“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.
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.