“The people that are the most susceptible to the corporate bullshit tended to choose the worst solutions to those problems on a consistent basis,” Littrell said.
Hmmmmmmmm.
Well that goes some way partially to explaining why management at large corporations almost as a rule are uselessly incompetent.
Additionally: it confuses intelligence with learning. Having a PhD is a sign of the later, not of the former.
A PhD is when you know everything about one specific rock on the beach, is how I put it. You know exactly where it is, all of its properties, and can go to it any time. Outside of that one rock, maybe a slightly above-average person, but nothing special.
Yup, pretty much. Someone who learnt all the bits and bobs of that rock; but that doesn’t mean the person has strong cognitive capabilities, not even to solve tasks related to that rock.
Generally speaking a PhD requires producing original research. Which ass-tier PhDs are you referencing that only require learning?
The sort of PhD that lands you a job in “HR, accounting, marketing and finance”, of course!
…okay, I’m being cheeky with the above. But serious now: 90% of research is learning. And the other 10% don’t really require you to be specially intelligent, they require you to be specially stubborn and methodological.
PhD is really mostly a proxy for how rich or educated your parents were. And rich people always score higher on general intelligence because they are better educated due to money. Less than a 1/3 of PhD students are first-generation. Meaning 2/3 of them have parents who have advanced degrees.
I was a first gen PhD student. I was the only one in my cohort of 20 students who was. Everyone else had highly educated parents. I ended up quitting because the deck was so incredibly stacked against me, and my dream job/career was basically the lazy fall-back career of folks who had generations of education and money carrying them through life.
I mean that’s mostly true. Coming up with novel ideas and how to test them is a small (but critical) part of the job. Still I agree, you don’t actually spend that much time on it.
No it doesn’t. You are confusing the ideal of a PhD with the reality.
Most PhDs are doing bland derivative safe stuff, to get their degree and get a job. Very few are doing anything legitimately original. And most of them won’t get a job in their field anyway. We have way too many PhDs because they are the cheap labor for teaching in the university systems, that have over-enrolled for decades so they have to hire less faculty.
Most of my cohort in grad school did not belong there, at a mid-level state school. Only about 1/4 of us were serious about our studies. Yeah, at elite schools you will be doing original research for sure, at most low/mid level programs (and there are a lot) most PhDs are just people with good grades killing time tying to figure out what they want out of life, and a PhD is a good way to do that for 5-10 years. The time to graduate has been going up to over 6 years on average now.
Mmm you know that’s a good point, I never even considered looking at mid or low tier programs when I was school shopping. Your point reminds me of Mike Israetel’s embarrassing doctorate that he likes to use as a kudgle. I could have done his dissertation without the typos and I am educated in a completely different field.
There are also a growing number of PhDs where you are paying for the degree rather than being funded. They are jokes. A lot of dumb people see PhD as a vanity thing.