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Summary: YOUR Ph.D. means almost next to nothing, but collectively they expand the bounds of human knowledge.
Do you have to live so relentlessly in reality?
Don’t we all?
Realism got you down? Here, have a fox…
What does the fox say…
Rindidingdingdingding
Thank you, I needed some new material for the wank folder
Sometimes I wonder.
Some admit to it. Others prefer the blue pill.
As a parent to five, yes. All shall join me.
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If I didn’t have to I wouldn’t be doing it.
Are you a soulist?
I know a guy with a PhD in medieval agriculture with a specific focus on cows. He’s one of my brothers wife’s friends.
This guy devoted his life to ye olde english cow farts.
He’s struggling for employment as one might expect.
whereas I , with my bachelors degree in clowning, have been head hunted for my last two corporate jobs.
You are now CEO of FTX
Who even funds degrees like that?
You end up with fewer job prospects than a GED
Degrees like that aren’t about a paycheck. It’s about more important things than that. They ought to be subsidized by government if anything.
A PhD is not the only way to expand human knowledge. This is disregarding a lot of work done by a lot of hard working people.
No one says it was the only way? But one of the requirements of getting that PhD is to expand knowledge so it’s 100% applicable
You might be surprised to learn it doesn’t actually suggest a PhD is the only way to expand human knowledge. No one was disregarded.
I don’t think it’s meant to do that. Also if we substitute PhD for learning both will be true.
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It’s funny but you see the same thing in sports, or I see it specifically in hockey. Phenom kid gets drafted and at 18 has the social skills of the hockey puck he’s playing with. By the time he’s 36 he’s not the player he once was but is a more well rounded individual with age and experience. When you focus all your energy to become the best at something, like a PhD, athlete, musician, whatever, you sacrifice some things along the way for sure.
When u look at most people I feel like the trending alternative at 18-50 y is personality of a hockey puck and also skills of a hockey puck, with the reasoning ability of the hockey puck.
I feel so called out. I’m alright in my field but completely clueless outside of it.
That’s not universally true. I know several people with PhD who have encyclopedic knowledge completely outside their specialisation. Some people are just super intelligent, talented and have enormous memory. The world is not fair.
Presumably you could meet the boundary with “a dollah fifty in late fees at the public library” and find a way to push through from there. You’d have to find a way to publish or share your new knowledge. Studying at uni gives you access to experts in their own thing that likely have knowledge that could help you with your thing as well as a system designed to churn out these papers when you eventually find your thing.
Every day people discover new things but it takes attention, effort, and will to PROVE it’s a new thing and more yet to share that with the world. Too bad you can’t get an honorary PhD for doing that, at least not reliably.
Good luck expanding the fields of math and science without a PhD.
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Like the guy who found this somehow important new shape not to long ago? I don’t think he has a PhD. But he did contribute. Not saying that it’s easy though.
I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I expected someone to bring up some shit like that. My point still stands.
Lookup the Einstein problem. I’m talking about the aperiodic monotile discovered by David Smith.
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Imagine having to pay for education
most PhDs are paid a salary.
I’ve been making six figures while getting my PhD. There are plenty of opportunities to get your PhD funded if you are a US citizen. There are plenty more valid places to poke fun at pursuing a PhD but it is very common to have funding and thus no debt.
wtf kind of university are you studying at? We get minimum wage here
The ratio is off. You learn a lot more from high school and bachelor’s degree and you learn way less with your master. PhD is just expanding a little bit more on master.
The visual is more about highlighting specialization and its distance from the limit of human knowledge. You often can’t represent every aspect of a complex subject at the same time on a single visual. Kinda like how you can’t represent the solar system distances and planet sizes to scale on a single page, you have to pick one.
But it’s all very basic knowledge.
Common knowledge would be more appropriate. It is known by many people, but it is not basic as in obvious. It took a long time to know what we learn in a very “basic” high school biology course.
And if you actually remember half of what you learned in that course a decade later, people ask things like, “where do you learn this shit?”
Frustrating to say the least. I feel my PhD accelerated learning in all directions. Not from the program content itself, but the skills involved in the ingestion of high volumes of dense information. This idea that the borders of my world don’t extend past some yadda yadda about some tiny subclass of a field is some silly goosery.
Can those “skills involved” be learned elsewhere? Sure, this is just the path I took. Can phDoctors be single minded or general idiots? Sure, I’m an idiot. Do we need some single minded people? Sure, amazing things can be accomplished by singular focus.
But it isn’t a mandatory condition or experience of a floppy hat assed (sword in some countries) recipient of this degree.
I kind of hate this image. Its like a way to discredit all the learning done in the formative elementary/high school years. If I would guess, 60-70% of everything I have learned was in high school and thats with me having several published papers.
To be fair, most of “all human knowledge” is stuff like when the last time was that each person on the planet pooped.
I would read that paper.
Go make your little bump in the circle of human knowledge then!
I made a little brown bump.
For your paper, I’m pooping right now. You can add that to your data points
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Nobody knows when I pooped last. It was some time today, but I don’t remember when, and no one else ever knew.
You only THINK we don’t know
Why do you think it discredis it?
Right, but the image says it’s a small part of all of human knowledge.
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One of my professors used to refer to it as:
Bull Shit
More Shit
Piled High and Deep
I guess outside of STEM you have Bull Ass and More Ass?
Only in customer facing positions
My Dad used to say it was just BS piled higher and deeper, similar but I always liked the joke from that phrasing.
They are being incredibly charitable with the width of that column
Knowledge is a grower and a shower
and also by not showing the bigger picture
https://i.postimg.cc/V19Jwzqd/knowledge-circle.png
there would also be an even bigger boundary of “all of reality” or something but obvs that would be infinite and impossible to know
Euler giving the circle two big balls and an erection:
O3–
Eh. It was a stupid misadventure, but it led ultimately to me meeting my wife and making a good amount of money. I managed to eke out a win.
Anyone knows the origin of this representation? I’ve seen a professor use it years ago and I thought it was his, but I guess not.
It is from Matt Might, here.
Matt Might, a professor in Computer Science at the University of Utah, created The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D. to explain what a Ph.D. is to new and aspiring graduate students.
Great, thank you! This post was not respecting the CC-BY ;)
I appreciate this picture!
Last cell:
What is this, a PhD for ants?
*image not to scale
