3 ms·

I chose an ambitious/important topic for my PhD. Perhaps it is because stories usually have happy endings, causing us to be overly optimistic, but I imagined th

I chose an ambitious/important topic for my PhD. Perhaps it is because stories usually have happy endings, causing us to be overly optimistic, but I imagined that if I just worked really hard on it then eventually I would solve it. In the end I did enough to get the degree, but I didn't solve the problem in any real way. It was five years of struggle that didn't produce any interesting results. The biggest learning for me from the PhD was that it made me more humble and caused me to doubt that something is possible unless a clear path to it is already visible.

amatic 3y ago
That is also a difficult problem - how do you know beforehand, that a problem is worthwhile? That someone else thinks it is important? Or how high is "ambitious" if you never tried to do a thing? There is a lot of luck in that system.
newswasboring 3y ago
I don't know you, neither your life, but if a university granted you a PhD you must have made some headway on the problem. It is possible that you made a bunch of progress but "not enough" from your perspective. We have some evidence that you did good work (your PhD) and no evidence (afaik) that your struggle didn't produce any interesting results. I think you might be being too harsh on yourself.
- hx8 3y ago
  If you work hard for five years you are going to have some tangible things to show for it. To me it sounds like he didn't accomplish as much as he originally hoped, and he suspects the opportunity cost of continuing with the work is too high.
  - jimz 3y ago
    Considering on how many people are routinely influenced by the sunk cost fallacy when making their decisions, perhaps even that awareness on when to fold is a part of the critical process a good academic goes through in the course their research. The economy and politics have forced me to pivot and without enough self-awareness to realize when to leverage some other skill or the ability to learn another set of skills based on my prior education, even if it meant moving or changing to a field that isn't immediately obvious. I think it's a useful sanity check at times. That is sort of the point of a liberal arts education broadly, no? It's not a trade school (although I did spend my 20s at a glorified one and worked in what really was a fancy service industry gig - the law - that is partially obstructed by the sort of things at stake that we deal with, but is fundamentally a service and very much one that is customer-facing. I was one of the first few to quit from those in my graduating class that I kept touch with as well.) Owners of sports franchises, worth billions of dollars, fail to understand concepts like this. Those in charge of large companies, with externalities being constraints that we might not see in fairness but still having control of the narrative more or less, fail to demonstrate this. The government and policymakers either ignore or are ignorant of this on more occasions than one can count. Although it's hard to say what would've happened in the alternative, the initiative does alter the dynamics one would eventually have with their new situation, speaking personally. At least I'm not routinely putting in 75-80 hour weeks which is liberating in its own way even if it was routine enough that few bat an eye when put in that position at the start, judging from what my friends mostly ended up doing and not doing. But the imposter syndrome thing does haunt as well. It takes a while to realize that one hears about plane crashes because planes not crashing do not make the news, after all, and the actual rate of crashes, incidents, and near-misses can be and usually ends up haphazardly reported at best if one doesn't dig into the official quotidian, and jargon-filled language of official reports, and I don't think that it's part of society's expectation for the average person even if it's both an apt analogy and something to look up if one has the time.
aleph_minus_one 3y ago
It is well-known that PhD theses are made out of the fragments of broken life dreams.

amatic 3y ago

That is also a difficult problem - how do you know beforehand, that a problem is worthwhile? That someone else thinks it is important? Or how high is "ambitious" if you never tried to do a thing? There is a lot of luck in that system.

newswasboring 3y ago

I don't know you, neither your life, but if a university granted you a PhD you must have made some headway on the problem. It is possible that you made a bunch of progress but "not enough" from your perspective. We have some evidence that you did good work (your PhD) and no evidence (afaik) that your struggle didn't produce any interesting results. I think you might be being too harsh on yourself.

hx8 3y ago
If you work hard for five years you are going to have some tangible things to show for it. To me it sounds like he didn't accomplish as much as he originally hoped, and he suspects the opportunity cost of continuing with the work is too high.
- jimz 3y ago
  Considering on how many people are routinely influenced by the sunk cost fallacy when making their decisions, perhaps even that awareness on when to fold is a part of the critical process a good academic goes through in the course their research. The economy and politics have forced me to pivot and without enough self-awareness to realize when to leverage some other skill or the ability to learn another set of skills based on my prior education, even if it meant moving or changing to a field that isn't immediately obvious. I think it's a useful sanity check at times. That is sort of the point of a liberal arts education broadly, no? It's not a trade school (although I did spend my 20s at a glorified one and worked in what really was a fancy service industry gig - the law - that is partially obstructed by the sort of things at stake that we deal with, but is fundamentally a service and very much one that is customer-facing. I was one of the first few to quit from those in my graduating class that I kept touch with as well.) Owners of sports franchises, worth billions of dollars, fail to understand concepts like this. Those in charge of large companies, with externalities being constraints that we might not see in fairness but still having control of the narrative more or less, fail to demonstrate this. The government and policymakers either ignore or are ignorant of this on more occasions than one can count. Although it's hard to say what would've happened in the alternative, the initiative does alter the dynamics one would eventually have with their new situation, speaking personally. At least I'm not routinely putting in 75-80 hour weeks which is liberating in its own way even if it was routine enough that few bat an eye when put in that position at the start, judging from what my friends mostly ended up doing and not doing. But the imposter syndrome thing does haunt as well. It takes a while to realize that one hears about plane crashes because planes not crashing do not make the news, after all, and the actual rate of crashes, incidents, and near-misses can be and usually ends up haphazardly reported at best if one doesn't dig into the official quotidian, and jargon-filled language of official reports, and I don't think that it's part of society's expectation for the average person even if it's both an apt analogy and something to look up if one has the time.

aleph_minus_one 3y ago

It is well-known that PhD theses are made out of the fragments of broken life dreams.