>Most people I knew who finished Phds did not do much of note (and this is fairly elite tier). One could argue that research in general is a probabilistic, dis

>Most people I knew who finished Phds did not do much of note (and this is fairly elite tier). One could argue that research in general is a probabilistic, distributed gradient descent search and you are fulfilling a certain voluntary social duty even if you are not successful. Unfortunately that doesn't apply to many pursuits because of various perverse incentives in modern academia...