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 1 year 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 1 year ago
ReluctantMuskrat@lemmy.world 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year ago
Imagine having to pay for education
avrachan@lemmings.world 1 year ago
most PhDs are paid a salary.
DrDr@lemmy.world 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year ago
Good luck expanding the fields of math and science without a PhD.
LittleWizard@feddit.de 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year ago
whereas I , with my bachelors degree in clowning, have been head hunted for my last two corporate jobs.
Agent641@lemmy.world 1 year ago
You are now CEO of FTX
Stuka@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Who even funds degrees like that?
You end up with federal job prospects than a GED
pinkdrunkenelephants@lemmy.cafe 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year ago
Why do you think it discredis it?
catastrophicblues@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Right, but the image says it’s a small part of all of human knowledge.
rimjob_rainer@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year ago
But it’s all very basic knowledge.
EvacuateSoul@lemmy.world 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year ago
One of my professors used to refer to it as: Bull Shit More Shit Piled High and Deep
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
I guess outside of STEM you have Bull Ass and More Ass?
holycrap@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Only in customer facing positions
orbitz@lemmy.ca 1 year 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 1 year ago
Euler giving the circle two big balls and an erection:
O3>
GarbageShoot@hexbear.net 1 year ago
They are being incredibly charitable with the width of that column
sooper_dooper_roofer@hexbear.net 1 year ago
and also by not showing the bigger picture
eran_morad@lemmy.world 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year ago
You can do a bachelor’s in college? Not here. College is typically only two year programs.
bleistift2@feddit.de 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year ago
Great thank you! This post is not respecting the CC-BY ;)
TWeaK@lemm.ee 1 year ago
fossilesque@mander.xyz 1 year ago
Damaskox@kbin.social 1 year ago
I appreciate this picture!
dylanTheDeveloper@lemmy.world 1 year ago
This is the exact same concept that hentai artists use because they don’t know how women’s anatomy works
troglodytis@lemmy.world 1 year ago
*image not to scale
0xebfe@lemm.ee 1 year ago
drctrl@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I love this
Tb0n3@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Neil deGrasse Tyson explained.
taanegl@beehaw.org 1 year ago
I would use the definition of Dr Kanye West, but that might not be appropriate.
Draconic_NEO@mander.xyz 1 year 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 1 year ago
I’ve been looking for this image for what feels like years lol. Ty.
Kolanaki@yiffit.net 1 year ago
Pretty Hot Doctor
ikilledtheradiostar@hexbear.net 1 year ago
Or you can just make up a bunch of shit ala Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino.
UlyssesT@hexbear.net 1 year ago
Forgetting someone, bucko? up-yours-woke-moralists
ikilledtheradiostar@hexbear.net 1 year ago
Most psychology if we’re being honest.
smuuthbrane@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Summary: YOUR Ph.D. means almost next to nothing, but collectively they expand the bounds of human knowledge.
fossilesque@mander.xyz 1 year ago
Do you have to live so relentlessly in reality?
Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Don’t we all?
smuuthbrane@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
As a parent to five, yes. All shall join me.
Zehzin@lemmy.world 1 year ago
If I didn’t have to I wouldn’t be doing it.
DroneRights@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Are you a soulist?