Comment by jacinda
21 hours ago
It would be good (especially with the replication crisis), but historically to earn a PhD, especially at a top-tier institution, the criteria is conducting original research that produces new knowledge or unique insights.
Replicating existing results doesn't meet that criteria so unknowingly repeating someone's work is an existential crisis for PhD students. It can mean that you worked for 4-6 years on something that the committee then can't/won't grant a doctorate for and effectively forcing you to start over.
Theoretically, your advisor is supposed to help prevent this as well by guiding you in good directions, but not all advisors are created equal.
And here we once again see an example of misaligned incentives baked into another one of our most hallowed institutions.
The problem is that what the “hallowed institutions” are trying to do is extremely ridiculous: turn the kind of work that scientific geniuses did into something that can be replicated by following a formula.
It’s as if a committee of middle managers got together and said, “how can we replicate and scale the work of people like Einstein?”
> The problem is that what the “hallowed institutions” are trying to do is extremely ridiculous: turn the kind of work that scientific geniuses did into something that can be replicated by following a formula.
> It’s as if a committee of middle managers got together and said, “how can we replicate and scale the work of people like Einstein?”
Or are they trying to require enough rigor and discipline so that out of 100,000 people who want to be the next Einstein, the process washes out the 99,000 who aren't willing or able to do more than throw out half-baked 'creative' ideas and expect the world to pick them up and run with them.
There's only finite attention and money for funding research, so you gotta do SOMETHING to filter out the larpers who want to take it and faff around.
I think at this point the system has eaten its own tail a bit, but there's good reason to require some level of "show me" before getting given the money to run your own research.