Of course, with all the Ph.D.s creating little bumps all over the place, various people have to come along and fill in the gaps between the bumps. They don't get enough credit.

Ah yes, the underpaid overworked summer students.

or

s/summer students/postdocs/g

or

s/summer students/full-time research staff/g

That is what I love about HN - Comments are dissected in a constructive manner.

Plenty of people think they're at the boundary and pushing but are actually stuck at a (close in) local maxima of crackpottery.

The real geniuses never even see a boundary. They just do their thing and let everyone else put labels on it later.

That is true in many cases in Academia as well.

I'll be sending this to anyone who asks what a PhD is really like.

Also why Ph.D is not for me. Too low bang/buck factor. I'd rather know a little about a lot than everything about a little. But, I'm very glad others are the opposite.

You can then view the work of a professor as a tension between adding shallow bumps to the perimeter and increasing the depth in the center.

If it paid the bills I'd become a Computer historian. But the tech isn't old enough yet to be worth stuying ;p

If you ever find a way to pay the bills this way, let me know. There's a lot of history in there.

Except perhaps that only the successful startups get to make that dent.

But there is a good list at cracked (of all things) http://www.cracked.com/article_18533_the-6-most-important-th... although that is a list of things we forgot and subsequently rediscovered. There is also a list of important books that we have lost, but I can't seem to find it.

What contributions have you made to the sum-total of human knowledge? I'm really interested.

My cat has a skin blemish on its paw. Does documenting this fact add to the sum total of human knowledge? Technically yes, but it's of no interest to anyone.

But there's an even continuum between this and academic papers of great import - what if I figure out the best strategy to defend against a Zerg rush and post it on a forum? What if I figure out a really cool new programming technique and blog about it? What if I write an academic paper on obscure characteristics of hyper-complex non-euclidian non-reimannian Q-manifolds in P-time that has no ramifications for anything and is quickly forgotten? But then what if a tremendously important application is discovered 50 years later?

Especially with the internet, what qualifies as human knowledge becomes completely blurred. Previously the qualification was probably getting published, but now anyone can make information available to anyone else and the rest of posterity.

I've written and given away tons of code. I not-too-rarely meet new people and find out that they've been using code that I've written in their production environments.

I've also given away as much higher level information as I can in my blog posts, mailing list contributions, and on places like StackOverflow, here, reddit, etc...

I'm not by any stretch of the imagination suggesting there aren't large numbers of people smarter than I am, but I will say without hesitation that it's wrong to consider the only way to increase the sum total of human knowledge is to grant someone a Ph.D.

agreed, but i don't think anyone was arguing this point, though

the contrapositive of:

PhD --> novel contribution to human knowledge

is certainly not:

!(PhD) --> !(novel contribution to human knowledge)

    You push at the boundary for a few years
    Until one day, the boundary gives way
    And, that dent you've made is called a Ph.D.

What's amazing to me about the PhD (and no, I don't think only the PhD) is that usually, when you're done with your research, you've actually learned something that no one anywhere has ever known before.

I imagine many of us have things like that, most of it being incredibly trivial stuff (like the cat's paw example above). It's incredibly cool to think about learning something utterly novel in an area like biology or math or physics.

Thanks for the response. I honestly meant no ill will, only curious.

Ph.D's are let into the ether to be consumed and used for the world. Some more efficiently than others, but nonetheless, their research undoubtedly allows for a better world than your own, internal "a-ha" moments.

http://steveblank.com/2010/07/26/you-cant-take-it-with-you/