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Comment by squozzer | Hacker News Reader

I offer as a hypothesis the belief that graduate study programs, even in hard sciences such as physics, aren't looking for scholars, but disciples.

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It really depends on the supervisor, which is a bit of a weird thing since so much depends on a single person -

my supervisor let me do anything I want as long as there were a few publications at the end (graduation requirement, and in academia the only way to get jobs), other supervisors just look for cheap work for their own project (~robots). I have a friend from the US who worked full-time for 7 years on her PhD and published only one paper! The rest was work on the supervisor's stuff. I would've switched supervisor after 2 years at the latest (but hindsight, 20/20, yaddayadda)

Yup. My thesis advisor flat out told me to stop wasting my time with "crap" like neural nets. He came up in the time when they were disparaged by researchers competing for funding in AI so he didn't like them. He didn't care that I was using them to solve problems he was interested in, he wanted me to solve problems he was interested in using methods he approved of.

Unless you want to put the word some in there your hypothesis/belief is easy to falsify/repudiate.

As a matter of fact, a leading philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn would agree with that. He talks about science progressing by way of paradigm, and graduate programs a way to induct people into a paradigm.

The book is called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Very interesting read.

My point was that there are exceptions to the rule. I don't think the exceptions (scientists with, generally speaking, open minds who pass these habits on to students) are as rare as people reading Kuhn might think. I don't think there is a correlation with doing brilliant work or sparking a paradigm shift, but not everyone is small minded and protective of their territory. Maybe it just seems that way to me because I'm not very ambitious, but I notice quite a few people who don't fit the Kuhnian stereotype.

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