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.
What does a PhD mean?
Submitted 11 months ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/68988a2a-03d7-4486-96cc-ac5067a1239b.webp
Comments
LittleWizard@feddit.de 11 months ago
ReluctantMuskrat@lemmy.world 11 months ago
You might be surprised to learn it doesn’t actually suggest a PhD I’d the only way to expand human knowledge.
Patches@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Yes but how will I feel good that I spent 140k on a piece of paper if I don’t brag about it?
SaakoPaahtaa@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Imagine having to pay for education
avrachan@lemmings.world 11 months ago
most PhDs are paid a salary.
DrDr@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
Treevan@aussie.zone 11 months ago
As their specialised knowledge reaches the edge of the circle, their general knowledge updating should retract.
Everyone has met a PhD that is almost entirely clueless in other areas. Not their fault though, don’t get me wrong.
angrystego@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
Dozzi92@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
ShustOne@lemmy.one 11 months ago
I don’t think it’s meant to do that. Also if we substitute PhD for learning both will be true.
Pulptastic@midwest.social 11 months ago
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.
dreamer@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Good luck expanding the fields of math and science without a PhD.
LittleWizard@feddit.de 11 months ago
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.
S_204@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
whereas I , with my bachelors degree in clowning, have been head hunted for my last two corporate jobs.
Agent641@lemmy.world 11 months ago
You are now CEO of FTX
Stuka@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Who even funds degrees like that?
You end up with federal job prospects than a GED
pinkdrunkenelephants@lemmy.cafe 11 months ago
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.
PatFussy@lemm.ee 11 months ago
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.
oce@jlai.lu 11 months ago
Why do you think it discredis it?
catastrophicblues@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
Right, but the image says it’s a small part of all of human knowledge.
rimjob_rainer@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
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.
oce@jlai.lu 11 months ago
The visual is more about highlighting specialization and it’s 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.
Poem_for_your_sprog@lemmy.world 11 months ago
But it’s all very basic knowledge.
EvacuateSoul@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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?”
drmeanfeel@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
three20three@lemmy.world 11 months ago
One of my professors used to refer to it as: Bull Shit More Shit Piled High and Deep
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 11 months ago
I guess outside of STEM you have Bull Ass and More Ass?
holycrap@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Only in customer facing positions
orbitz@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
My Dad used to say it was just BS piled higher and deeper, similar but I always liked the joke from that phrasing.
ezchili@iusearchlinux.fyi 11 months ago
Euler giving the circle two big balls and an erection:
O3>
GarbageShoot@hexbear.net 11 months ago
They are being incredibly charitable with the width of that column
sooper_dooper_roofer@hexbear.net 11 months ago
and also by not showing the bigger picture
eran_morad@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
MudMan@kbin.social 11 months ago
Wait, how bad are bachelors' degrees in the US/anglosphere? I was contirbuting to research projects and had a specialization by the time I was done with my five year bachelors' equivalent.
In fairness, I think the system has since been reformatted so that the fifth year is a (paid for) master's, but still. That graph makes it seem like it's high school with benefits.
fossilesque@mander.xyz 11 months ago
College is what you put into it. A lot of people don’t get into the networking side of it because it’s never really introduced to them. Mostly professors look for those who are “turned on” to bring onto projects like that.
MudMan@kbin.social 11 months ago
Well, not really over here. You do have to do a bunch of hands-on stuff for credits. Can't even replace those with more standard subjects.
You can absolutely wing it past all five years, depending on your degree, but between mandatory projects and internships you have to try really hard to not get some level of expertise in the field.
Plus, university curriculums have specializations here, so you get mandatory courses on pretty narrow subjects whether you like it or not. So... I guess there are some differences, maybe? I was pissed when they announced they'd do that masters' thing here because the price of tuition for that year goes from being a couple hundred to a few thousand for basically the same curriculum, but this is definitely not the first time I notice that the anglosphere assumes there's a huge difference between the two things.
fruitSnackSupreme@lemmy.world 11 months ago
You can do a bachelor’s in college? Not here. College is typically only two year programs.
bleistift2@feddit.de 11 months ago
five year bachelors’ equivalent
In Germany (and Europe, I believe, since the Bologna reforms), a bachelor’s is (usually) 3 years and a master’s is 5 years. That might be why you got to do research and I didn’t. How long are your master’s courses?
MudMan@kbin.social 11 months ago
One year, typically. Some could be two or have a big chunk of on-the-job training/internship.
We used to have a more prominent 3 year degree, but it went semi-extinct in favor of other intermediate education, leaving our Bachelor's equivalent being 4-5 years, depending on which degree you're going for. And yeah, I think now they made them all 4 year and have more of a master's offering.
The thing is that internationally those 4-5 year degrees are still the thing immediately under a masters' degree, so there is a bit of a mismatch there. That goes some ways towards clarifying that, thanks.
TWeaK@lemm.ee 11 months ago
It depends on the course. For my course, the bachelor’s year included a project that was more design based, while the master’s year had a project that was research based, however I ended up working with a PhD student assisting in his research project for my bachelor’s.
MudMan@kbin.social 11 months ago
It definitely sounds that our system was a bit more standardized than that, which checks out and is both a strenght and a weakness depending on how you look at it.
oce@jlai.lu 11 months ago
Anyone knows the origin of this visual? I’ve seen a professor use it years ago and I thought it was his, but I guess not.
MelodicMischief@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
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.
oce@jlai.lu 11 months ago
Great thank you! This post is not respecting the CC-BY ;)
TWeaK@lemm.ee 11 months ago
fossilesque@mander.xyz 11 months ago
Damaskox@kbin.social 11 months ago
I appreciate this picture!
dylanTheDeveloper@lemmy.world 11 months ago
This is the exact same concept that hentai artists use because they don’t know how women’s anatomy works
troglodytis@lemmy.world 11 months ago
*image not to scale
0xebfe@lemm.ee 11 months ago
drctrl@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I love this
Tb0n3@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Neil deGrasse Tyson explained.
taanegl@beehaw.org 11 months ago
I would use the definition of Dr Kanye West, but that might not be appropriate.
Draconic_NEO@mander.xyz 11 months ago
People can make dents in the outer shell of human knowledge without having PhDs though. As in to discover something new and revolutionary, plenty of great scientists have and likely many more will continue to.
blanketswithsmallpox@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I’ve been looking for this image for what feels like years lol. Ty.
Kolanaki@yiffit.net 11 months ago
Pretty Hot Doctor
ikilledtheradiostar@hexbear.net 11 months ago
Or you can just make up a bunch of shit ala Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino.
UlyssesT@hexbear.net 11 months ago
Forgetting someone, bucko? up-yours-woke-moralists
ikilledtheradiostar@hexbear.net 11 months ago
Most psychology if we’re being honest.
smuuthbrane@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Summary: YOUR Ph.D. means almost next to nothing, but collectively they expand the bounds of human knowledge.
fossilesque@mander.xyz 11 months ago
Do you have to live so relentlessly in reality?
Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Don’t we all?
smuuthbrane@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
As a parent to five, yes. All shall join me.
Zehzin@lemmy.world 11 months ago
If I didn’t have to I wouldn’t be doing it.
DroneRights@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Are you a soulist?