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by jack9 3570 days ago
It is not. The purpose of a PHD is to advance the sphere of human knowledge as it applies to a subset of existing data in a unique way. Getting the PHD by proving something empirically is the point of a PHD. This does not require a great deal of intelligence. Not enough to warrant more than a participation badge, anyway. e.g. Computer Science, where there's tons of data and few people have done the grunt work of organizing it for a statistician.