| > PhD study hyper-specializes people I want to dive into that a bit, if it's alright. If the world is becoming more complex as time marches onward, which I think we all think it is, then we should expect people to specialize and then hyper-specialize with more time. I'm sure most grad students have seen this illustration: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ It's an informative idea, that the PhD takes a lot of effort and accounts for not so much. However, it's uninformative in the representation of science being a circle or any other uniform mass. I know I'm nitpicking a quick drawing, but I see this illustration all the time in PhD-land and it makes me a bit frustrated. The circle misinforms the reader that at large scales, the sum of human knowledge is countable, known to all, and accessible. But even more pernicious is the idea that, in the local area, where that zit on the face of science lies, the field is moving outward/progressing uniformly. That there are no holes, or that if there are, they can be seen and worked towards. In fact, I'd say that the sum-of-knowledge-circle is more of a fractal, something like the animated Mandelbrot set: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set#/media/File:Ani... The boundary of science that a PhD pushes outward is a fractal portion of some previous portion. The circumference is always increasing and may do so until infinity, though the surface area is finite (like Euler's horn). Your doctoral work is just making more questions to be asked, though in a smaller and smaller way, like a fractal zoom. As the timestamps count up, the fractals increase in complexity, the questions science creates increase. But it's not just science, as if 'science' can be locked away from the rest of humanity and just doled out like a communion wafer. Science is human, all of us (eventually) share in it's flowers and thorns. That includes the general populace. They are part of that fractal too. So i think that in fact, yes, given enough time, most folks will be a the level of specialization of today's PhD, because the world and the science will need for them to be there because it will be so advanced and difficult. |
