
A ‘Rebel’ Without a Ph.D - digital55
https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140326-a-rebel-without-a-ph-d/
======
noname123
Really good read. Would love to hear some stories from other HN folks who have
"escaped" from or "rebelled" against academia but are still pursuing academic
interests...

Me personally, after deciding not to pursue a Masters degree in
Bioinformatics, I realized that working in IT is also a (more lucrative but
just as empty) sham. I've been focusing my time for the past year on learning
new computational modeling on side projects, such as 1) contributing to
QuantLib, open-source finance library with new option volatility surface
curves, 2) parsing through PLoS Computational Biology papers and feeding any
supplementary data from authors/research group to visualizations/statistics
libraries and open lab notebooks wiki's; and verifying whether their
assertions are truly statistically significant.

As the author noted, it is very hard to do the real research in academia
unless you have a union-card of PhD. However working in industry even R&D,
unless you have a PhD or are very lucky gets you most of the suckered into
"technician" and mundane CRUD work. Not to mention the financial realities of
having a family and setting down later in life vs. the idealistic dream of
monastic academic research when you're younger.

What have you guys done to balance the two? Do you work on side projects while
collecting the paycheck? Or do you work in R&D division or a research
institute that allows you to take on novel research work? Or do you finance
your research on your own or solicit grants/funding from other people (like
David E. Shaw, Kickstarter or a "Hackerspace" that survives on membership
fees)?

~~~
LordHumungous
I quit a PhD program in systems biology a few years back to become a
programmer and now I contribute to an open source science project in systems
biology in my free time. I feel like I am contributing far more to science now
than I ever did as a grad student. After spending a couple of years in
industry, I (undeservedly) feel like an engineering god working on this
project. It's not that scientists aren't smart, it's that they haven't worked
in a place where good engineering practices are vital, rather they have worked
in the academic world where you typically hack together a bunch code that
barely works, write a paper, and call it a day. Today science is at a point
where many, if not most questions are answered with computers, and IMO there
is a _huge_ need for quality engineers to produce that software.

~~~
tdaltonc
The challenge is finding a fair way to compensate talented engineers. Many
might do it for free under a "code for science" campaign. But that would
require a lot of scientist to realize and then admit how deeply incompetent
they are at programing.

~~~
Fomite
I know very few scientists who are terribly pleased with their coding skills,
and many who actively admit they're not great coders.

The problem is you can't rely on a "code for science" campaign. A research
study isn't something done in a weekend Hackathon, though they are
occasionally helpful. What happens if, 2 years into your 5 year study, your
helpful volunteers, leaving you with an incomplete code base beyond your
skills to maintain or extend?

~~~
Blahah
I know of two ways currently being tried to address this.

The first is to have scientists break their problems down into chunks that can
be performed by volunteers but which aren't completely beyond the ability of
the scientist to manage the resultant code. This is doable for much of physics
and computational biology, less so where a scientist isn't a programmer
themselves. We're taking this approach with
[http://solvers.io](http://solvers.io).

The second is to have the scientists mentored by programmers to help them
become better at it. This is the approach being taken by
[http://interdisciplinaryprogramming.com](http://interdisciplinaryprogramming.com).

In both cases, any particular volunteer dropping out is probably not a massive
blow. If a project is going to rely on a particular programmer long-term, they
probably need to find the funding to pay them.

~~~
minikomi
I would love to see smaller, more puzzle like challenges on solvers.io .. I
love the idea but a lot of the projects are kind of big!

~~~
Fomite
I'm really interested in solvers.io, and I've been trying to come up with
things like that. Small, bite-sized chunks that take just a bit of time, and
then everyone can go their separate way.

------
tdaltonc
>I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for
educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those
conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going to spend
their lives being professors. But it has become now a kind of union card that
you have to have in order to have a job, whether it’s being a professor or
other things, and it’s quite inappropriate for that. It forces people to waste
years and years of their lives sort of pretending to do research for which
they’re not at all well-suited. In the end, they have this piece of paper
which says they’re qualified, but it really doesn’t mean anything. The Ph.D.
takes far too long and discourages women from becoming scientists, which I
consider a great tragedy. So I have opposed it all my life without any success
at all.

I don't think that I would have believed this until I got into graduate school
but it's really true. A PhD doesn't mean anything. If I told you that someone
had a PhD, that wouldn't have told you anything else else about that person.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Wellll... it really is a union card. The fact that a person has a PhD from a
reputable institution does in fact set an absolute baseline: this person
managed to do _something_ that was sufficiently close to being science for
other scientists to call it science.

I would say that if we want to _think_ in terms of "union cards", we should
just scrap the PhD and pin "science ranks" to publication metrics, as the real
scientific job market already does. After all, what we _really_ need from a
scientific union card isn't to tell us how _good_ a scientist is (and it
doesn't do that), it's just to give us some baseline for separating real
scientists from crackpots and wannabes (of which there are far too many).

------
danieltillett
Having a PhD I would not say it is worthless, but I suspect if I had spent the
same amount of time just working I would have gained just as much. Of all the
problems science faces the 'need' for a PhD to join the science 'union' is
pretty low down - things like pervese incentives and rewarding academic
gamesmanship over quality are much more of a problem.

~~~
thearn4
It probably isn't necessary in the strictest sense of the word, But I guess
that really depends on what it is that you want to get out of it. But the most
valuable part of my PhD were the few years that I spent getting regular face
time with subject matter experts, who walked me past the periphery of my
field, to the point where I am comfortable enough publishing my own peer
reviewed research.

You could read the literature and try to get far enough up to speed to publish
entirely yourself, but I guarantee that you will miss many subtleties if you
don't connect with folks in the field. Enough that you are face a lot of
hurdles trying to pass your work through peer review. The idea of doing that
alone seems twice as daunting as doing a PhD.

That said, I am neither teaching nor in academia (gov't at the moment). My
retrospective might be a bit different if I was trying to elbow my way into
tenure.

~~~
hueving
>I guarantee that you will miss many subtleties if you don't connect with
folks in the field. Enough that you are face a lot of hurdles trying to pass
your work through peer review.

This translates to, "you need to learn to speak the correct dialect of
bullshit to get into the club."

------
wuliwong
I have a Ph.D. in physics and now I'm a full stack web developer. :p While I
would not recommend my path to anyone, for me it happened to work out. I am
not claiming that it couldn't have worked out going a different route but I
was really challenged throughout graduate school and it help me to realize
some of my potential. I gained a good bit of confidence with regards to my
ability to learning complex things, solving extremely tedious and difficult
problems and generating my own interesting ideas.

All that said, I think pretty poorly of physics academia now. In retrospect,
it seems like a small, incestuous group of people consistently reminding
themselves that they are the smartest people in the world and are working on
only the most noble and difficult pursuits.

~~~
selimthegrim
I dropped out of a PhD program in chemistry taking a masters and have been
working as a full stack web developer and team lead. I've now been offered
admission to a physics PhD program and am at a quandary - I have publishable
research that would almost certainly get me a first author PRL (my presumptive
co-author is one of the editors of PRB) but I don't even know if I want to
throw away another 3-4 years of my life earning-potential wise.

~~~
aaren
It depends what motivates you and where you want to be in 4 years.

There are far easier ways to earn money in the long term than doing a PhD. A
PhD gives you 4 years* of relative freedom to build yourself intellectually
within some rough bounds (these bounds are dependent on your program and can
be quite tight though). You also get to hang out on campus with other PhDs
(ymmv!).

But, you could get similar freedom with even less bounds by working and saving
hard for the next 4 years and then doing what you want. It depends what
motivates you.

*depends where you are though. I'm UK.

------
shanemhansen
As someone who didn't obtain a PhD, I found this article pretty interesting.
However we can't all be Freeman Dyson. I think that credential inflation means
that the time is coming when more jobs will require a PhD, not less.

Of course it's remotely possible that our society will reject the PhD due to
rapidly rising educational costs, but I don't think that's going to happen.

~~~
jpmattia
> _Of course it 's remotely possible that our society will reject the PhD due
> to rapidly rising educational costs, but I don't think that's going to
> happen._

A sizeable fraction of folks in Science/Engineering do not pay tuition for
their PhDs, and receive a modest stipend for living expenses.

~~~
judk
That fraction is over 95%

------
eli_gottlieb
I would have to say that the problems in academic science go deeper than "PhD
union cards", but they're certainly rooted in the same academic-familial-
reproductive structure as the PhD issue.

Academia does a breadth-first heuristic search on possible research, slowly
converting the search space of potential ideas into published papers. If you
want to work in the research system, you get slotted into a specialty and an
education largely just according to what your grad-school and postdoc
supervisors already work on. Hence why I'm calling it a breadth-first search:
new scientists are almost literally additional nodes in a search tree.

The problem is the heuristic that governs where the tree is expanded (and how
quickly): publication numbers and grant funding (which is determined by
publication numbers). From the personal perspective there's also the sheer
coincidence of which research fields and which advisers you've _heard of at
all_ when you finish your BSc or MSc and apply to your postgraduate research
degree -- which is governed by grant funding and publication numbers.

Thing being... not only is a tree-shaped expansion structure generating
untenable job markets, but the expansion heuristic in question doesn't really
correspond to what we want out of scientific research. There are three main
reasons to prioritize one research proposal over another: we think it will be
technologically fruitful, we think it will be cheap or easy, and we think it
will advance knowledge. In short: technology, convenience, and _mystery_.
Grant funding and publication metrics, however, almost exclusively target
convenience, with technological applicability coming in second-place and the
fundamental scientific issue of _filling in our ignorance about Nature_ stuck
waaaay at the back of the bus.

------
noonespecial
_“We should try to introduce our children to science today as a rebellion
against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice.”_

There's nothing more I can say about, or add to this. Read it again instead.

------
sktrdie
I actually have a very different opinion about academia compared to the rest
of the comments. I've been working in industry for the past 8 years, since my
late teens. Now I'm searching a more research oriented life path because I'm
tired of working always for shit people need. It seems that knowledge has a
value on its own, and it's not always about pleasing the costumer. So I've
enrolled in a bachelor degree in computing at the open university which
hopefully will lead me to a place where I can work on things that truly
interest me but that don't always lend themselves to meeting someone's
requirements.

------
read
I wonder if there's a bigger trend here. What stood out for me was this
response:

    
    
      I look for interesting problems that I can solve. I
      don’t care whether they’re important or not, and so I’m 
      definitely not obsessed with solving some big mystery.
    

It suggests working on interesting problems isn't only rewarding but almost a
precondition for working on important problems. As if you should be actively
trying _not_ to pick important problems.

~~~
rwallace
That is something one would like to believe, but honestly I think it's only
true if one's taste for interesting problems happens to be very well tuned for
finding important problems. Dyson's is, but I think he's in a very small
minority.

~~~
read
If that's true, it suggests taste for interesting problems might be a
different kind of taste (is there a difference between taste for problems and
taste for solutions?) Either way it begs the question: how do you cultivate
taste for interesting problems?

From his Wikipedia page
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson)

 _His friend, the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, said: "A favorite word
of Freeman's about doing science and being creative is the word 'subversive'.
He feels it's rather important not only to be not orthodox, but to be
subversive, and he's done that all his life."_

~~~
rwallace
Maybe so, though I don't know how to cultivate taste for interesting problems
or even whether it's possible per se. All I ever managed to do was train
myself to explicitly focus on important problems.

~~~
read
Can I ask you how you trained yourself to do this? Is there a trick that helps
focus on important problems?

~~~
rwallace
I find the key is, using the metaphor of the tech tree, to distinguish between
branches (inventions which lead to other things) and leaves (which don't, at
least not in a relevant timescale) and - this is the hard part - to ruthlessly
apply the rule _only work on branches_.

It's easy to see that things like video games, artificial life and fart "apps"
are leaves and we shouldn't spend time working on them. It gets painful when
we apply the rules to things we value more highly. Astronomy, particle
physics, space flight, fusion power: these are all noble pursuits, at least
the first two or three were branches in the past, by rights they should all be
branches today. But they're not. They're leaves. That's the cold fact of the
matter, and the world has to be dealt with as it is, not as it should be.

------
epaladin
Any advice for applying for jobs that specify a PhD as a requirement, but for
which I'd be otherwise qualified? I'm in bioinformatics, and trying to
transition into a particular field. I completed a masters degree, and have
been working for a few years in a rather intense academic research lab. I
don't have any intention of being a professor, but would like to continue in
research- based on that, most people I've talked to have advised to skip the
PhD. However, more and more company jobs like the bioinformatics positions I'm
eyeing at Craig Venter's new Human Longevity Institute seem to be specifying
PhDs as a requirement. Any insight or suggestions?

~~~
haihaibye
Just apply, it can't hurt.

------
zafka
This article makes my day! I have read quite a bit about Feynman, and am now
reading his thicker work in my spare time. I really enjoy reading the wisdom
of folks with extremely good pattern matching abilities.

------
guscost
If I ever start thinking that it's too late to start learning new things and
working on new problems, this interview should set me straight. Wise words.

------
quarterwave
Another example of Dyson's ability to find mathematical connections: the link
between the zeros of the Riemann zeta function and random matrices.

[http://www.ias.edu/about/publications/ias-
letter/articles/20...](http://www.ias.edu/about/publications/ias-
letter/articles/2013-spring/primes-random-matrices)

------
andyjohnson0
_" He’s a computer expert, so everything he does is worked out just with
numbers, and so I have taken on as my next task to translate what he did into
equations"_

Just numbers.

------
Fando
Amazing, I love mathematics. I want to study it all my life.

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kimonos
Nice post! I had a great time reading.

------
midas007
Pedigree is for .......

