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.
73whereas I , with my bachelors degree in clowning, have been head hunted for my last two corporate jobs.
27You are now CEO of FTX
11
Who even funds degrees like that?
You end up with fewer job prospects than a GED
12Degrees like that aren't about a paycheck. It's about more important things than that. They ought to be subsidized by government if anything.
4
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.
71No 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
96You might be surprised to learn it doesn't actually suggest a PhD is the only way to expand human knowledge. No one was disregarded.
23I don't think it's meant to do that. Also if we substitute PhD for learning both will be true.
8Permanently Deleted
6That'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.
7It'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.
7
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.
4Permanently Deleted
1Good luck expanding the fields of math and science without a PhD.
1A total layman discovered solutions to the einstein problem, although once you get to a certain level of abstractness I do agree it's highly unlikely.
1
Yes but how will I feel good that I spent 140k on a piece of paper if I don't brag about it?
-3Imagine having to pay for education
15most PhDs are paid a salary.
13
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.
55The 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.
19But it's all very basic knowledge.
4Common 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?"
22
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.
52I 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.
50Why do you think it discredis it?
14If I would guess, 60-70% of everything I have learned was in high school
Do you think so? IMHO people overestimate how much they learned in high school because 4 years felt like a really long time at that age, and it felt hard because students don't care and aren't paying attention.
If you have a bachelor's, master's and a PhD you've spent like 8-10 years studying full time and working harder than you did as a teenager. I don't think it's plausible you learned less in that time than you did in high school.
1Right, but the image says it’s a small part of all of human knowledge.
1
One of my professors used to refer to it as:
Bull Shit
More Shit
Piled High and Deep
38I guess outside of STEM you have Bull Ass and More Ass?
2Only in customer facing positions
2
My Dad used to say it was just BS piled higher and deeper, similar but I always liked the joke from that phrasing.
1
They are being incredibly charitable with the width of that column
32Knowledge is a grower and a shower
11and 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
3
Euler giving the circle two big balls and an erection:
O3--
28Eh. 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.
25Anyone 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.
22It 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.
10Great, thank you! This post was not respecting the CC-BY ;)
2
Last cell:
What is this, a PhD for ants?
17I appreciate this picture!
15Wait, 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 now a (paid for) master's, but still. That graph makes it seem like it's high school with benefits.
11College 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, that is, those that are engaged and asking questions and curious.
Youngins, lpt: talk to your professors and let them know you are interested and ask questions. It's what you are there for- access to brains.
21Well, 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.
1
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?
10One 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.
3
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.
1It 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.
1
*image not to scale
9I love this
5Neil deGrasse Tyson explained.
3People 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.
2This is the exact same concept that hentai artists use because they don't know how women's anatomy works
2I've been looking for this image for what feels like years lol. Ty.
2I would use the definition of Dr Kanye West, but that might not be appropriate.
2Press here, dummy
1Pretty Hot Doctor
1Or you can just make up a bunch of shit ala Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino.
-1Forgetting someone, bucko?
1Most psychology if we're being honest.
0
