4 ms·

My wife rather derisively calls this the "penis pimple model of science". It's a great article and a great set figures, but folks sometimes push it a bit too mu

by jofer 2y ago

My wife rather derisively calls this the "penis pimple model of science". It's a great article and a great set figures, but folks sometimes push it a bit too much, especially in grad school. It has a lot of truth to it and it's been making the rounds for well over a decade. Unfortunately, sometimes it can set folks up to feel bad about themselves if what they do doesn't line up well with whatever is in vogue as the boundary of knowledge that's currently being pushed. There's a _ton_ of value in more pragmatic parts of fields that focus on applications or combining relatively well-know parts of different sub-fields. Those parts of science often don't feel like you're pushing some "boundary". It's more layering on top of, filling in holes, and building up than building "out". Sometimes what you do is to use multiple things that lots of folks already knew, but the people who knew X and the people who knew Y didn't talk to each other, so no one thought about how to combine them. It can also be hard to get papers published because reviewers will consider one part obvious/well-known and the other part irrelevant because they come from one sub-field and not both. It will often feel like you don't belong because your work doesn't look like these figures. Applied and interdisciplinary fields "feel" different. However, this type of integrative work can be among the most valuable parts of modern research. Don't feel like what you do has to fit into the "penis pimple model" of science. There's also nothing wrong with pushing some known boundary of a field, either! Both are valid.

tbrownaw 2y ago
But this isn't a model is science, it's a model of what different kinds of academic credentials mean. Sure there's plenty of ways to contribute to society without publishing academic research, but that's not what a PhD is.
- jofer 2y ago
  Not all PhDs push boundaries of knowledge in quite that way. Often what you do was already known, but no one really figured out how to correctly apply it. Alternatively, it's often combining different things that were already well known, but no one had combined. It's novel work that makes a PhD. Novel work is distinct from pushing the boundary of knowledge. Often what you do doesn't change what "humanity knows" in any way. Both my wife and I have PhDs. Neither of us did things that look like the figures there. It's not a good mental model for what all PhDs mean, though it is a good model for some. I combined fields and reinterpreted a ton of things that had already been done to draw very different fundamental conclusions about what was going on in a particular location. I put out alternative hypotheses for observations that had already been collected. It's not new knowledge at all and I didn't add to what we "know". I just added an additional hypothesis to the set of multiple working hypotheses that will hopefully be tested decades from now. My wife worked on how to actually apply well-known methods in other fields to our field. Her work was half engineering, half field experiments. Lots of folks had been working with fiber optic strain gauges for decades. However, no one was using them to measure in-situ strain in rock masses yet (which has since become common). The application was broadly "known", but actually doing it and demonstrating that is novel.

by jofer 2y ago

tbrownaw 2y ago

But this isn't a model is science, it's a model of what different kinds of academic credentials mean. Sure there's plenty of ways to contribute to society without publishing academic research, but that's not what a PhD is.

jofer 2y ago
Not all PhDs push boundaries of knowledge in quite that way. Often what you do was already known, but no one really figured out how to correctly apply it. Alternatively, it's often combining different things that were already well known, but no one had combined. It's novel work that makes a PhD. Novel work is distinct from pushing the boundary of knowledge. Often what you do doesn't change what "humanity knows" in any way. Both my wife and I have PhDs. Neither of us did things that look like the figures there. It's not a good mental model for what all PhDs mean, though it is a good model for some. I combined fields and reinterpreted a ton of things that had already been done to draw very different fundamental conclusions about what was going on in a particular location. I put out alternative hypotheses for observations that had already been collected. It's not new knowledge at all and I didn't add to what we "know". I just added an additional hypothesis to the set of multiple working hypotheses that will hopefully be tested decades from now. My wife worked on how to actually apply well-known methods in other fields to our field. Her work was half engineering, half field experiments. Lots of folks had been working with fiber optic strain gauges for decades. However, no one was using them to measure in-situ strain in rock masses yet (which has since become common). The application was broadly "known", but actually doing it and demonstrating that is novel.