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Extremely few people outside academia are (1) world class at anything, even in a tiny subfield (2) advance the state of the art (3) can explain it in a way clea
by barry-cotter 5y ago
Extremely few people outside academia are (1) world class at anything, even in a tiny subfield (2) advance the state of the art (3) can explain it in a way clear enough that you can reliably learn something from what they wrote about what they did and how they did it.
That combination describes what a doctoral disserataion is.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y agoThe opposite is true in my field, which is half-way between CS and humanities. I've read a few hundred PhD dissertations now and most of them are really not great. Not a few are more jargon than substance, covering up mediocre ideas with a sugar frosting of math symbols and bizarre wordy academic pseudo-abstraction which obfuscates simple ideas instead of clarifying complex thoughts. A few are straight out pandering and careerism, with style and content apparently designed to appeal to a specific supervisor. I was considering a PhD and the quality of the work was the biggest factor that decided me against it. To be fair it's a fairly niche field. But even so - literally only a handful of those dissertations come close to matching your criteria.