[colechristensen]

Academia is very broken if even your thesis committee is A) not interested in reading your thesis and B) can't even be bothered to when it is ostensibly their job.

What exactly is the point of dedicating years of your life to create something exactly nobody is going to read?

[gus_massa]

Most PhD have a few papers before finishing the dissertation. Many times the dissertation is made of a few paper by the author glued together. The papers usually chain, so it's instead of

introduction1 -> main1 -> conclussion1

introduction2 -> main2 -> conclussion2

introduction3 -> main3 -> conclussion3

the thesis is something like

long introduction -> easy example -> main1 -> main2 -> main3 -> main of preprint -> long conclussion

[AlotOfReading]

Thesis by publication is only one way, and not even the most common in many fields. I can't access the actual text of this thesis, but the abstract sounds more like a monograph and I don't see any author publications before the thesis that would lead me to think otherwise.

[maleldil]

What gus_massa was describing doesn't sound like thesis by publication. TBP usually uses the papers verbatim with some added material to make them cohesive to the overall thesis argument. What they described is more like repurposing existing material in a thesis format, which is indeed very common.

[IAmBroom]

Haven written a Master's dissertation, I think your typo of conclussion for conclusion (suggesting a head injury is needed to slog through it) is perfect.

[cge]

For both me (physics) and my wife (history), in the American system, both at strong universities, most of our committee members read most of of our dissertations. For her, in a field where thesis by publication is not standard (your thesis is typically revised into your first book), her committee at the defense focused on questions and comments based on the committee's reading of the thesis more than on the actual defense presentation, which is apparently also normal in the field. In part, I expect that's because the thesis is expected to be built into something important post-PhD, and comments are seen as helpful in that process.

For me, it wasn't quite so apparent at the defense, and I don't know that all members read the final thesis carefully, but most of them had already seen me publish or present most of the research previously, often multiple times. I also know that some (and not just my advisor) did read the final thesis very closely. My thesis was only partially thesis by publication, however, which may have influenced this; it does now have a fair number of citations in its own right, which is somewhat unusual for the theses in the field, and potentially seen as awkward (it means there's significant work in the thesis that I never published elsewhere).

As a caveat, the American system (before current crises) does feel like it can have a two-tier system of PhD students who are expected to remain in academia (we both were) and ones who are not, even at strong universities. Expectations, and attention given, can vary considerably. The American system also tends to have larger and more closely involved committees than, for example, the UK/Irish system.

However, for the form of plagiarism discussed here: if someone had sentences from papers I published years ago interspersed in their work, and they weren't particularly notable sentences, I'm not confident I would notice. Depending on citations and what the sentences were, I'm not even sure I'd mind much, for example, if they were essentially copying a model definition.

[complex_pi]

Academia is very broken. That's it actually.

It's a long time that the incentive and job structure make universities a very toxic environment. Professors are basically running a 40 years race (about from bachelor or master graduation to retirement). It is still amazing that some good comes out of it.

[rjzzleep]

It's very broken, and I'm not sure if it's possible to write everything original given that you're expected to repeat 2/3rds of past research to fill pages when you write your thesis. For a master thesis that was at least 100 pages. For a PhD nowadays each one of those is published as a book. At least it was like that in my engineering department.

[orwin]

It's a philosophy thesis, and unlike STEM or soft sciences (history, linguistics...), they are very light on fact which make them very dry. The will read the introduction, conclusion (which can have more words than a physic thesis), the main thesis that interest them the most, and count on their collegue to read the other main thesis.

Also, very dry, so it's easy to loose focus, and you can read a rephrasing of your own thesis as a "he has the same ideas" (also, if you do that, please reference the author?)

I find a few of the example damning (hje should totally have added a citation and build his argument around it). Most less so, and i understand that a reader could not catch them.

[foldr]

It varies a lot by field, but in many (not all) scientific fields, a PhD thesis is largely a formality these days. Your publication record is what counts. The days where you could get a tenure track faculty position just on the strength of a PhD thesis are long gone.

[wbl]

Depends on the subfields. CS is by publication, number theory varies ("my students can find a stapler" to the dissertation has revolutionary result not published elsewhere)

[mswphd]

CS can (but not frequently) have the revolutionary result you mention as well. A candidate Fully Homomorphic Encryption scheme was first detailed in Craig Gentry's thesis, for example. That being said, this is much less common than a

1. literal stapler thesis, or

2. cleaned up version of a stapler thesis (e.g. rewrite of several previous publications to give broader context etc)

[wbl]

Cryptography is closer to math than most CS disciplines institutionally.

[mswphd]

that's broadly true, but there are some areas of CS that are at least as close (say at a minimum PL theory). it's also less math heavy than e.g. complexity theory (though that's admittedly smaller). It can also be less math-heavy than learning theory. This all depends on the type of cryptography as well, especially since it can depend on the region (american cryptography is more theoretical than european cryptography, for example).

[a-dub]

that's how i understand it. it's a portfolio with front matter, back matter, the papers that got published with some connective tissue between them and maybe some discussion of the things that didn't work out and why.

[maleldil]

What you create is the research along the way, which usually gets published. The dissertation is just a document that examiners read.

[swatcoder]

Early work in any trade is mostly junk, and academia no exception.

But the process of creating that work, engaged throughought that process with those purported to be more practiced, is usually pretty good at seeding enough expertise and confidence that you might be able to proceed more independently and with real novelty, or might at least be prepared to share the trade with others new to it.

That's the point of those years, and so it's more than a little ironic that AI is being used to undermine a practicing expert while simultaneously eroding the traditional process for becoming one by making it so easy to just generate slop and engage with hallucinations than to actually practice writing deep work or engaging with primary sources.

[colechristensen]

The whole idea of a PhD is acknowledging that a person has made a meaningful contribution.

It is not "early work" but the end of early work. The masterpiece: the piece of work that proves a subject has mastered their craft.

If you're still producing junk you haven't earned your PhD.

[jltsiren]

I guess I disagree with both of you.

You probably have plenty of novel ideas in early career, but you almost certainly lack the experience and the basic understanding of your field to develop them properly. Most people have exhausted their own ideas by mid-career. But that that point, they should have the skills and the experience to work on the ideas they come across.

(Looking back at my PhD, it's quite amusing how little did I understand. On the other hand, many of the choices I intuitively made turned out to have some value. But in some cases, understanding that properly took a decade of work by other people.)

Your PhD work is an apprenticeship, after which you are expected to work as a journeyman. The masterpiece that qualifies you for independent work as a tenured professor is often called habilitation. Many academic cultures don't have those, because the expectations are so situational that they don't want to formalize them.

[foldr]

That’s how people outside academia see PhDs. Inside academia, everyone has a PhD and it doesn’t really mean very much. It can take decades to really become an expert in a field, and a PhD program usually lasts around 5 years (in the US).

[colechristensen]

>everyone has a PhD and it doesn’t really mean very much

Then academia is broken and the universities that operate like this should be dismantled (not to mention the accreditation organizations)

What's actually happening is people chasing items on a CV instead of actual knowledge is rotting the core of universities.

[wholinator2]

I believe the person was saying that in academia, literally everyone has a PhD, by definition since it's a requirement for the job, so the simple act of having it means nothing in the context of all of the other people that have it. It of course means a great deal since it's what let's you in to the room in the first place. Imagine interviewing 50 people, every single one of whom have an internship on their resume. What they did during their internship matters of course, but the simple act of having had one doesn't differentiate (matter).

I find it rich how fast you are to jump to destroying the entirety of academia in one stroke. It's quite easy to say things we don't understand should not exist, of course I'm guilty of this myself from time to time. Have you done education beyond the bachelor's degree? It's a very different world.

[foldr]

Who does or doesn't have a PhD isn't terribly important in the scheme of things. Inside academia, the job market is highly competitive, and no-one is getting a job just on the strength of a cookie-cutter PhD thesis. Outside academia, it mostly makes no difference to anything whether you have a PhD or not.

If we apply your criteria, I'm not sure if any universities would be left.

[BDPW]

I think they mean that a phd doesn't mean much relatively speaking, since everyone around has one so it's less impressive and you're less of an expert when everyone around you is knowledgeable in the same domain.

[vjk800]

That's how it was maybe 100 years ago. Now PhD is just another bit of school work. Sometimes people manage to do really great PhD work, but most of the time it's pretty mediocre or straight garbage.

In some ways, people doing research now have it way more difficult than people of the past. They have hundreds of years worth of research to study before they are on top of things and making an original contribution that stands out among the huge amount of research that already exists is really hard. If we want to keep PhD as a proof of meaningful work, then we ought to lengthen the graduate studies considerably. How about a 10 year PhD program, at the end of which you can really say you have mastered the field?

[breezybottom]

Well that's the ideal yes, but it's not the reality.

[Calavar]

The value of a PhD thesis is the personal intellectual growth you get from putting it together. The end product isn't really the point.

There's a lot to be said about publishing in academia being broken and how nearly all the value comes from 10% of publications, while the rest are garbage spewed out for reasons orthogonal to the advancement knowledge. However, IMHO, none of that really applies to PhD theses.

[TFNA]

> The value of a PhD thesis is the personal intellectual growth you get from putting it together. The end product isn't really the point.

This definitely varies by field. For example, there are some branches of linguistics where the big, important new monographs that move the field forward are often PhD theses (though typically the defended diss manuscript will get some very light rewriting and polishing before it appears from a publisher). After that, a scholar's publications over his/her career might be less ambitious and focused more on minutiae.

[gowld]

What if you don't grow intellectually and just slap together a PhD thesis that no one reads?

[bombcar]

Then you've benefited nothing beyond the paper and the letters.

It's really the "cheat yourself" problem, except we put some value on that paper and those letters.

[psychoslave]

Reproducing elitist social structure?