People can make dents in the outer shell of human knowledge without having PhDs though. As in to discover something new and revolutionary, plenty of great scientists have and likely many more will continue to.
Matt Might, a professor in Computer Science at the University of Utah, created The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D. to explain what a Ph.D. is to new and aspiring graduate students.
Frustrating to say the least. I feel my PhD accelerated learning in all directions. Not from the program content itself, but the skills involved in the ingestion of high volumes of dense information. This idea that the borders of my world don’t extend past some yadda yadda about some tiny subclass of a field is some silly goosery.
Can those “skills involved” be learned elsewhere? Sure, this is just the path I took. Can phDoctors be single minded or general idiots? Sure, I’m an idiot. Do we need some single minded people? Sure, amazing things can be accomplished by singular focus.
But it isn’t a mandatory condition or experience of a floppy hat assed (sword in some countries) recipient of this degree.
I’ve been making six figures while getting my PhD. There are plenty of opportunities to get your PhD funded if you are a US citizen. There are plenty more valid places to poke fun at pursuing a PhD but it is very common to have funding and thus no debt.
Like the guy who found this somehow important new shape not to long ago? I don’t think he has a PhD. But he did contribute. Not saying that it’s easy though.
Presumably you could meet the boundary with “a dollah fifty in late fees at the public library” and find a way to push through from there. You’d have to find a way to publish or share your new knowledge. Studying at uni gives you access to experts in their own thing that likely have knowledge that could help you with your thing as well as a system designed to churn out these papers when you eventually find your thing.
Every day people discover new things but it takes attention, effort, and will to PROVE it’s a new thing and more yet to share that with the world. Too bad you can’t get an honorary PhD for doing that, at least not reliably.
It’s funny but you see the same thing in sports, or I see it specifically in hockey. Phenom kid gets drafted and at 18 has the social skills of the hockey puck he’s playing with. By the time he’s 36 he’s not the player he once was but is a more well rounded individual with age and experience. When you focus all your energy to become the best at something, like a PhD, athlete, musician, whatever, you sacrifice some things along the way for sure.
When u look at most people I feel like the trending alternative at 18-50 y is personality of a hockey puck and also skills of a hockey puck, with the reasoning ability of the hockey puck.
That’s not universally true. I know several people with PhD who have encyclopedic knowledge completely outside their specialisation. Some people are just super intelligent, talented and have enormous memory. The world is not fair.
The ratio is off. You learn a lot more from high school and bachelor’s degree and you learn way less with your master. PhD is just expanding a little bit more on master.
Common knowledge would be more appropriate. It is known by many people, but it is not basic as in obvious. It took a long time to know what we learn in a very “basic” high school biology course.
And if you actually remember half of what you learned in that course a decade later, people ask things like, “where do you learn this shit?”
The visual is more about highlighting specialization and its distance from the limit of human knowledge. You often can’t represent every aspect of a complex subject at the same time on a single visual. Kinda like how you can’t represent the solar system distances and planet sizes to scale on a single page, you have to pick one.
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