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Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

Two people with master's degrees bumped into each other on the street.

One's dissertation was "Preparation of Substituted Enol Derivatives From Terminal Alkynes and Progress Toward the Total Synthesis of Nigricanoside A."

The other's was "An Investigation Into the Appeal of LOLcats."

"Hi, I have a master's degree," said the one.

"Hi, so do I," said the other.

Guess who punched who in the face.

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On a more serious note, I used to puzzle about this when I was in Grad. School. There used to be people whose research I personally (at that time) thought to be trivial and used to think it was unfair that they were publishing papers and stuff. I recall what a mentor told me at that time: 99% of research is garbage but this is what we find post factum. We do it anyways so as to be able to take the 1% which drives progress. Also, the nature of cutting edge research is that progress goes slowly, which means that polished results from say 50 years ago are going to look amazing. As I went deeper into research, I was able to appreciate this more: There are things we do, ideas we derive that help us make things more rigorous but sometimes we have to explore other less thought off avenues.

I expect the one exposed to lolcats would be more aggressive than the scientist.

Master's degrees have never really been comparable between disciplines anyway.

I don't get the joke. Is one of them supposed to be a more worthy science?

Guess who punched whom in the face.

I humbly accept this correction.

I have "Game Theory Analysis of the Groups of the European Parliament" and I'm not inclined to punch either.

The only requirement for my MA was to stay alive for two years after graduating my BA (seriously) - needless to say I've never bothered to collect on that offer, but if I had it would certainly be worth less (if there is a metric for value of academic theses) than one issued on the basis of a thesis about Lolcats.

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