Put the “Ph” Back in PhD
magazine.jhsph.edu
magazine.jhsph.edu
We need some, but there aren't anywhere near enough big-thinking jobs for all these PhDs.
> The success of science and technology will always lead to new ethical dilemmas. How do you spot them and try to work with society before they become problems? A better appreciation of ethics is likely to address what has become an epidemic of retractions in the scientific literature.
All the recent retractions have nothing to do with scientists being unaware of ethical dilemmas raised by their work. They're to do with perverse incentives, p-hacking, and occasionally deliberate dishonesty.
As long as the competition for stable positions will remain so fierce, and the criteria for which candidates are judged will remain so narrow, the problems are likely to be far more prosaic than those raised by analytical philosophers.
You're arguing that what happens to be the case now is how it should be.
Do you think this is the best way for it to be, and if so, why?
However, if you forget the job market, the argument the guy is making is absolutely spot on. There's a solid trend in academia that is "publish early, publish fast". Although one might argue that it actually makes sense (career-wise or whatever), it is intrinsic in such a system to penalise pursuing big, risky ideas. Considering that the PhD (and the few years after) are the most productive in a researcher's life, it is a shame that students are not actively encouraged to think bigger.
Source? I'm curious.
http://openaccessweek.org/profiles/blogs/age-amp-science-do-...
"A study in 2002 examined 50 Nobel prize winners from each of the three prizes for physics, chemistry and medicine. This study recorded the age of the scientists when they had done the work that was rewarded with the prize and found that the centre points for age were: physics, 34; chemistry, 37; medicine, 40 (Marchetti C, 2002.) A study published in 1993 investigated a similar data set and concluded that scientists tend to be the most productive in their mid-thirties (Stephan & Levan, 1993.) Finally, a 2008 study of 300 randomly selected bioscientists revealed that the most productive age was 36-40 (Falagas et al., 2008) based on the number of citations from their publications. These studies all indicate that a scientist's greatest potential for discovery is during their thirties"
If instead you measure productivity in number of articles published, this study (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF00142022) claims that productivity peaks at 45-49. However that number covers a wide variety of fields, not just science, and makes no attempt to account for the quality or significance of the work.
Incidentally I remember also reading [1] that in certain fields, in this case mathematics, most of the groundbreaking research comes from younger mathematicians. Great contributions to the field from people over 40 are extremely rare.
[1] Simon Singh, Fermat's Last theorem. Ok, not great source but still!
With an increasing number of researchers isn't that a great thing? If you publish your little incremental innovations then everyone can build on them. If you try to build your giant all-encompassing framework before you publish any of it, you'll have to do it all yourself (if it even amounts to anything).
EDIT: I would also argue that developments like the printing press and the world wide web would have been difficult to justify as incremental extensions of existing work.
I'm not saying these developments came from nowhere, nor that they didn't build on previous work. I'm specifically arguing against the idea that it's fruitful to just focus on work that would be seen as incremental improvements on existing work.
Then someone (Newton, Darwin, Einstein) comes along and assembles a new framework based on new observations/theories that do a better job of explaining things. Eg the switch from creationism to evolution, or from newtonian physics to relativity.
Here are some more examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift#Examples_of_par...
I guess what I'm trying to say is that the incentives are strongly biased to what can be easily seen as a increment on what has been done before, and that this is biased against work that may draw on what has been done before but is presenting a fairly different view to what is currently accepted.
Could Darwin have presented his view as an incremental extension of some existing view? (I am aware there were existing theories of evolution, but there weren't any like Darwin's or Wallace's to be built upon).
Tenure with reduced teaching responsibilities is the way big thinking gets funded these days.
Einstein didn't get funding, i.e. an academic position. He did his initial groundbreaking work while having a day job in a patent office. He published his four groundbreaking papers in 1905 and was offered a lecturer position only on 1908.
Why? Because small incremental improvements cannot get published in high impact journals, and high impact journals are the currency to scientific prestige/grants/tenure.
This could be normalized within fields, but in practice it's not. For example, the NIH K-awards have a fixed eligibility period, which seems to keep shrinking.
> We need some, but there aren't anywhere near enough big-thinking jobs
Ok. Perhaps we also need jobs for them?
[EDIT: what I mean is, perhaps it is in society's interest to divert some resources to creating more jobs for such people?]
And perhaps the research itself, that these big thinkers do for their PhDs, has important value for society?
The research itself could and should have value. But a PhD must go all the way to the bottom, in terms of detail. It's not a pop science book or a funding programme, which can delegate the details to someone else. Therefore, asking the PhD student to be a big thinker as well as taking care of the experimental details is just raising the bar -- it's not changing the focus, it's raising the bar. Fewer people will be able to start PhDs and fewer will be able to complete them. The article doesn't suggest that this has been recognised.
Instead, I suggest that a PhD is not a great vehicle for "big thinking", and instead serves as a training-ground for planning, executing and describing ordinary research. Maybe the big thinking should be done -- as it is currently -- by people who have already demonstrated that they can do all that very well.
> Maybe the big thinking should be done -- as it is currently -- by people who have already demonstrated that they can do all that very well.
I completely dispute this. I would bet that historically, the majority of "big thinking" has been done by people who are not already well established.
In fact, I think there's a fallacy that "big thinking" somehow comes from accumulated experience. I would argue that "big thinking" is actually a different kind of thinking, one that requires you to have that kind of thinking rather than a wealth of experience.
[EDIT: there seems to be empirical evidence that having a wealth of experience tends to prevent people from coming up with (good) "big ideas". And since this is Hacker News, think about this in terms of technology and startups. Is it usually older people or younger people who tend to come up with the game-changing tech developments?]
I agree with your points about the young and non-established being good bets for big thinking. But I think the PhD is an unsuitable vehicle, partly because it's not well-designed to handle failure (your analogy with startups is great and instructive on this point).
Yeah, man, jobs! It's all about jobs! Jobs jobs jobs! Steve Jobs! Jobs jobs!
How about this? The world needs big thinkers in ways other than their capacity as economic actors. Einstein worked at a patent office. The work he did there (for the patent office) was not his primary contribution to the world at that time.
As for jobs jobs, I think you missed the point. If we lie to PhD candidates about career prospects and train them in things that have a negative effect on their careers, then the best people won't undertake research.
1. Being smart isn't a product, and most people won't consider it a skill
2. Thinking big isn't a product, and most people won't consider it a skill
3. Thinking big is usually reserved for top level people, of which there are less than five
You know what they call the big thinker who is looking for a job with his shiny new PhD? Unemployed.
In technical fields (which is what this article is about)?
The ones who choose to stay in academia and are lucky enought to find a position are called "Professor".
The unlucky or disillusioned ones -- as well as the (majority) of PhDs who never even intended to go into academia at any point during thier studies -- are called, variously, "Engineer", "Analyst", "Consultant", etc. and typically start in the low six figures (and not even in the bay area / NYC). They take a marginal hit to their lifetime earnings, but in most cases make decent salaries and get to work on more interesting problems (obv. interesting is subjective).
> Unemployed.
The unemployment rate for STEM PhDs is ludicrously low (FYI: if you google this, be aware that the Slate article by Jordan Weissmann is IMO purposefully misleading. See Table 1 of http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf14310/ and compare to his graphs. E.g., his graph seems to indicate that the unemployment rate for CS PhDs was over around 15% in 2001, but the NSF tables makes it clear that the rate was 0.9%, which is even more than what most economists refer to as full employment. In fact, in CS, the increase for 0.9% to 2% is almost entirely attributable to there being a lot more retired CS phds now than 10 years ago (for rather obvious reasons). So the stats he's using to tell his story are, at very best, unintentionally but absurdly non-representative of the actual state of affairs. It's like asking someone the day after they quit their job if they've started their new job yet and, when they say "hell no, taking some time off to recharge", assuming they're unemployable and/or don't have something lined up.)
Perverse incentives is a great point.
Stated problems:
- scientists are not equipped by their training to be able to tackle "big" challenges such as meteorites and pandemics.
- "hyper-competitiveness" for grants
- extreme specialisation means that people can't communicate.
And the solution is to learn about:
1. epistemology 2. quantitative skills 3. ethics
I certainly don't disagree with the value of learning about these things. But while epistemology and quantitative skills might help make the scientific process more rigorous, I don't see that it will change competitiveness or the inability to tackle big challenges or deter specialisation.
And while ethics is always a valuable thing to think about, I don't think it helps scientific rigor or any of the author's stated problems.
Overall I found the piece a bit muddled.
> In most of Europe, all fields other than theology, law, and medicine were traditionally known as philosophy, and in Germany and elsewhere in Europe the basic faculty of (liberal) arts was known as the faculty of philosophy.
Source: I once looked down my nose at philosophy, then I started doing first-priciples on the methodology I was taught. Turns out that 'philosophy of science' is a field unto itself.
It's also easy to get the two mixed up as Philosophy basically used to be the nascent 'science'.
It's also worth reading this before you get too attached to philosophy:
http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html
Ultimately present day philosophy, last I looked and certainly since Wittgenstein, is all about playing with word meaning and almost upfront about it, but pg argues in reality it always was like that.
It was still kind of true in the social sciences like psychology and sociology in the last century, but they've become more 'real', more rigorous and less influenced by philosophers, the questions in those fields today are now asked by people who wouldn't identify themselves as philosophers but as scientists.
I would say that change has really crystallized in the last 20 years, when I was in uni psychology and sociology were still considered a bit of a joke, kind of not real science and the philosophy courses I did about them still tried to pretend to be relevant in the discussion. Now I think we're starting to see the rigor really kick in, which is demonstrated in the recent reproducibility saga.
Philosophy is a slippery slope the same way that improvising in music is. It's value is not in the results but in the process.
There are a few folks who do care about things like multiverses and quantum foundations, which certainly overlap with philosophy a lot more, but it's not really something most physicists do.
The example of string theory is actually proving my point. The resemble part is a philosophical observation not a scientific one. It's that ability to see new context ask different questions that's at the core of philosophy.
The point I am trying to make is that in the very act of conducting science is a philosophical pursuit. The scientific model is just another way of asking philosophical questions. And so you can't decouple them from each other. They are just different perspectives on the same phenomena. Keep in mind that for a long time QM had no application, no value it was seen as a curiosity. Yet it lived on long enough through the philosophical implications that it seemed to present.
Without a philosophical framework there is no meaning to the results of our experiments. They are just anecdotal isolated tests. Thats what Popper and later Kuhn was trying to deal with.
Only in the instances where philosophy asks questions science can test.
Questions like "What is The Good?" and "Is it morally right to do this thing?" are not those kinds of questions.
It's important to distinguish between the act of philosophizing and then the disciplin and it's historical context.
It's just that most of the 'ingrained' stuff has been settled now, and people are more interested in writing about new, unanchored stuff. The same is true of science - few professional researchers bother retreading settled ground. How often do you see an article by modern professional scientists that examine the basics of the electrical resistivity of copper?
Didn't Francis Bacon have a lot to do with the initial codification of the ideas behind the practice of science?
I'm not saying his philosophy wasn't a major contributor, but he was around at the time Philosophy and Science were splitting up and he formalized what the scientists were already starting to do.
Just in case anyone doesn't know, this all happened 400 years ago. That was the beginning of the end of philosophy having any influence on Science.
Have you read any present day philosophy? That's at best a description of some of the worst tendencies of analytic philosophy, which peaked in the 40-50s. (Many philosophers these days identify as "analytic" in the broad sense of "not continental", but that is more to do with sociology than anything else.)
Had a quick google and a lot of the people I read at uni are still listed as great present day philosophers, Derek Parfitt, David Chalmers, Thomas Nagel, Saul Kripke, Daniel Dennett.
Some of those books still sit on my shelf. I remember Reasons and Persons being very good.
>Most philosophical debates are not merely afflicted by but driven by confusions over words. Do we have free will? Depends what you mean by "free."
Well, yes, which is why philosophers have been trying to clarify the various possible senses of 'free' and to determine whether or not we have free will in each of these various senses. Either we ignore the question, or we try to clarify it and answer it in one of it's clarified forms. And indeed, philosophers have been doing the latter, quite productively, for thousands of years. If there's now a third option, PG doesn't bother telling us what it is.
>Meanwhile, sensing a vacuum in the metaphysical speculation department, the people who used to do literary criticism have been edging Kantward, under new names like "literary theory," "critical theory," and when they're feeling ambitious, plain "theory."
PG is apparently unaware of the resurgence of metaphysics in the past few decades. You could hardly describe EJ Lowe as a literary critic.
> it would be misleading to say the field is 2500 years old, because for most of that time the leading practitioners weren't doing much more than writing commentaries on Plato or Aristotle while watching over their shoulders for the next invading army.
Again, total ignorance of the history of philosophy.
First you accused me, with no proof, of not having read modern philosophy. I disabused you of that view.
Now you are calling us 'unaware' and ignorant because you don't agree with this viewpoint.
You've fallen to the level of name calling.
This is the problem that philosophy has, and it's evident in PG's essay, too: "philosophy is old dead Greek dudes". Philosophy is much broader than that, and philosophers are not distinct entities from scientists. Philosophy and science are intertwined; knowing how to ask and answer valid questions are core functions of the fields.
So, no, we're not just talking about the old white bearded guys from Greece.
For me, reading that essay crystallized what had been nagging me about philosophy when I studied it, all the different forms felt the same, the arguments sounded the same but I couldn't vocalise why.
As soon as I read that essay it was obvious.
As one can remember from high school, natural science fields spawned from natural philosophy from 17th through 19th century. Culminating maybe with psychology in the early 20th century (end of 19th). No mystery there.
Ph.D.s in literature, history, or classics have nothing to do with natural philosophy, and never did.
(this is the classic meaning) 1. the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline.
2. a theory or attitude that acts as a guiding principle for behaviour.
It may be more productive to have the expectation of bigger-thinking introduced earlier and let that expectation be realized more fully at the PhD level.
By the time you're getting your PhD, the college graduate should have read the classics, done at least 1st year level calculus, biology, physics, ethics, philosophy, and 2-4 years of a foreign language.
High school and undergraduate is the time to be broad-minded. PhD is for very focused work (with the big picture in mind).
Personally, I read the classics and learned Greek and Latin (high school), then in college took 8 courses of philosophy, 2 of Spanish, 2 in economics, 4 in business/entrepreneurship, and a smattering of other interesting things (art, music, etc...) while getting a Physics major.
Then I went and spent 6 years learning more about one thing than anyone in the world.