5 ms·

Incidentally, this describes what I believe to be the great difficulty of PhD research. You have to take a topic you find interesting and read all possible rela

Incidentally, this describes what I believe to be the great difficulty of PhD research. You have to take a topic you find interesting and read all possible related work in it, which tends to result in significant scope creep as you realize just how much there is that already does you want to do. Having exhausted your initial energy and excitement for the project, you have to force yourself the remaining 20-30% of he way to the finish line to get that work to a publishable state.

wasabi991011 5mo ago
Oh man I feel that in my bones. Any advice on how to mitigate this?
- exidex 5mo ago
  My choice is to not do a PhD and just invest as much or as little effort in the topic as you like
- Kichererbsen 5mo ago
  I worked at a chair for 12 years - in that time I've seen a lot of PhD students go through this. If it helps anything at all: It's normal. At this point, you've already proven you're smart and knowledgeable. Now, the universe wants to see if you can also finish what you've started. That's the main thing a PhD proves: That you can take an incredibly interesting topic and then do all the boring stuff that they need you to do to be formally compliant with arbitrary rules. Focus on finishing. Reduce the scope as much as possible again. Down to your core message (or 3-4 core messages, I guess, for paper-based dissertations). Listen to the feedback you get from your advisor. You got this!
  - arethuza 5mo ago
    It's been a long long time since I was the academic research world - but isn't 3 published papers pretty much the expectation for a PhD quantity of research?
    - noelwelsh 5mo ago
      Really depends on the field. Computer science research usually has pretty short cycle times. If you're working on, say, biology or anthropology, collecting data can take substantially longer.
  - wjnc 5mo ago
    This is spot on. My dad was a professor and had dozens of PhDs. The only thing differentiating them (as I remember him telling me) was the resolve to keep work as /tiny/ as possible. Who is remember for his/her PhD? Only the smallest cream of the crop. He even made good fun of worthless thesis by (then) well known professors. It’s not about your PhD. When I did my MSc thesis he told me it was a pretty good PhD. (Before giving me a months work in corrections.) I didn’t understand back then, but I understand now. It was small, replicatable and novel (still is)! Just replicate three times and be done with it. You’ve proven your mastery. Now start something serious.
    - collabs 5mo ago
      > This is spot on. My dad was a professor and had dozens of PhDs. The only thing differentiating them (as I remember him telling me) was the resolve to keep work as /tiny/ as possible. Who is remember for his/her PhD? Only the smallest cream of the crop. He even made good fun of worthless thesis by (then) well known professors. It’s not about your PhD. My professor once told me he presented at a small conference, the whole audience everybody had PhD in mathematics and maybe 2 of the 50 or so people in the audience could follow along. The point he was trying to make is at some point the people in the audience were not really interested in what was being presented because it is difficult to just follow along some really niche topic.
      - brandall10 5mo ago
        There was a book I read a couple years back called "Mathematica: A Secret World of Intuition and Curiosity", by David Bessis. He discussed this topic and how generally it's left to those who are more notable in a field to ask the 'dumb' questions everyone else is afraid to ask. And such questions often need to be asked to get the audience on board and open the floodgates with areas of niche research - the speaker themself is often too far into the rabbit hole to discern the difference between opaque and obvious. So it stands to reason, at smaller conferences this would be a big problem, with fewer thought leaders in attendance whose reputations are intact enough that they wouldn't mind looking foolish.
  - stathibus 5mo ago
    > Focus on finishing. Reduce the scope as much as possible again. in my field this would be terrible advice. instead you need to be doing something that your audience actually will give a shit about.
    - lazyasciiart 5mo ago
      If you’ve spent a significant amount of time widening the scope as far as possible to include everything interesting about your original question, and there is nothing in that whole widened scope that the audience will give a shit about, your topic is unsaveable and your advisor is a failure. If there is something interesting enough to qualify, then reduce the scope as much as possible. It should go without saying that you shouldn’t throw out the interesting bit.
      - stathibus 5mo ago
        The problem that occurs in practice is “focus on finishing” leads people to finish without actually doing anything meaningful. Advisors may or may not encourage this depending on where they are in their career. When you get on the industry job market nobody cares if it took you 3 years or 7 years to do the work, they only care if it’s meaningful.
  - wanderingmind 5mo ago
    Technical feedback yes, but always reject any career feedback from your advisor since the data shows it's unlikely a good model for future career success
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- bennettnate5 5mo ago
  For me, it wasn't so much about mitigating this cycle as much as recognizing that the grit of pushing through that last 20-30% is actually a valuable life skill that the PhD could teach me to do, and that projects that I felt like I would never want to touch again actually started to become interesting again after I had left them for a year or so.
- ericmcer 5mo ago
  It seems almost inevitable... Acknowledge it is normal? Attempt to buy deeper into the delusion ("Yeah my work is awesome and unique!"). Use stimulants to force enthusiastic days every once in awhile?
- godelski 5mo ago
  Switch back and forth between trying and reviewing. Often it can be good to just try before reviewing, to get your feet wet. Don't spend too much time. Then when reviewing you're going to understand it more. Repeat this process. But there's some things to remember that are incredibly important - a paper doesn't *prove* something, it suggests it is *probably* right - under the conditions of the paper's settings, which aren't yours - just because someone had X outcome before doesn't mean you won't get Y outcome - those small details usually dominate success - sometimes a one liner seemingly throw away sentence is what you're missing - sometimes the authors don't know and the answer is 5 papers back that they've been building on - DO NOT TREAT PAPERS AS *ABSOLUTE* TRUTH - no one is *absolutely* right, everyone is *some* degree of wrong - other researchers are just like you, writing papers just like you - they also look back at their old papers and say "I'm glad I'm not that bad anymore" - a paper demonstrating your idea is a positive signal, you're thinking in the right direction As soon as you start treating papers as "this is fact" you tend to overly generalize the results. But the details dominate so you just kill your own creativity. You kill your own ideas before you know they're right or wrong. More importantly you don't know how right or how wrong.
  - gopher_space 5mo ago
    Your bullet points explain most of the replication crisis, from my perspective.
    - godelski 5mo ago
      They're definitely deeply related. For example, a lot of works get rejected over "novelty" issues. Well, if success and/or failure depend on something seemingly small then it will almost never get through review because it seems like low novelty. Though it'll get through review if authors are convincing enough, which often leads to some minor exaggerations. Combine that with the publish-or-perish paradigm and I think we got significant coverage. People don't even consider diving deeper into things and are encouraged to take the route of "assume paper is correct" because that's the fastest way to push out research. But if the foundation is shaky, then everything built on it is shaky too. Which, that's a distinction in the hard and more formal fields like math and physics. They have no issues pushing out papers that may have errors in them because the process is to attack works as hard as possible. Then whatever is left is where you build again. You definitely have people take advantage of this, like Avi Loeb publishing about aliens, but it is realistically a small price to pay. And hey, even Loeb's work still contributes. If at some point it actually is aliens, then there's work existing that can be built upon. And when it continues to not be aliens, there's existing work to build on since really his problem is more that the papers just end up concluding "and this is why we can't rule out aliens!" (-__-) Anyways, long story short, my advice is to just remember that you, and everybody else, is a blubbering idiot and it is a absolute fucking miracle a bunch of mostly hairless apes can even communicate, let alone postulate about the cosmos. At the end of the day we're all on the same team, seeking truth. Truth matters more than our egos and if we start to forget how dumb we are then we'll only hinder our pursuit of truth.
- thechao 5mo ago
  Find a brand new hire who wants to get tenure. Getting a PhD through in 4 years is catnip for tenure at most universities (stateside). We then dropped off my dissertation in the middle of NSF funding week. I paid for it during orals (4 hours), but they all signed within a few days without comment. Uhh... unless you plan to stay in academia? Then, this is a terrible idea.
- biophysboy 5mo ago
  I finished a PhD. My concrete advice is focus on feasible methods you know are realistic for your lab resource wise (time, money, etc)
sidewndr46 5mo ago
Day 1: We aim to demonstrate the effectiveness of an existing industrial catalyst in a novel application that has not seen commercial usage, potentially lowering cost of production of precursors for essential medications Day 400: Having thoroughly described a universal theory of everything, we set out to build an experimental apparatus in orbit at a Lagrange point capable of detecting a universal particle which acts a mediator for all observable forces in the known universe.
- bluefirebrand 5mo ago
  Damn, that's an incredible amount of progress in just 400 days
  - gadflyinyoureye 5mo ago
    That is the power of AI.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    - FridgeSeal 5mo ago
      Don’t sell yourself short! You could achieve things yourself if you tried!
  - dnnddidiej 5mo ago
    Notice: "We set out to build..."
    - lukan 5mo ago
      "Having thoroughly described a universal theory of everything" That is already something people would call a project.
- Johnny_Bonk 5mo ago
  Hahaha so well said, can relate during my thesis
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
abdullahkhalids 5mo ago
> You have to take a topic you find interesting and read all possible related work in it This is definitely the wrong way of going about a research project, and I have rarely seen anyone approach research projects this way. You should read two or at most three papers and build upon them. You only do a deep review of the research literature later in the project, once you have some results and you have started writing them down.
- bennettnate5 5mo ago
  The usual justification is that if you don't do at least a breadth-first literature review, you can get burned by missing a paper that already does substantially what you do in your work. I've heard of extreme case where it happens a week before someone goes to defend their dissertation!
  - 1718627440 5mo ago
    Excuse my naivety, but isn't it good if the same results get proofed in slightly different ways? This is effectively a replication, but instead of just the appliance of the experiments, you also replicate the thought process by having a slightly different approach.
    - Xirdus 5mo ago
      For the humanity? Yes, it's generally good. For that particular researcher's career? Not really. Who wants to pay for research into something that's already known?
      - 1718627440 5mo ago
        My imagination was leaning more into the educational side than the research side of university. I see how that wouldn't be appreciated by a patron, but when you get search grants, isn't the topic discussed before starting and paying for the research? Also that is kind of the point, why topics are cleared with the chair-holding professor, which is expected to be already experienced in the subject to know where the knowledge needs to be expanded.
AndrewKemendo 5mo ago
The majority of PhD candidates deal with this because the point of a PhD is to prove you can to “normal science” [1] which boils down to “how do I make this system go from 1% observable to 1.001% observable” which is just a gate for being in the academic career field. You’ll almost never see a PhD thesis that has anything particularly interesting, novel or directly applicable to the sciences. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_science
Serhii-Set 5mo ago
[dead]
SecretDreams 5mo ago
This, all while battling the increasingly heavy burden of regret towards having started a PhD in the first place.
SoftTalker 5mo ago
This is why so many research papers have "Towards" as the first word in the title. I.e. we didn't actually achieve our original goal, but here's a writeup of what progress we made. I heard academic research described like this: Imagine yourself inside a balloon. The body of research in your field is represented by the current size of the balloon. Now put your fingertip on the wall of the balloon and push. That little indentation is your Ph.D. Another analogy is a lake: The lake is the current body of research, you walk up and dump in an additional bucket of water. That's your Ph.D. I'm sure there are many others.
- sunrunner 5mo ago
  > That little indentation is your Ph.D. Illustrated nicely by https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
  - orochimaaru 5mo ago
    Lol. That one. I wish I had seen that before I began my PhD. It describes the anti-climactic and exhilarating feeling you have simultaneously at your thesis defense.
BobbyTables2 5mo ago
I feel one also has to have a drive for “marketing” their idea and that is 50% of the PhD. Or at least a blind enthusiasm that they are doing something significantly better than previous work. How else does one stand up and proclaim that the fruits of years of labor and expense of a small fortune is an incremental improvement ? While working on a project for a class, I once found a solution to a particular problem that hadn’t been really solved. Got to do a conference poster. Someone asked if it was my PhD topic (it wasn’t). I felt it was too silly to even count toward such. The problem likely had not been unsolved because very few ever cared. (I eventually dropped out) Instead I write software mostly with no UI that nobody ever sees. But I enjoy the work and can convince myself that someone finds it useful.

wasabi991011 5mo ago

Oh man I feel that in my bones. Any advice on how to mitigate this?

exidex 5mo ago
My choice is to not do a PhD and just invest as much or as little effort in the topic as you like
Kichererbsen 5mo ago
I worked at a chair for 12 years - in that time I've seen a lot of PhD students go through this. If it helps anything at all: It's normal. At this point, you've already proven you're smart and knowledgeable. Now, the universe wants to see if you can also finish what you've started. That's the main thing a PhD proves: That you can take an incredibly interesting topic and then do all the boring stuff that they need you to do to be formally compliant with arbitrary rules. Focus on finishing. Reduce the scope as much as possible again. Down to your core message (or 3-4 core messages, I guess, for paper-based dissertations). Listen to the feedback you get from your advisor. You got this!
- arethuza 5mo ago
  It's been a long long time since I was the academic research world - but isn't 3 published papers pretty much the expectation for a PhD quantity of research?
  - noelwelsh 5mo ago
    Really depends on the field. Computer science research usually has pretty short cycle times. If you're working on, say, biology or anthropology, collecting data can take substantially longer.
- wjnc 5mo ago
  This is spot on. My dad was a professor and had dozens of PhDs. The only thing differentiating them (as I remember him telling me) was the resolve to keep work as /tiny/ as possible. Who is remember for his/her PhD? Only the smallest cream of the crop. He even made good fun of worthless thesis by (then) well known professors. It’s not about your PhD. When I did my MSc thesis he told me it was a pretty good PhD. (Before giving me a months work in corrections.) I didn’t understand back then, but I understand now. It was small, replicatable and novel (still is)! Just replicate three times and be done with it. You’ve proven your mastery. Now start something serious.
  - collabs 5mo ago
    > This is spot on. My dad was a professor and had dozens of PhDs. The only thing differentiating them (as I remember him telling me) was the resolve to keep work as /tiny/ as possible. Who is remember for his/her PhD? Only the smallest cream of the crop. He even made good fun of worthless thesis by (then) well known professors. It’s not about your PhD. My professor once told me he presented at a small conference, the whole audience everybody had PhD in mathematics and maybe 2 of the 50 or so people in the audience could follow along. The point he was trying to make is at some point the people in the audience were not really interested in what was being presented because it is difficult to just follow along some really niche topic.
    - brandall10 5mo ago
      There was a book I read a couple years back called "Mathematica: A Secret World of Intuition and Curiosity", by David Bessis. He discussed this topic and how generally it's left to those who are more notable in a field to ask the 'dumb' questions everyone else is afraid to ask. And such questions often need to be asked to get the audience on board and open the floodgates with areas of niche research - the speaker themself is often too far into the rabbit hole to discern the difference between opaque and obvious. So it stands to reason, at smaller conferences this would be a big problem, with fewer thought leaders in attendance whose reputations are intact enough that they wouldn't mind looking foolish.
- stathibus 5mo ago
  > Focus on finishing. Reduce the scope as much as possible again. in my field this would be terrible advice. instead you need to be doing something that your audience actually will give a shit about.
  - lazyasciiart 5mo ago
    If you’ve spent a significant amount of time widening the scope as far as possible to include everything interesting about your original question, and there is nothing in that whole widened scope that the audience will give a shit about, your topic is unsaveable and your advisor is a failure. If there is something interesting enough to qualify, then reduce the scope as much as possible. It should go without saying that you shouldn’t throw out the interesting bit.
    - stathibus 5mo ago
      The problem that occurs in practice is “focus on finishing” leads people to finish without actually doing anything meaningful. Advisors may or may not encourage this depending on where they are in their career. When you get on the industry job market nobody cares if it took you 3 years or 7 years to do the work, they only care if it’s meaningful.
- wanderingmind 5mo ago
  Technical feedback yes, but always reject any career feedback from your advisor since the data shows it's unlikely a good model for future career success
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
bennettnate5 5mo ago
For me, it wasn't so much about mitigating this cycle as much as recognizing that the grit of pushing through that last 20-30% is actually a valuable life skill that the PhD could teach me to do, and that projects that I felt like I would never want to touch again actually started to become interesting again after I had left them for a year or so.
ericmcer 5mo ago
It seems almost inevitable... Acknowledge it is normal? Attempt to buy deeper into the delusion ("Yeah my work is awesome and unique!"). Use stimulants to force enthusiastic days every once in awhile?
godelski 5mo ago
Switch back and forth between trying and reviewing. Often it can be good to just try before reviewing, to get your feet wet. Don't spend too much time. Then when reviewing you're going to understand it more. Repeat this process. But there's some things to remember that are incredibly important - a paper doesn't *prove* something, it suggests it is *probably* right - under the conditions of the paper's settings, which aren't yours - just because someone had X outcome before doesn't mean you won't get Y outcome - those small details usually dominate success - sometimes a one liner seemingly throw away sentence is what you're missing - sometimes the authors don't know and the answer is 5 papers back that they've been building on - DO NOT TREAT PAPERS AS *ABSOLUTE* TRUTH - no one is *absolutely* right, everyone is *some* degree of wrong - other researchers are just like you, writing papers just like you - they also look back at their old papers and say "I'm glad I'm not that bad anymore" - a paper demonstrating your idea is a positive signal, you're thinking in the right direction As soon as you start treating papers as "this is fact" you tend to overly generalize the results. But the details dominate so you just kill your own creativity. You kill your own ideas before you know they're right or wrong. More importantly you don't know how right or how wrong.
- gopher_space 5mo ago
  Your bullet points explain most of the replication crisis, from my perspective.
  - godelski 5mo ago
    They're definitely deeply related. For example, a lot of works get rejected over "novelty" issues. Well, if success and/or failure depend on something seemingly small then it will almost never get through review because it seems like low novelty. Though it'll get through review if authors are convincing enough, which often leads to some minor exaggerations. Combine that with the publish-or-perish paradigm and I think we got significant coverage. People don't even consider diving deeper into things and are encouraged to take the route of "assume paper is correct" because that's the fastest way to push out research. But if the foundation is shaky, then everything built on it is shaky too. Which, that's a distinction in the hard and more formal fields like math and physics. They have no issues pushing out papers that may have errors in them because the process is to attack works as hard as possible. Then whatever is left is where you build again. You definitely have people take advantage of this, like Avi Loeb publishing about aliens, but it is realistically a small price to pay. And hey, even Loeb's work still contributes. If at some point it actually is aliens, then there's work existing that can be built upon. And when it continues to not be aliens, there's existing work to build on since really his problem is more that the papers just end up concluding "and this is why we can't rule out aliens!" (-__-) Anyways, long story short, my advice is to just remember that you, and everybody else, is a blubbering idiot and it is a absolute fucking miracle a bunch of mostly hairless apes can even communicate, let alone postulate about the cosmos. At the end of the day we're all on the same team, seeking truth. Truth matters more than our egos and if we start to forget how dumb we are then we'll only hinder our pursuit of truth.
thechao 5mo ago
Find a brand new hire who wants to get tenure. Getting a PhD through in 4 years is catnip for tenure at most universities (stateside). We then dropped off my dissertation in the middle of NSF funding week. I paid for it during orals (4 hours), but they all signed within a few days without comment. Uhh... unless you plan to stay in academia? Then, this is a terrible idea.
biophysboy 5mo ago
I finished a PhD. My concrete advice is focus on feasible methods you know are realistic for your lab resource wise (time, money, etc)

sidewndr46 5mo ago

Day 1: We aim to demonstrate the effectiveness of an existing industrial catalyst in a novel application that has not seen commercial usage, potentially lowering cost of production of precursors for essential medications Day 400: Having thoroughly described a universal theory of everything, we set out to build an experimental apparatus in orbit at a Lagrange point capable of detecting a universal particle which acts a mediator for all observable forces in the known universe.

bluefirebrand 5mo ago
Damn, that's an incredible amount of progress in just 400 days
- gadflyinyoureye 5mo ago
  That is the power of AI.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - FridgeSeal 5mo ago
    Don’t sell yourself short! You could achieve things yourself if you tried!
- dnnddidiej 5mo ago
  Notice: "We set out to build..."
  - lukan 5mo ago
    "Having thoroughly described a universal theory of everything" That is already something people would call a project.
Johnny_Bonk 5mo ago
Hahaha so well said, can relate during my thesis

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

abdullahkhalids 5mo ago

> You have to take a topic you find interesting and read all possible related work in it This is definitely the wrong way of going about a research project, and I have rarely seen anyone approach research projects this way. You should read two or at most three papers and build upon them. You only do a deep review of the research literature later in the project, once you have some results and you have started writing them down.

bennettnate5 5mo ago
The usual justification is that if you don't do at least a breadth-first literature review, you can get burned by missing a paper that already does substantially what you do in your work. I've heard of extreme case where it happens a week before someone goes to defend their dissertation!
- 1718627440 5mo ago
  Excuse my naivety, but isn't it good if the same results get proofed in slightly different ways? This is effectively a replication, but instead of just the appliance of the experiments, you also replicate the thought process by having a slightly different approach.
  - Xirdus 5mo ago
    For the humanity? Yes, it's generally good. For that particular researcher's career? Not really. Who wants to pay for research into something that's already known?
    - 1718627440 5mo ago
      My imagination was leaning more into the educational side than the research side of university. I see how that wouldn't be appreciated by a patron, but when you get search grants, isn't the topic discussed before starting and paying for the research? Also that is kind of the point, why topics are cleared with the chair-holding professor, which is expected to be already experienced in the subject to know where the knowledge needs to be expanded.

AndrewKemendo 5mo ago

The majority of PhD candidates deal with this because the point of a PhD is to prove you can to “normal science” [1] which boils down to “how do I make this system go from 1% observable to 1.001% observable” which is just a gate for being in the academic career field. You’ll almost never see a PhD thesis that has anything particularly interesting, novel or directly applicable to the sciences. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_science

Serhii-Set 5mo ago

[dead]

SecretDreams 5mo ago

This, all while battling the increasingly heavy burden of regret towards having started a PhD in the first place.

SoftTalker 5mo ago

This is why so many research papers have "Towards" as the first word in the title. I.e. we didn't actually achieve our original goal, but here's a writeup of what progress we made. I heard academic research described like this: Imagine yourself inside a balloon. The body of research in your field is represented by the current size of the balloon. Now put your fingertip on the wall of the balloon and push. That little indentation is your Ph.D. Another analogy is a lake: The lake is the current body of research, you walk up and dump in an additional bucket of water. That's your Ph.D. I'm sure there are many others.

sunrunner 5mo ago
> That little indentation is your Ph.D. Illustrated nicely by https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
- orochimaaru 5mo ago
  Lol. That one. I wish I had seen that before I began my PhD. It describes the anti-climactic and exhilarating feeling you have simultaneously at your thesis defense.

BobbyTables2 5mo ago

I feel one also has to have a drive for “marketing” their idea and that is 50% of the PhD. Or at least a blind enthusiasm that they are doing something significantly better than previous work. How else does one stand up and proclaim that the fruits of years of labor and expense of a small fortune is an incremental improvement ? While working on a project for a class, I once found a solution to a particular problem that hadn’t been really solved. Got to do a conference poster. Someone asked if it was my PhD topic (it wasn’t). I felt it was too silly to even count toward such. The problem likely had not been unsolved because very few ever cared. (I eventually dropped out) Instead I write software mostly with no UI that nobody ever sees. But I enjoy the work and can convince myself that someone finds it useful.