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The problem here is merely a misunderstanding of career statistics. The statistics for success in academia are thoroughly against any one Ph.D. The competition

The problem here is merely a misunderstanding of career statistics. The statistics for success in academia are thoroughly against any one Ph.D. The competition is too high, the rewards are too low, and the competitors are too desperate. This is not a place where you wish to compete - unless you have some kind of overwhelming advantage - aka really, really brilliant - you know who you are. For everyone else - look straight at industry - where the competition is a hell of a lot lower, the salaries much higher, and the competition is really not that bright. If you are getting a Ph.D - and you know you're not a genius - be looking at getting a cushy engineering job at a large firm. The benefits are great, the salaries are great, the job security is great and you can always jump back into academia. It's also the closest analogue to academia as you'll get, next to research labs. Don't ever compete on the same terms as the people around you. Don't play a game where you will lose - a game where you are probably outclassed. Go look to where you can charge monopoly pricing and extract as much as you possibly can. Competing for limited resources is a losers game - hell, competition SUCKS BALLS (just ask any Chinese manufacturers you know :) - monopoly is where it's at (just ask AAPL/GOOG/MSFT/TSLA). Separately - people should go out and learn some basic statistics, microeconomics (macro is pretty fucking useless), game theory and psychology. These will help you to avoid getting stuck in what can appropriately be called real life versions of the "Hunger Games" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunger_Games http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunger_Games). Reminds me of Tony Hsieh talking about poker strategies, and the conclusion of the movie WarGames: > Through reading poker books and practicing by playing, I spent a lot of time learning about the best strategy to play once I was actually sitting down at a table. My big "ah-ha!" moment came when I finally learned that the game started even before I sat down in a seat. In a poker room at a casino, there are usually many different choices of tables. Each table has different stakes, different players, and different dynamics that change as the players come and go, and as players get excited, upset, or tired. I learned that the most important decision I could make was which table to sit at. This included knowing when to change tables. I learned from a book that an experienced player can make ten times as much money sitting at a table with nine mediocre players who are tired and have a lot of chips compared with sitting at a table with nine really good players who are focused and don't have that many chips in front of them. In business, one of the most important decisions for an entrepreneur or a CEO to make is what business to be in. It doesn't matter how flawlessly a business is executed if it's the wrong business or if it's in too small a market. Imagine if you were the most efficient manufacturer of seven-fingered gloves. You offer the best selection, the best service, and the best prices for seven-fingered gloves--but if there isn't a big enough market for what you sell, you won't get very far. Or, if you decide to start a business that competes directly against really experienced competitors such as Wal-Mart by playing the same game they play (for example, trying to sell the same goods at lower prices), then chances are that you will go out of business. In a poker room, I could only choose which table I wanted to sit at. But in business, I realized that I didn't have to sit at an existing table. I could define my own, or make the one that I was already at even bigger. (Or, just like in a poker room, I could always choose to change tables.) I realized that, whatever the vision was for any business, there was always a bigger vision that could make the table bigger. Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tony-hsieh/tony-hsieh-zappos-ceo-del_b_589543.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tony-hsieh/tony-hsieh-zappos-c... > Instead, Falken and David direct the computer to play tic-tac-toe against itself. This results in a long string of draws, forcing the computer to learn the concept of futility. Joshua obtains the missile code but before launching, it cycles through all the nuclear war scenarios it has devised, finding they too all result in stalemates. The computer concludes that nuclear warfare is "a strange game"; having discovered the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction ("WINNER: NONE"), therefore "the only winning move is not to play." Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames In summary: Competition is M.A.D. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction), the only winning move is not to play! And long live monopoly!

dhimes 14y ago
This is a pretty awesome post that I hope near- and new Ph.D.s think about, especially because at that point in your life, you are probably immersed in a 'macho' culture where thinking about anything but a life in academia is seen as wimping out. Don't pay attention to that. It's nonsense. Pay attention to confluence's post.
matwood 14y ago
The poker example is a great one. Years ago when I first started to learn to play a friend of mine told a similar story more succinctly. When you sit down at a table if you can't pick out the sucker, it's you. Pick your table, pick your game, do whatever you have to to slant the odds in your favor. If you're the sucker get up and move. Don't let your pride get in the way. Back when I started playing poker I could sit at tables in LV and do pretty well. As poker became popular LV became a much harder place to play. The quality (and recklessness of the player went up), so I quit playing. The last time I played was on a business trip in Phoenix. After a couple of hands a woman already at the table and I realized we were the top ones at the table and just stayed out of each others way while drunk businessmen and golfers emptied their wallets :)
- confluence 14y ago
  Ah but you see - there's too much competition for short, sharp comments! I try and own the high value long comments. Although I relapse ever so often and move back towards the short/sharp side - winning a high volume competition is very alluring. It's probably why reddit/stackoverflow/wikipedia/HN exist.
flatline 14y ago
Nate Silver has a similar point[1], and claims that he has been successful by choosing fields that were not already saturated with excellent players. Baseball prediction was waiting to be cracked wide open with modern statistical techniques. It would now be much, much harder to make meaningful gains, you'd be competing with a host of competent firms who have years of experience and have long since claimed all the low-hanging fruit. The competition in online and even professional poker matches used to be much looser, until enough people started getting serious about it that the field narrowed to exclude merely above-average players. To the OPs point, If you want to compete in a well-established academic field, you have to be really freaking good. Want to be an experimental physicist? You see the competition out there: they write books and appear on TV shows, or at least have tenure and get grant money. Are you really one of those guys or gals? On the other hand, there's interesting stuff out there that is just waiting for someone with a modicum of intellect and desire to revolutionize it. The challenge lies in finding (or creating) such a field and exploiting it at the right time. I think this can be done in academia or in business alike, business is just much more flexible and forgiving of mistakes. [1] "The Signal and the Noise"

dhimes 14y ago

This is a pretty awesome post that I hope near- and new Ph.D.s think about, especially because at that point in your life, you are probably immersed in a 'macho' culture where thinking about anything but a life in academia is seen as wimping out. Don't pay attention to that. It's nonsense. Pay attention to confluence's post.

matwood 14y ago

The poker example is a great one. Years ago when I first started to learn to play a friend of mine told a similar story more succinctly. When you sit down at a table if you can't pick out the sucker, it's you. Pick your table, pick your game, do whatever you have to to slant the odds in your favor. If you're the sucker get up and move. Don't let your pride get in the way. Back when I started playing poker I could sit at tables in LV and do pretty well. As poker became popular LV became a much harder place to play. The quality (and recklessness of the player went up), so I quit playing. The last time I played was on a business trip in Phoenix. After a couple of hands a woman already at the table and I realized we were the top ones at the table and just stayed out of each others way while drunk businessmen and golfers emptied their wallets :)

confluence 14y ago
Ah but you see - there's too much competition for short, sharp comments! I try and own the high value long comments. Although I relapse ever so often and move back towards the short/sharp side - winning a high volume competition is very alluring. It's probably why reddit/stackoverflow/wikipedia/HN exist.

flatline 14y ago

Nate Silver has a similar point[1], and claims that he has been successful by choosing fields that were not already saturated with excellent players. Baseball prediction was waiting to be cracked wide open with modern statistical techniques. It would now be much, much harder to make meaningful gains, you'd be competing with a host of competent firms who have years of experience and have long since claimed all the low-hanging fruit. The competition in online and even professional poker matches used to be much looser, until enough people started getting serious about it that the field narrowed to exclude merely above-average players. To the OPs point, If you want to compete in a well-established academic field, you have to be really freaking good. Want to be an experimental physicist? You see the competition out there: they write books and appear on TV shows, or at least have tenure and get grant money. Are you really one of those guys or gals? On the other hand, there's interesting stuff out there that is just waiting for someone with a modicum of intellect and desire to revolutionize it. The challenge lies in finding (or creating) such a field and exploiting it at the right time. I think this can be done in academia or in business alike, business is just much more flexible and forgiving of mistakes. [1] "The Signal and the Noise"