Academia is very broken if even your thesis committee is A) not interested in reading your thesis and B) can't even be bothered to when it is ostensibly their job.

What exactly is the point of dedicating years of your life to create something exactly nobody is going to read?

The value of a PhD thesis is the personal intellectual growth you get from putting it together. The end product isn't really the point.

There's a lot to be said about publishing in academia being broken and how nearly all the value comes from 10% of publications, while the rest are garbage spewed out for reasons orthogonal to the advancement knowledge. However, IMHO, none of that really applies to PhD theses.

> The value of a PhD thesis is the personal intellectual growth you get from putting it together. The end product isn't really the point.

This definitely varies by field. For example, there are some branches of linguistics where the big, important new monographs that move the field forward are often PhD theses (though typically the defended diss manuscript will get some very light rewriting and polishing before it appears from a publisher). After that, a scholar's publications over his/her career might be less ambitious and focused more on minutiae.

What if you don't grow intellectually and just slap together a PhD thesis that no one reads?

Then you've benefited nothing beyond the paper and the letters.

It's really the "cheat yourself" problem, except we put some value on that paper and those letters.

It varies a lot by field, but in many (not all) scientific fields, a PhD thesis is largely a formality these days. Your publication record is what counts. The days where you could get a tenure track faculty position just on the strength of a PhD thesis are long gone.

Depends on the subfields. CS is by publication, number theory varies ("my students can find a stapler" to the dissertation has revolutionary result not published elsewhere)

CS can (but not frequently) have the revolutionary result you mention as well. A candidate Fully Homomorphic Encryption scheme was first detailed in Craig Gentry's thesis, for example. That being said, this is much less common than a

1. literal stapler thesis, or

2. cleaned up version of a stapler thesis (e.g. rewrite of several previous publications to give broader context etc)

Cryptography is closer to math than most CS disciplines institutionally.

that's broadly true, but there are some areas of CS that are at least as close (say at a minimum PL theory). it's also less math heavy than e.g. complexity theory (though that's admittedly smaller). It can also be less math-heavy than learning theory. This all depends on the type of cryptography as well, especially since it can depend on the region (american cryptography is more theoretical than european cryptography, for example).

that's how i understand it. it's a portfolio with front matter, back matter, the papers that got published with some connective tissue between them and maybe some discussion of the things that didn't work out and why.

Early work in any trade is mostly junk, and academia no exception.

But the process of creating that work, engaged throughought that process with those purported to be more practiced, is usually pretty good at seeding enough expertise and confidence that you might be able to proceed more independently and with real novelty, or might at least be prepared to share the trade with others new to it.

That's the point of those years, and so it's more than a little ironic that AI is being used to undermine a practicing expert while simultaneously eroding the traditional process for becoming one by making it so easy to just generate slop and engage with hallucinations than to actually practice writing deep work or engaging with primary sources.

The whole idea of a PhD is acknowledging that a person has made a meaningful contribution.

It is not "early work" but the end of early work. The masterpiece: the piece of work that proves a subject has mastered their craft.

If you're still producing junk you haven't earned your PhD.

I guess I disagree with both of you.

You probably have plenty of novel ideas in early career, but you almost certainly lack the experience and the basic understanding of your field to develop them properly. Most people have exhausted their own ideas by mid-career. But that that point, they should have the skills and the experience to work on the ideas they come across.

(Looking back at my PhD, it's quite amusing how little did I understand. On the other hand, many of the choices I intuitively made turned out to have some value. But in some cases, understanding that properly took a decade of work by other people.)

Your PhD work is an apprenticeship, after which you are expected to work as a journeyman. The masterpiece that qualifies you for independent work as a tenured professor is often called habilitation. Many academic cultures don't have those, because the expectations are so situational that they don't want to formalize them.

That's how it was maybe 100 years ago. Now PhD is just another bit of school work. Sometimes people manage to do really great PhD work, but most of the time it's pretty mediocre or straight garbage.

In some ways, people doing research now have it way more difficult than people of the past. They have hundreds of years worth of research to study before they are on top of things and making an original contribution that stands out among the huge amount of research that already exists is really hard. If we want to keep PhD as a proof of meaningful work, then we ought to lengthen the graduate studies considerably. How about a 10 year PhD program, at the end of which you can really say you have mastered the field?

Well that's the ideal yes, but it's not the reality.

That’s how people outside academia see PhDs. Inside academia, everyone has a PhD and it doesn’t really mean very much. It can take decades to really become an expert in a field, and a PhD program usually lasts around 5 years (in the US).

>everyone has a PhD and it doesn’t really mean very much

Then academia is broken and the universities that operate like this should be dismantled (not to mention the accreditation organizations)

What's actually happening is people chasing items on a CV instead of actual knowledge is rotting the core of universities.

I believe the person was saying that in academia, literally everyone has a PhD, by definition since it's a requirement for the job, so the simple act of having it means nothing in the context of all of the other people that have it. It of course means a great deal since it's what let's you in to the room in the first place. Imagine interviewing 50 people, every single one of whom have an internship on their resume. What they did during their internship matters of course, but the simple act of having had one doesn't differentiate (matter).

I find it rich how fast you are to jump to destroying the entirety of academia in one stroke. It's quite easy to say things we don't understand should not exist, of course I'm guilty of this myself from time to time. Have you done education beyond the bachelor's degree? It's a very different world.

I think they mean that a phd doesn't mean much relatively speaking, since everyone around has one so it's less impressive and you're less of an expert when everyone around you is knowledgeable in the same domain.

Who does or doesn't have a PhD isn't terribly important in the scheme of things. Inside academia, the job market is highly competitive, and no-one is getting a job just on the strength of a cookie-cutter PhD thesis. Outside academia, it mostly makes no difference to anything whether you have a PhD or not.

If we apply your criteria, I'm not sure if any universities would be left.

Most PhD have a few papers before finishing the dissertation. Many times the dissertation is made of a few paper by the author glued together. The papers usually chain, so it's instead of

introduction1 -> main1 -> conclussion1

introduction2 -> main2 -> conclussion2

introduction3 -> main3 -> conclussion3

the thesis is something like

long introduction -> easy example -> main1 -> main2 -> main3 -> main of preprint -> long conclussion

Thesis by publication is only one way, and not even the most common in many fields. I can't access the actual text of this thesis, but the abstract sounds more like a monograph and I don't see any author publications before the thesis that would lead me to think otherwise.

What gus_massa was describing doesn't sound like thesis by publication. TBP usually uses the papers verbatim with some added material to make them cohesive to the overall thesis argument. What they described is more like repurposing existing material in a thesis format, which is indeed very common.

Haven written a Master's dissertation, I think your typo of conclussion for conclusion (suggesting a head injury is needed to slog through it) is perfect.

Reproducing elitist social structure?

Academia is very broken. That's it actually.

It's a long time that the incentive and job structure make universities a very toxic environment. Professors are basically running a 40 years race (about from bachelor or master graduation to retirement). It is still amazing that some good comes out of it.

It's very broken, and I'm not sure if it's possible to write everything original given that you're expected to repeat 2/3rds of past research to fill pages when you write your thesis. For a master thesis that was at least 100 pages. For a PhD nowadays each one of those is published as a book. At least it was like that in my engineering department.

For both me (physics) and my wife (history), in the American system, both at strong universities, most of our committee members read most of of our dissertations. For her, in a field where thesis by publication is not standard (your thesis is typically revised into your first book), her committee at the defense focused on questions and comments based on the committee's reading of the thesis more than on the actual defense presentation, which is apparently also normal in the field. In part, I expect that's because the thesis is expected to be built into something important post-PhD, and comments are seen as helpful in that process.

For me, it wasn't quite so apparent at the defense, and I don't know that all members read the final thesis carefully, but most of them had already seen me publish or present most of the research previously, often multiple times. I also know that some (and not just my advisor) did read the final thesis very closely. My thesis was only partially thesis by publication, however, which may have influenced this; it does now have a fair number of citations in its own right, which is somewhat unusual for the theses in the field, and potentially seen as awkward (it means there's significant work in the thesis that I never published elsewhere).

As a caveat, the American system (before current crises) does feel like it can have a two-tier system of PhD students who are expected to remain in academia (we both were) and ones who are not, even at strong universities. Expectations, and attention given, can vary considerably. The American system also tends to have larger and more closely involved committees than, for example, the UK/Irish system.

However, for the form of plagiarism discussed here: if someone had sentences from papers I published years ago interspersed in their work, and they weren't particularly notable sentences, I'm not confident I would notice. Depending on citations and what the sentences were, I'm not even sure I'd mind much, for example, if they were essentially copying a model definition.

It's a philosophy thesis, and unlike STEM or soft sciences (history, linguistics...), they are very light on fact which make them very dry. The will read the introduction, conclusion (which can have more words than a physic thesis), the main thesis that interest them the most, and count on their collegue to read the other main thesis.

Also, very dry, so it's easy to loose focus, and you can read a rephrasing of your own thesis as a "he has the same ideas" (also, if you do that, please reference the author?)

I find a few of the example damning (hje should totally have added a citation and build his argument around it). Most less so, and i understand that a reader could not catch them.

What you create is the research along the way, which usually gets published. The dissertation is just a document that examiners read.

A lot of "plagiarism" is not plagiarism. Feed stuff you wrote into those tools and it will call you a plagiarist every day because you wrote something similar to the person you learned it from.

I don't know about this case, but a lot of these kinds of cases truly are witch-hunts. It's not at all like the reproducibility crisis and faked data and images.

The very few cases that result in sanctions are generally horrendously flagrant.

With another professor I caught a flagrant case in a student thesis and we faced attacks from the university administration because the student had a stellar transcript (also not the positive signal some might think). Punishment was almost inexistent.

It's difficult for me to imagine what it would take to get a doctoral thesis revoked.

> It's difficult for me to imagine what it would take to get a doctoral thesis revoked.

Personal grudges. Academia is full of them.

You need more than that. No university is going to revoke anything without very good reasons, they have too much to lose. Their first action is always to try to bury the case.

See Harvard, Stanford, et.al.

Different leadership.

If some in your experience erred on the side of leniency, then it stands to reason that others might err just as egregiously in the opposite direction.

In fact, your anecdote suggests erring is the norm. We should thus expect punishments to be inappropriate in one direction or another. An appropriate punishment seems rather unlikely.

No, that doesn't stand to reason at all.

I too enjoy creating bell curves from a single datum.

The anecdote is meant to illustrate not to substitute a full data set.

Universities and other similar large institutions usually err systematically in one direction - that which protects the institution.

>It's difficult for me to imagine what it would take to get a doctoral thesis revoked.

No respect for the plagiarist physicist, but an easy way to control what media representatives of scientific disciplines get to say publically, is to start out with what amounts to "academic compromat" (scientific fraud, plagiarism, ...).

Did this physicist / media star recently say something controversial?

I mean why did the system let him pass as a physicist, and why did it let him rise the media rank?

> Did this physicist / media star recently say something controversial?

Not really. This is the consequence of an investigation by some journalists about a decade ago, and an audit that lasted for almost 2 years.

> I mean why did the system let him pass as a physicist, and why did it let him rise the media rank?

He is a smooth talker and by all accounts good at vulgarisation. He does well in interviews and is easy to deal with for journalists. There’s always been controversies but media thrive on those.

> I don't know about this case,

They compiled a document with the source material side-by-side https://v42.arretsurimages.net/fichiers/documents/2024-08-02...

This goes well beyond accidentally triggering a plagiarism detector.

> Feed stuff you wrote into those tools and it will call you a plagiarist every day because you wrote something similar to the person you learned it from.

The examples in the article use very distinctive wording. One or two occurrences would be forgivable as coincidence or inspiration. An entire document full of examples points to something else.

It seems like that should be the case yet when I listen to any same group of people over a period of time, I often find that those unfamiliar with a concept or solution on day 1 end up repeating it as if it was their own a few weeks later. When I was younger I tended to assume there was an element of intentional theft, but I'm not sure it's natural and a prerequisite to educational acquisition that people can categorize original origin of ideas that may have bounced around them for a long time before they understood their significance.

The plagiarism in the document was more significant than that.

This wasn't a couple cases of the same words or word pairs being used.

Sure a common answer would be intentionally copying in the same sessions, less likely is intentionally copying via eidetic memory.. But how much of a spectrum could there be in the middle for memory that would result in repeating a "plagiarism" form months later, etc?

People say how obvious the parlor trick is when they look at a small model LLMs. Well, I've seen the same parlor trick in students who get good grades but seem weak at thought from fundamentals. It seems quite possible to me that in some examples we are now going after them because the environment changed. At much earlier points we did actually value the people who could recite even if somewhat brokenly because we lacked random order recital tools.

You’re wrong; academia has never accepted plagiarism of this magnitude. Enforcement is never perfect, but a doctorate is not an undergrad repeating verbally, it is not thoughtless writing. It’s a doctorate thesis for crying out loud, it has to be novel!

Crediting the origin of the idea is the whole point of citing sources. Learning something from someone doesn't mean the idea is yours now. It means that when you repeat that idea, you should cite the original source of the idea.

This is just how scholarship works. It's not needed in the kind of day to day most of us do, but when you're writing a thesis for a PhD, this stuff matters. You're making the argument that you're expanding the totality of human knowledge with your dissertation, and that requires strict source citing to separate your original scholarship from the sources that influenced it.

What are these tools? I often write about stuff on my blog and I know a lot of what I’m writing or thinking about are ideas someone else has come up with (and that I’ve read but not remembered or not read and come up with a poor version of) but bog standard LLM DeepResearch never picks up the things I want.

I imagine any tool that’s good at plagiarism detection would also kill it at this kind of literature research.

An example of something where it worked like this is that I had some ideas around how tribes evolve and so on and wrote them as I could think of them and ChatGPT was able to find that Darwin’s Cathedral had a far better synthesis of various much more rigorous takes on the subject.

> I often write about stuff on my blog and I know a lot of what I’m writing or thinking about are ideas someone else has come up with

These tools compare words, not idea. They would not detect someone copying concepts but coming up with their own words. I guess some specially fine-tuned LLMs could work but I am not aware of a company actually licensing those for plagiarism detection.

Having seen plagiarism first hand, sometimes it exceedingly blatant. Like copying from a PDF that was produced via LaTeX — since LaTeX hyphenates words to split them across lines, if you end up keep-ing the hyphenation in, the te-xt reads like this.

I've seen way worse: a Word document submission that preserved the style and fonts of the sources the plagiarer stole from. As in, font "Calibri 14" only appeared in paragraphs nicked from a source entirely written in that font - and the adjoining paragraphs weren't even size 14!!!

Sadly, this idiot won an award before I was able to see their work, so they had the confusion of receiving an award, and THEN being told they were being spanked for unacceptable behavior. Since they were too stupid to hide the most blatant clues, they had a hard time comprehending this duality.

> I don't know about this case, but a lot of these kinds of cases truly are witch-hunts.

There have been a lot of plagiarism accusation in his books already. In this case there was an audit and the conclusions are clear. Whole paragraphs copied and pasted word for word without attribution, about a third of the document overall. If anything, this should have happened about 15 years ago.

> He also uses this to say it's unfair to punish him now with tools that didn't exist when he did the crime, which I find quite rich.

What crime?

“Creepy old man says police should release him on account of Scooby Doo not existing at the time he decided to dress up as a ghost”