[bennettnate5]

Incidentally, this describes what I believe to be the great difficulty of PhD research. You have to take a topic you find interesting and read all possible related work in it, which tends to result in significant scope creep as you realize just how much there is that already does you want to do. Having exhausted your initial energy and excitement for the project, you have to force yourself the remaining 20-30% of he way to the finish line to get that work to a publishable state.

[sidewndr46]

Day 1: We aim to demonstrate the effectiveness of an existing industrial catalyst in a novel application that has not seen commercial usage, potentially lowering cost of production of precursors for essential medications

Day 400: Having thoroughly described a universal theory of everything, we set out to build an experimental apparatus in orbit at a Lagrange point capable of detecting a universal particle which acts a mediator for all observable forces in the known universe.

[Ifkaluva]

I think it’s the opposite—you start out bright eyed and busy tailed thinking you will do something big over the next five years…

You find out your idea has been tried, five different ways, all of them failed. Two of your follow up ideas were already done, and had some impact but not as much as expected. Finally you have an idea nobody has done, you try it and it flops—maybe somebody had tried it before but their results were so bad they couldn’t publish.

Then in the end you have done a tiny increment over the state of the art, and you want to persuade the PhD committee this is enough and they should let you graduate.

[danaris]

I mean, part of the systemic problem here is that "results were so bad they couldn't publish."

That shouldn't ever be a thing. As long as your methods are sound, it should never matter whether your results are just completely random noise; that's still an important result.

[Ifkaluva]

Right :) I was trying to write the bleakest possible version, and in the bleakest, your own unpublished idea is not actually original, it’s just a failure of the system to record negative results.

[bluefirebrand]

Damn, that's an incredible amount of progress in just 400 days

[dnnddidiej]

Notice: "We set out to build..."

[lukan]

"Having thoroughly described a universal theory of everything"

That is already something people would call a project.

[gadflyinyoureye]

That is the power of AI.

[FridgeSeal]

Don’t sell yourself short!

You could achieve things yourself if you tried!

[richardw]

That’s how I do side projects.

[amarant]

I think this is the definition of side projects.

Like, if you stay focused, is it even really a side project?

Which is why my 2d top down sprite-based rpg now has a 3d procedural animation engine, a procedural 3d character generator with automagic rigging, a population simulator that would put Europa Universalis to shame if I ever get around to finishing it (ha!) a pixel art editor, a 2d procedural animation engine using active ragdolls.........

You might wonder why a 2d game needs 3d procedural animation, well...

The scope creeps in mysterious ways

[x______________]

> a population simulator that would put Europa Universalis to shame if I ever get around to finishing it (ha!)

I believe the answer is buried in this submission:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47902525

Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish (matthewbrunelle.com) 228 points by speckx 12 hours ago | flag | hide | 122 comments

[lukan]

"You might wonder why a 2d game needs 3d procedural animation, well..."

To produce better looking assets for the 2D top down world?

[appplication]

I think this is what factorio did for their assets (2d sprites from 3d models, not proc gen)

[twic]

Mine was more:

Day 1: we aim to demonstrate the role of myosin II in the initiation of adhesions in migrating fibroblasts

Day 1047: we aim to get one preparation of fibroblasts to express GFP-myosin and survive long enough to film, just one, come on, please, twenty cells is enough, is that too much to ask

[Johnny_Bonk]

Hahaha so well said, can relate during my thesis

[dnnddidiej]

This comment is screaming out fot 3 or 4 panels and some stick figures.

[sidewndr46]

feel free to expand upon it, I'm not an artist.

[fHr]

Lmao accurate

[SoftTalker]

This is why so many research papers have "Towards" as the first word in the title. I.e. we didn't actually achieve our original goal, but here's a writeup of what progress we made.

I heard academic research described like this: Imagine yourself inside a balloon. The body of research in your field is represented by the current size of the balloon. Now put your fingertip on the wall of the balloon and push. That little indentation is your Ph.D.

Another analogy is a lake: The lake is the current body of research, you walk up and dump in an additional bucket of water. That's your Ph.D.

I'm sure there are many others.

[sunrunner]

> That little indentation is your Ph.D.

Illustrated nicely by https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

[orochimaaru]

Lol. That one. I wish I had seen that before I began my PhD. It describes the anti-climactic and exhilarating feeling you have simultaneously at your thesis defense.

[BobbyTables2]

I feel one also has to have a drive for “marketing” their idea and that is 50% of the PhD. Or at least a blind enthusiasm that they are doing something significantly better than previous work.

How else does one stand up and proclaim that the fruits of years of labor and expense of a small fortune is an incremental improvement ?

While working on a project for a class, I once found a solution to a particular problem that hadn’t been really solved. Got to do a conference poster. Someone asked if it was my PhD topic (it wasn’t). I felt it was too silly to even count toward such. The problem likely had not been unsolved because very few ever cared.

(I eventually dropped out)

Instead I write software mostly with no UI that nobody ever sees. But I enjoy the work and can convince myself that someone finds it useful.

[SecretDreams]

This, all while battling the increasingly heavy burden of regret towards having started a PhD in the first place.

[wasabi991011]

Oh man I feel that in my bones.

Any advice on how to mitigate this?

[Kichererbsen]

I worked at a chair for 12 years - in that time I've seen a lot of PhD students go through this.

If it helps anything at all: It's normal. At this point, you've already proven you're smart and knowledgeable. Now, the universe wants to see if you can also finish what you've started. That's the main thing a PhD proves: That you can take an incredibly interesting topic and then do all the boring stuff that they need you to do to be formally compliant with arbitrary rules.

Focus on finishing. Reduce the scope as much as possible again. Down to your core message (or 3-4 core messages, I guess, for paper-based dissertations).

Listen to the feedback you get from your advisor.

You got this!

[wjnc]

This is spot on. My dad was a professor and had dozens of PhDs. The only thing differentiating them (as I remember him telling me) was the resolve to keep work as /tiny/ as possible. Who is remember for his/her PhD? Only the smallest cream of the crop. He even made good fun of worthless thesis by (then) well known professors. It’s not about your PhD.

When I did my MSc thesis he told me it was a pretty good PhD. (Before giving me a months work in corrections.) I didn’t understand back then, but I understand now. It was small, replicatable and novel (still is)! Just replicate three times and be done with it. You’ve proven your mastery. Now start something serious.

[collabs]

> This is spot on. My dad was a professor and had dozens of PhDs. The only thing differentiating them (as I remember him telling me) was the resolve to keep work as /tiny/ as possible. Who is remember for his/her PhD? Only the smallest cream of the crop. He even made good fun of worthless thesis by (then) well known professors. It’s not about your PhD.

My professor once told me he presented at a small conference, the whole audience everybody had PhD in mathematics and maybe 2 of the 50 or so people in the audience could follow along. The point he was trying to make is at some point the people in the audience were not really interested in what was being presented because it is difficult to just follow along some really niche topic.

[brandall10]

There was a book I read a couple years back called "Mathematica: A Secret World of Intuition and Curiosity", by David Bessis.

He discussed this topic and how generally it's left to those who are more notable in a field to ask the 'dumb' questions everyone else is afraid to ask. And such questions often need to be asked to get the audience on board and open the floodgates with areas of niche research - the speaker themself is often too far into the rabbit hole to discern the difference between opaque and obvious.

So it stands to reason, at smaller conferences this would be a big problem, with fewer thought leaders in attendance whose reputations are intact enough that they wouldn't mind looking foolish.

[stathibus]

> Focus on finishing. Reduce the scope as much as possible again.

in my field this would be terrible advice. instead you need to be doing something that your audience actually will give a shit about.

[lazyasciiart]

If you’ve spent a significant amount of time widening the scope as far as possible to include everything interesting about your original question, and there is nothing in that whole widened scope that the audience will give a shit about, your topic is unsaveable and your advisor is a failure.

If there is something interesting enough to qualify, then reduce the scope as much as possible. It should go without saying that you shouldn’t throw out the interesting bit.

[stathibus]

The problem that occurs in practice is “focus on finishing” leads people to finish without actually doing anything meaningful. Advisors may or may not encourage this depending on where they are in their career.

When you get on the industry job market nobody cares if it took you 3 years or 7 years to do the work, they only care if it’s meaningful.

[arethuza]

It's been a long long time since I was the academic research world - but isn't 3 published papers pretty much the expectation for a PhD quantity of research?

[noelwelsh]

Really depends on the field. Computer science research usually has pretty short cycle times. If you're working on, say, biology or anthropology, collecting data can take substantially longer.

[wanderingmind]

Technical feedback yes, but always reject any career feedback from your advisor since the data shows it's unlikely a good model for future career success

[godelski]

Switch back and forth between trying and reviewing. Often it can be good to just try before reviewing, to get your feet wet. Don't spend too much time. Then when reviewing you're going to understand it more. Repeat this process.

But there's some things to remember that are incredibly important

  - a paper doesn't *prove* something, it suggests it is *probably* right
    - under the conditions of the paper's settings, which aren't yours
  - just because someone had X outcome before doesn't mean you won't get Y outcome
  - those small details usually dominate success
    - sometimes a one liner seemingly throw away sentence is what you're missing
    - sometimes the authors don't know and the answer is 5 papers back that they've been building on
  - DO NOT TREAT PAPERS AS *ABSOLUTE* TRUTH
    - no one is *absolutely* right, everyone is *some* degree of wrong
  - other researchers are just like you, writing papers just like you
    - they also look back at their old papers and say "I'm glad I'm not that bad anymore"
  - a paper demonstrating your idea is a positive signal, you're thinking in the right direction

As soon as you start treating papers as "this is fact" you tend to overly generalize the results. But the details dominate so you just kill your own creativity. You kill your own ideas before you know they're right or wrong. More importantly you don't know how right or how wrong.

[gopher_space]

Your bullet points explain most of the replication crisis, from my perspective.

[godelski]

They're definitely deeply related. For example, a lot of works get rejected over "novelty" issues. Well, if success and/or failure depend on something seemingly small then it will almost never get through review because it seems like low novelty. Though it'll get through review if authors are convincing enough, which often leads to some minor exaggerations.

Combine that with the publish-or-perish paradigm and I think we got significant coverage. People don't even consider diving deeper into things and are encouraged to take the route of "assume paper is correct" because that's the fastest way to push out research. But if the foundation is shaky, then everything built on it is shaky too.

Which, that's a distinction in the hard and more formal fields like math and physics. They have no issues pushing out papers that may have errors in them because the process is to attack works as hard as possible. Then whatever is left is where you build again. You definitely have people take advantage of this, like Avi Loeb publishing about aliens, but it is realistically a small price to pay. And hey, even Loeb's work still contributes. If at some point it actually is aliens, then there's work existing that can be built upon. And when it continues to not be aliens, there's existing work to build on since really his problem is more that the papers just end up concluding "and this is why we can't rule out aliens!" (-__-)

Anyways, long story short, my advice is to just remember that you, and everybody else, is a blubbering idiot and it is a absolute fucking miracle a bunch of mostly hairless apes can even communicate, let alone postulate about the cosmos. At the end of the day we're all on the same team, seeking truth. Truth matters more than our egos and if we start to forget how dumb we are then we'll only hinder our pursuit of truth.

[exidex]

My choice is to not do a PhD and just invest as much or as little effort in the topic as you like

[bennettnate5]

For me, it wasn't so much about mitigating this cycle as much as recognizing that the grit of pushing through that last 20-30% is actually a valuable life skill that the PhD could teach me to do, and that projects that I felt like I would never want to touch again actually started to become interesting again after I had left them for a year or so.

[biophysboy]

I finished a PhD. My concrete advice is focus on feasible methods you know are realistic for your lab resource wise (time, money, etc)

[ericmcer]

It seems almost inevitable...

Acknowledge it is normal? Attempt to buy deeper into the delusion ("Yeah my work is awesome and unique!"). Use stimulants to force enthusiastic days every once in awhile?

[thechao]

Find a brand new hire who wants to get tenure. Getting a PhD through in 4 years is catnip for tenure at most universities (stateside). We then dropped off my dissertation in the middle of NSF funding week. I paid for it during orals (4 hours), but they all signed within a few days without comment.

Uhh... unless you plan to stay in academia? Then, this is a terrible idea.

[AndrewKemendo]

The majority of PhD candidates deal with this because the point of a PhD is to prove you can to “normal science” [1] which boils down to “how do I make this system go from 1% observable to 1.001% observable” which is just a gate for being in the academic career field.

You’ll almost never see a PhD thesis that has anything particularly interesting, novel or directly applicable to the sciences.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_science

[abdullahkhalids]

> You have to take a topic you find interesting and read all possible related work in it

This is definitely the wrong way of going about a research project, and I have rarely seen anyone approach research projects this way. You should read two or at most three papers and build upon them. You only do a deep review of the research literature later in the project, once you have some results and you have started writing them down.

[bennettnate5]

The usual justification is that if you don't do at least a breadth-first literature review, you can get burned by missing a paper that already does substantially what you do in your work. I've heard of extreme case where it happens a week before someone goes to defend their dissertation!

[1718627440]

Excuse my naivety, but isn't it good if the same results get proofed in slightly different ways? This is effectively a replication, but instead of just the appliance of the experiments, you also replicate the thought process by having a slightly different approach.

[jacinda]

It would be good (especially with the replication crisis), but historically to earn a PhD, especially at a top-tier institution, the criteria is conducting original research that produces new knowledge or unique insights.

Replicating existing results doesn't meet that criteria so unknowingly repeating someone's work is an existential crisis for PhD students. It can mean that you worked for 4-6 years on something that the committee then can't/won't grant a doctorate for and effectively forcing you to start over.

Theoretically, your advisor is supposed to help prevent this as well by guiding you in good directions, but not all advisors are created equal.

[Apocryphon]

And here we once again see an example of misaligned incentives baked into another one of our most hallowed institutions.

[antonvs]

The problem is that what the “hallowed institutions” are trying to do is extremely ridiculous: turn the kind of work that scientific geniuses did into something that can be replicated by following a formula.

It’s as if a committee of middle managers got together and said, “how can we replicate and scale the work of people like Einstein?”

[Xirdus]

For the humanity? Yes, it's generally good. For that particular researcher's career? Not really. Who wants to pay for research into something that's already known?

[1718627440]

My imagination was leaning more into the educational side than the research side of university. I see how that wouldn't be appreciated by a patron, but when you get search grants, isn't the topic discussed before starting and paying for the research? Also that is kind of the point, why topics are cleared with the chair-holding professor, which is expected to be already experienced in the subject to know where the knowledge needs to be expanded.

[jcelerier]

Well, if you don't care about not being able to do your defense after 4 years of work because someone managed to do it just before you..

[ChromaticPanic]

Unless you're already an expert in the topic a literature search is literally step 1 since you have to check if your idea has already been done before.

[abdullahkhalids]

That's where your supervisor comes in. In most cases, they should be an expert in the field, and guide you towards a useful and novel problem.

Moreover, I am not suggesting you don't look at other papers at all. But google scholar and some quick skimming of abstracts and papers you find should suffice to check if someone has already done the work. If you start fully reading more than a handful of papers, your ideas are already locked in by what others have done, and it becomes way harder to produce something novel.