However, if you forget the job market, the argument the guy is making is absolutely spot on. There's a solid trend in academia that is "publish early, publish fast". Although one might argue that it actually makes sense (career-wise or whatever), it is intrinsic in such a system to penalise pursuing big, risky ideas. Considering that the PhD (and the few years after) are the most productive in a researcher's life, it is a shame that students are not actively encouraged to think bigger.
With an increasing number of researchers isn't that a great thing? If you publish your little incremental innovations then everyone can build on them. If you try to build your giant all-encompassing framework before you publish any of it, you'll have to do it all yourself (if it even amounts to anything).
Why? Because small incremental improvements cannot get published in high impact journals, and high impact journals are the currency to scientific prestige/grants/tenure.
Then someone (Newton, Darwin, Einstein) comes along and assembles a new framework based on new observations/theories that do a better job of explaining things. Eg the switch from creationism to evolution, or from newtonian physics to relativity.
Here are some more examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift#Examples_of_par...
I guess what I'm trying to say is that the incentives are strongly biased to what can be easily seen as a increment on what has been done before, and that this is biased against work that may draw on what has been done before but is presenting a fairly different view to what is currently accepted.
Could Darwin have presented his view as an incremental extension of some existing view? (I am aware there were existing theories of evolution, but there weren't any like Darwin's or Wallace's to be built upon).
Einstein didn't get funding, i.e. an academic position. He did his initial groundbreaking work while having a day job in a patent office. He published his four groundbreaking papers in 1905 and was offered a lecturer position only on 1908.
Tenure with reduced teaching responsibilities is the way big thinking gets funded these days.
EDIT: I would also argue that developments like the printing press and the world wide web would have been difficult to justify as incremental extensions of existing work.
I'm not saying these developments came from nowhere, nor that they didn't build on previous work. I'm specifically arguing against the idea that it's fruitful to just focus on work that would be seen as incremental improvements on existing work.
This could be normalized within fields, but in practice it's not. For example, the NIH K-awards have a fixed eligibility period, which seems to keep shrinking.
Source? I'm curious.
http://openaccessweek.org/profiles/blogs/age-amp-science-do-...
"A study in 2002 examined 50 Nobel prize winners from each of the three prizes for physics, chemistry and medicine. This study recorded the age of the scientists when they had done the work that was rewarded with the prize and found that the centre points for age were: physics, 34; chemistry, 37; medicine, 40 (Marchetti C, 2002.) A study published in 1993 investigated a similar data set and concluded that scientists tend to be the most productive in their mid-thirties (Stephan & Levan, 1993.) Finally, a 2008 study of 300 randomly selected bioscientists revealed that the most productive age was 36-40 (Falagas et al., 2008) based on the number of citations from their publications. These studies all indicate that a scientist's greatest potential for discovery is during their thirties"
If instead you measure productivity in number of articles published, this study (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF00142022) claims that productivity peaks at 45-49. However that number covers a wide variety of fields, not just science, and makes no attempt to account for the quality or significance of the work.
Incidentally I remember also reading [1] that in certain fields, in this case mathematics, most of the groundbreaking research comes from younger mathematicians. Great contributions to the field from people over 40 are extremely rare.
[1] Simon Singh, Fermat's Last theorem. Ok, not great source but still!
As long as the competition for stable positions will remain so fierce, and the criteria for which candidates are judged will remain so narrow, the problems are likely to be far more prosaic than those raised by analytical philosophers.
You're arguing that what happens to be the case now is how it should be.
Do you think this is the best way for it to be, and if so, why?
> We need some, but there aren't anywhere near enough big-thinking jobs
Ok. Perhaps we also need jobs for them?
[EDIT: what I mean is, perhaps it is in society's interest to divert some resources to creating more jobs for such people?]
And perhaps the research itself, that these big thinkers do for their PhDs, has important value for society?
The research itself could and should have value. But a PhD must go all the way to the bottom, in terms of detail. It's not a pop science book or a funding programme, which can delegate the details to someone else. Therefore, asking the PhD student to be a big thinker as well as taking care of the experimental details is just raising the bar -- it's not changing the focus, it's raising the bar. Fewer people will be able to start PhDs and fewer will be able to complete them. The article doesn't suggest that this has been recognised.
Instead, I suggest that a PhD is not a great vehicle for "big thinking", and instead serves as a training-ground for planning, executing and describing ordinary research. Maybe the big thinking should be done -- as it is currently -- by people who have already demonstrated that they can do all that very well.
> Maybe the big thinking should be done -- as it is currently -- by people who have already demonstrated that they can do all that very well.
I completely dispute this. I would bet that historically, the majority of "big thinking" has been done by people who are not already well established.
In fact, I think there's a fallacy that "big thinking" somehow comes from accumulated experience. I would argue that "big thinking" is actually a different kind of thinking, one that requires you to have that kind of thinking rather than a wealth of experience.
[EDIT: there seems to be empirical evidence that having a wealth of experience tends to prevent people from coming up with (good) "big ideas". And since this is Hacker News, think about this in terms of technology and startups. Is it usually older people or younger people who tend to come up with the game-changing tech developments?]
I agree with your points about the young and non-established being good bets for big thinking. But I think the PhD is an unsuitable vehicle, partly because it's not well-designed to handle failure (your analogy with startups is great and instructive on this point).
Yeah, man, jobs! It's all about jobs! Jobs jobs jobs! Steve Jobs! Jobs jobs!
How about this? The world needs big thinkers in ways other than their capacity as economic actors. Einstein worked at a patent office. The work he did there (for the patent office) was not his primary contribution to the world at that time.
1. Being smart isn't a product, and most people won't consider it a skill
2. Thinking big isn't a product, and most people won't consider it a skill
3. Thinking big is usually reserved for top level people, of which there are less than five
You know what they call the big thinker who is looking for a job with his shiny new PhD? Unemployed.
In technical fields (which is what this article is about)?
The ones who choose to stay in academia and are lucky enought to find a position are called "Professor".
The unlucky or disillusioned ones -- as well as the (majority) of PhDs who never even intended to go into academia at any point during thier studies -- are called, variously, "Engineer", "Analyst", "Consultant", etc. and typically start in the low six figures (and not even in the bay area / NYC). They take a marginal hit to their lifetime earnings, but in most cases make decent salaries and get to work on more interesting problems (obv. interesting is subjective).
> Unemployed.
The unemployment rate for STEM PhDs is ludicrously low (FYI: if you google this, be aware that the Slate article by Jordan Weissmann is IMO purposefully misleading. See Table 1 of http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf14310/ and compare to his graphs. E.g., his graph seems to indicate that the unemployment rate for CS PhDs was over around 15% in 2001, but the NSF tables makes it clear that the rate was 0.9%, which is even more than what most economists refer to as full employment. In fact, in CS, the increase for 0.9% to 2% is almost entirely attributable to there being a lot more retired CS phds now than 10 years ago (for rather obvious reasons). So the stats he's using to tell his story are, at very best, unintentionally but absurdly non-representative of the actual state of affairs. It's like asking someone the day after they quit their job if they've started their new job yet and, when they say "hell no, taking some time off to recharge", assuming they're unemployable and/or don't have something lined up.)
As for jobs jobs, I think you missed the point. If we lie to PhD candidates about career prospects and train them in things that have a negative effect on their careers, then the best people won't undertake research.
Perverse incentives is a great point.
We need some, but there aren't anywhere near enough big-thinking jobs for all these PhDs.
> The success of science and technology will always lead to new ethical dilemmas. How do you spot them and try to work with society before they become problems? A better appreciation of ethics is likely to address what has become an epidemic of retractions in the scientific literature.
All the recent retractions have nothing to do with scientists being unaware of ethical dilemmas raised by their work. They're to do with perverse incentives, p-hacking, and occasionally deliberate dishonesty.