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)
That's just how I read this:
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.
I didn't feel like you were being arrogant at all, believe it or not. I just thought it was a neat claim and was interested in learning more.
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.
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.