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Comment by jszymborski | Hacker News Reader

You know, as a PhD student, I sometimes feel like the moment I come up with a good idea, it's guaranteed to show up as a result on Google Scholar the next day, which can be rather discouraging.

I've never really thought about it in terms of your comment, however, which is actually very motivating. Thanks for the perspective random internet person.

(Apologies for the OT comment)

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Reminds me of when I asked a professor once "why don't they try <alternative approach> instead?". He replied, "I tried that when I was a grad student. It turns out not to work that well because <reasons>." I never figured out if that validated or invalidated my thinking, but I found it funny and kind of eye-opening either way.

It is validation that you had an interesting idea that others thought was worth checking out.

A lot of the value of being in a department is being able to have these shortcuts. I remember as an undergrad in physics asking why we didn't use imaginary time to formulate special relativity? The grad students around me by and large looked puzzled and said they had never thought of it. A very, very experienced nuclear/mathematical physicist said, "Oh, yeah, folks did try that back in the early 20th century. It works fine, but you have to go to a full metric for general relativity, so why carry around two formalisms?" I contemplated that for about thirty seconds, said, "That makes sense," and happily put aside the question.

It vindicates your thinking in that it indicates that you are picking up the techniques that professionals use to generate ideas. You just have to accept that as you're learning, most of the ideas will have been generated and addressed.

What gets awkward is when you're doing interdisciplinary research and you're using the generative mechanisms from one discipline in the other. By and large both sides stare at you in confusion, or it requires multiple hour conversations to lead the other discipline's practitioners into a mental space where they can say, "Oh, yeah, that wouldn't be useful because of X." It makes the process of tuning your idea generation much slower. On the flip side, you hit the unknown way faster, sometimes great vistas of unknown where everyone goes, "Umm...wow. Yeah. Never heard of that continent. Let us know what you find."

I think even a PhD is more about execution than good ideas. There is generally speaking no shortage of good ideas, but many turn out to be too labour intensive or have other subtle problems. In any case I’ve also gotten discouraged by this, but what eventually matters is really execution on one or two good ideas during your PhD

This is very true.

Advise to new PhD candidates: take a boring idea and write the best paper you can on it. It will be 10x better received than your "great" idea.

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