightly mutated expertise. This is why PhDs endure their own type of bullshit, because they want to be part of this particular kind of knowledge legacy. There are other ways of doing this. A problem-first (vs solution-first) approach is kind of better for a different kind of venue, like business, NASA, etc.
Political spats? Absolutely. No contest there. Turf wars are a thing.
- marcus_holmes 5y agoI was more addressing the "you've got to be really smart to complete a PhD" trope. From what I saw, the primary qualification is the ability to jump through pointless hoops because an authority says you should. You're totally right that academia doesn't have a monopoly on this kind of bullshit. But few other places get away with it so much, and manage to maintain a (rapidly crumbling) reputation of not being 90% bullshit.
- jvanderbot 5y agoYes, the "PhD's are smart" trope doesn't give enough air to smart non-phd's. But I think, at least around here, equivalent experience is just as useful as a PhD, but PhD's have the benefit of being extremely vocal / public about their experience in the form of state-sponsored projects and publications. I would suggest that your own rapidly crumbling opinion of academia is probably not endemic. The top universities still produce top-tier R&D, and top-tier candidates that go on to do top-tier work for large and small companies. It's definitely ok and understandable that some (or even many) people would feel differently, but my own opinion (coming from a mid-tier school) is that my training was absolutely of inestimable benefit to my job prospects, and was 100% enabling of my current career in robotics R&D. And I'm guessing that getting admitted to MIT would, without fail, make anyone happy in the entire world. (Though I didn't go to MIT obv)