[fastneutron]

Most discussions I see online about whether or not someone should do a PhD tend to assume:

- The student becomes hyper focused and pigeonholed into some esoteric and unemployable domain, destined to run on the postdoctoral treadmill for decades.

- The PI is a control freak who only cares about publications, and considers students who leave for industry jobs after graduation to be failures.

These stereotypes can have an element of truth, but there are more enlightened PhD programs and PIs that understand the value of cross-cutting and commercializable research than you’d expect from the discourse. Not everyone is stuck working on a pinprick of knowledge, and if you choose your program and PI wisely, you can go much further and do many more things than you would never have access to with just an undergraduate background.

[hikingsimulator]

One big issue is that industry jobs in some areas increasingly expect academic excellence in the shape of "publishing in top 3 conferences" for example.

[Over2Chars]

An obviously totally arbitrary barrier. Why not 4 or even 5?

Someone who only published in 2 top conferences is obviously not worth anyone's time. But 3, now we're talking.

[saagarjha]

Because that's the number conferences that are generally considered to be better than the rest. Just like the "top 4" computer science schools in the US are unambiguously Stanford, UC Berkeley, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon. You can ask, why not 5? Because then you start getting into questions about whether you want to include UCLA or UIUC or Caltech and it's significantly more complicated.

[Over2Chars]

And... it's totally arbitrary.

Top people come from non-top schools, and lots of non-top people from from "top" schools. And some top people come from no school at all.

[saagarjha]

Of course, but there are still four schools which are clearly the "top" ones. The same is true for academic conferences, or big tech, or intelligence agencies.

[Over2Chars]

Top is just marketing. In Big Tech it's market cap or something, but it's not proof of anything and may be just marketing. Google is a search advertising monopoly pretending to be a "tech" company (per Thiel), but is a "top" company to work for. Ok.

And intelligence agencies are government mandated, not marketing made. Or at least I haven't heard any marketing from the NSA saying how selective they are in admissions (as if that means anything).

[halgir]

Most quantitative recruitment criteria are arbitrary to some degree. Unless you rigorously examine every single applicant, you need some heuristics for initial filtering.

[Over2Chars]

So you need some arbitrary filtering to give you breathing room for your objective heuristics?

For some reason that seems slightly non-optimal.

[InkCanon]

I never understood point 1. Your PhD thesis will almost definitely be on a very specific topic, you don't have the time or knowledge to cover multiple distinct fields.

[Over2Chars]

I'm not saying you're wrong but...

Elon Musk skipped his PhD program and did many more things than spending time in school would have allowed him to do. Of course, most people aren't Elon (probably a good thing).

Other than preparing you for a career in academia or some highly regulated environment where education is erected as a barrier to entry, it's hard for me to think of "many more things" that are open to a phd holder than to someone who is not.

[fastneutron]

Celebrity exceptions are exactly that; exceptions. Those people knew an opportunity when they had one, and were able to generalize their early successes into other domains by leveraging the financial, social, and intellectual capital they accumulated. People who fit this description aren’t the ones reading this thread.

In some fields all you need is a computer and an idea to be impactful, but in plenty of other fields you’d be hard pressed to make any credible, let alone meaningful impact without significant intellectual preparation and tacit knowledge. These things only come through experience, and for many people, the PhD program is that experience.

[Over2Chars]

I agree that the exception is rare, but it suggests that the non-exception isn't exclusively necessary. It might suggest that the dominant paradigm of diplomas is quite non-optimal or at least optional.

Carlos Ghosn started out as a factory manager (although well educated), and in his Stanford interview the presenter noted that Stanford produced no factory managers, although it produces lots of would be global CEOs.

Perhaps it should produce more factory managers.

Musk has shown an ability to make an impact in multiple fields for which he seems quite under qualified for, for which he did not have "significant intellectual preparation and tacit knowledge". He read alot.

I think there are more non-celebrity exceptions that are simply not well known.

And there are lots of people in PhD programs who, despite their education, do not make credible or meaningful impacts, quite possibly not at all due to their competence or training quality, but due to wholly accidental or uncontrollable factors: industry shifts, business culture, changes in government research funding, or their entire paradigm being based on faulty assumptions that were simply not known and discovered later, or superseded by some innovation, etc.

Academics are rarely comfortable discussing the shortcomings of academia.

[fastneutron]

No, the non-exception is not absolutely necessary, and there are plenty of people on my staff who fit the description. There are also plenty more who Dunning-Krueger their way into thinking they do, but break down when challenged to do anything novel. Understand your options and choose your program carefully. > Musk has shown an ability to make an impact in multiple fields for which he seems quite under qualified for, for which he did not have "significant intellectual preparation and tacit knowledge". He read alot. He also had a giant pile of money from his PayPal windfall to hire the right people with the tacit knowledge to act on his ideas. The difference between a crank and eccentric businessman is the size of the budget they can wield when nobody else will. > Academics are rarely comfortable discussing the shortcomings of academia. Correct, which is why I’m not in academia.