Re:Employment rates for STEM Ph.D.s are down or stagnant acr...
by erkkie on Monday July 28, 2014 @04:39AM
(#8095731)
I think saying specialization is necessary but not sufficient sums up the trends in many fields.
The barriers of entry to having information available are the lowest they've ever been and thus traditional models are being eaten by ad-hoc methods. And that is fine, requires reorientation though.
Depends on the field. Even in natural sciences, there are several research areas not related directly with experimentation.
I would say that, for a lot of areas, we have the bases covered, but what's needed are better tools to understand it.
Protein folding is one area. The physics are ok, what we don't know is how to make it work for several atoms at once.
Data transmission is another. The real changes behind 4G, 802.11N, etc, is not a better radio transmitter only, but better channel estimation, error correction and use of diversity.
"I also don't understand why your fourth point means that specialization is not necessary"
It is necessary, but not sufficient. If you only focus on one area but don't know how to interface with the necessary surroundings you won't get anywhere.
" so I think it's at least premature to conclude that you can develop the same level of expertise as an autodidact."
The application of new discoveries and techniques is important as well, and several companies and individuals are doing important work in this area. (Go, Rust, several machine learning libraries, etc)