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>I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those cond

>I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going to spend their lives being professors. But it has become now a kind of union card that you have to have in order to have a job, whether it’s being a professor or other things, and it’s quite inappropriate for that. It forces people to waste years and years of their lives sort of pretending to do research for which they’re not at all well-suited. In the end, they have this piece of paper which says they’re qualified, but it really doesn’t mean anything. The Ph.D. takes far too long and discourages women from becoming scientists, which I consider a great tragedy. So I have opposed it all my life without any success at all. I don't think that I would have believed this until I got into graduate school but it's really true. A PhD doesn't mean anything. If I told you that someone had a PhD, that wouldn't have told you anything else else about that person.

eli_gottlieb 13y ago
Wellll... it really is a union card. The fact that a person has a PhD from a reputable institution does in fact set an absolute baseline: this person managed to do something that was sufficiently close to being science for other scientists to call it science. I would say that if we want to think in terms of "union cards", we should just scrap the PhD and pin "science ranks" to publication metrics, as the real scientific job market already does. After all, what we really need from a scientific union card isn't to tell us how good a scientist is (and it doesn't do that), it's just to give us some baseline for separating real scientists from crackpots and wannabes (of which there are far too many).
aaren 13y ago
I agree, a PhD doesn't mean anything in itself. I don't think that they are entirely worthless as a process though. In a PhD you potentially have vast intellectual freedom to learn what you want whilst earning a (small) income, rather than being molded by a company. I say potentially because whilst I've had a lot of freedom over the past 3.5 years, I can't say that this would be true of all institutions and all supervisors. If you get treated and worked like cheap disposable labour then maybe you won't get as much out of it. Personally I think I have gained a lot of skills that are useful outside of academia (largely implemented in Python). This happened because I knew that I didn't want to pigeon hole myself into academia and made choices correspondingly (e.g. Python instead of matlab or idl).
therobot24 13y ago
> I don't think that I would have believed this until I got into graduate school but it's really true. A PhD doesn't mean anything. If I told you that someone had a PhD, that wouldn't have told you anything else else about that person. I believe the opposite. Before entering grad school i was under this impression, but now at the tail end of my PhD, saying someone has a PhD tells me that they're motivated above everything else. You don't just 'get one' for going to classes and writing a few papers. It really pushes you to establish solid techniques and approaches to conduct meaningful research. More importantly, as many ideas fail before finding something that works, it's pushes the student to stay motivated.

eli_gottlieb 13y ago

Wellll... it really is a union card. The fact that a person has a PhD from a reputable institution does in fact set an absolute baseline: this person managed to do something that was sufficiently close to being science for other scientists to call it science. I would say that if we want to think in terms of "union cards", we should just scrap the PhD and pin "science ranks" to publication metrics, as the real scientific job market already does. After all, what we really need from a scientific union card isn't to tell us how good a scientist is (and it doesn't do that), it's just to give us some baseline for separating real scientists from crackpots and wannabes (of which there are far too many).

aaren 13y ago

I agree, a PhD doesn't mean anything in itself. I don't think that they are entirely worthless as a process though. In a PhD you potentially have vast intellectual freedom to learn what you want whilst earning a (small) income, rather than being molded by a company. I say potentially because whilst I've had a lot of freedom over the past 3.5 years, I can't say that this would be true of all institutions and all supervisors. If you get treated and worked like cheap disposable labour then maybe you won't get as much out of it. Personally I think I have gained a lot of skills that are useful outside of academia (largely implemented in Python). This happened because I knew that I didn't want to pigeon hole myself into academia and made choices correspondingly (e.g. Python instead of matlab or idl).

therobot24 13y ago

> I don't think that I would have believed this until I got into graduate school but it's really true. A PhD doesn't mean anything. If I told you that someone had a PhD, that wouldn't have told you anything else else about that person. I believe the opposite. Before entering grad school i was under this impression, but now at the tail end of my PhD, saying someone has a PhD tells me that they're motivated above everything else. You don't just 'get one' for going to classes and writing a few papers. It really pushes you to establish solid techniques and approaches to conduct meaningful research. More importantly, as many ideas fail before finding something that works, it's pushes the student to stay motivated.