See poke’s comment above (which is so on the nose, it actually inspired me to register). Then consider the following.
You will never get a PhD in the manner you propose, because that would fulfill only a part of the purpose of a PhD. The number of years spent in the building can be (and in too many cases is) wasted time—but if things are done in a proper manner, this time (which can be only three or four years) is critical.
For science PhDs specifically, the idea isn’t to just come up with something novel and write it up. The idea is to go into the field with a question that you don’t have an answer for, not yet. To find ways to collect data, and then to actually collect it. To build intricate, detailed models that answer your question precisely and completely, fitting all the available data. To design experiments specifically so you can test your models. And finally, to watch these models completely and utterly fail, nine times out of ten.
They won’t fail because you missed something while building them. They will fail because you could only test them properly after making them. If you just built the model that fit everything, and then never tested it with specific experiments… you could spend a very long time convinced that you have found the truth. Several iterations of this process makes people far less willing to extrapolate beyond the available data—certainly not nearly as wildly and as far as transhumanists do.
A good philosophy PhD can do the same, but it is much more difficult to get an optimal result.
Don’t take this the wrong way. I respect and admire your achievements, and I think getting a PhD would be a waste of time for you at this point. But it is entirely true that getting one—a real one—would increase the acceptance of your thoughts and ideas. Not (just) because a PhD would grant you prestige, but because your thoughts and ideas would actually get better.
Which finally brings us to the reason for the dichotomy you noted in your post. Your rationality musings are accepted because a) they are inspiring, and b) they can be actionable and provide solid feedback. A person can read them, try the ideas out, and see if those ideas work for them. Transhumanism, alas, falls under “half-baked” category; and the willingness to follow wildly speculative tangents from poorly constrained models… well, in order to have any weight there, you better either show concrete, practical results… or have credentials that show you have experienced significant model failure in the past. Repeatedly. And painfully. With significant cost to yourself.
As a current grad student myself, I could not disagree with poke’s comment and this comment more. I work for a very respected adviser in computer vision from a very prestigious university. The reason I was accepted to this lab is because I am an NDSEG fellow. Many other qualified people lost out because my attendance here frees up a lot of my adviser’s money for more students. In the mean time, I have a lot of pretty worthwhile ideas in physical vision and theories of semantic visual representations. However, I spend most of my days building Python GUI widgets for a group of collaborating sociologists. They collect really mundane data by annotating videos and no off the shelf stuff does quite what they want… so guess who gets to do that grunt work for a summer? Grad students.
You should really read the good Economist article The Disposable Academic. Graduate studentships are business acquisitions in all but the utmost theoretical fields. Advisers want the most non-linear things imaginable. For example, I am a pure math guy, with heavy emphasis on machine learning methods and probability theory. Yet my day job is seriously creative-energy-draining Python programming. The programming isn’t even related to original math, it’s just a novel thing for some sociologists to use. My adviser doesn’t want me to split my time between reading background theory, etc. He wants me to develop this code because it makes him look good in front of collaborators.
Academia is mostly a bad bad place. I think Eliezer’s desire to circumvent all the crap of grad school is totally right. The old way was a real, true apprenticeship. It isn’t like that anymore. Engineering is especially notorious for this. Minimize the amount of tenured positions, and balloon the number of grad students in order to farm out the work that profs don’t want to do. For almost all of these people, they will just go through the motions, do mundane bullshit, and write a thesis not really worth the paper it gets printed on. The few who don’t follow this route usually just take it upon themselves to go and read on their own and become experts across many different disciplines and then make interconnections between previously independent fields or results. Eliezer has certainly done this with discussions of Newcombe-like problems and friendly A.I. from a philosophical perspective. He’s done more honest academic work here than almost anyone I know in academia.
When I used to work at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, a colleague of mine had a great saying about grad school: “Grad school is 99% about putting your ass in the chair.” It is indeed about spending X years in building Y and getting Z publications. Pure mathematics is somewhat of an exception at elite schools. To boot, people don’t take you any more seriously when you finish. It continues on as a political/social process where you must win grants and provide widgets for collaborators and funding agencies.
There is much more to be said, and of course, I am a grad student, so I must feel that at least for myself it is a good decision despite all of the issues. Well, that’s not quite true. Part of it is that as an undergrad, all of my professors just paid attention to the fact that I was energetic and attentive when they talked about topics they liked, and it created a cumulative jazzed-up feeling for those topics. I expected grad school to be very different than it really is. I should also add that I have been in two different PhD programs, both Ivy League (I can talk more specifically in private). I transferred because the adviser situation at the first school was pretty grim. There was only one faculty member doing things close to what I wanted to study, and he was such a famous name that he had not the time of day for me. For example, I once scheduled a meeting with him to discuss possible research and when I arrived he let me know it was going to be a jointly held meeting with his current doctoral student. While that student wrote on a chalkboard, I got to ask questions. When the student was finished, this prof addressed the student for various intervals of time and then came back to me. This sort of pedantic garbage is the rule rather than the exception.
I find myself having to constantly fight the urge go home from a long, wrist-achingly terrible day of mundane Python programming and just mentally check out. Instead, I read about stuff here on LW, or I read physics books, or now A.I. complexity books. Hopefully my thesis will be a contribution that I enjoy and find interesting. Even better if it helps move science along in a “meaningful way”, but the standard PhD process is absolutely not going to let that happen unless I actively intervene and do things all on my own.
Anyone considering a PhD should consider this heavily. My experience is that it is nothing like the description above or poke’s comment. I think Bostrom should advise a thesis with Eliezer because it would be a great addition to philosophy, and I don’t want Eliezer burdened with nuisance coursework requirements. We should be unyoking uncommonly smart people when we find them, not forcing them to jump through extra hoops just for the pedantic sake of standardization.
Ok, so—I hear what you’re saying, but a) that is not the way it’s supposed to be, and b) you are missing the point.
First, a), even in the current academia, you are in a bad position. If I were you, I would switch mentors or programs ASAP.
I understand where you’re coming from perfectly. I had a very similar experience: I spent three years in a failed PhD (the lab I was working in went under at the same time as the department I was in), and I ended up getting a MS instead. But even in that position, which was all tedious gruntwork, I understood the hypothesis and had some input. I switched to a different field, and a different mentor, where most of my work was still tedious, but it was driven by ideas I came to while working with my adviser.
If your position is, as it seems to be, even worse—that you have NO input whatsoever, and are purely cheap labor—then you should switch mentors immediately. If you don’t, you might finish your PhD with a great deal of bitterness, but it is much more likely that you will simply burn out and drop out.
Which brings me to b). As I said above, it would be pointless for Eliezer to go to grad school now. Even at best, it contains a lot of tedious, repetitive work. But the essential point stands: in a poorly constrained area such as transhumanism, grand ideas are not enough. That is where PhD does have a function, and does have a reason.
Actually, my mentor is among one of the nicest guys around and is a good manager, offers good advice, and has a consistent record of producing successful students. It’s just that almost no grad student gets to have real input in what they are doing. If you do have that, consider yourself lucky, because the dozens of grad students that I know aren’t in a position like that. I just had a meeting today where my adviser talked to me about having to balance my time between “whatever needs doing” (for the utility of our whole research group rather than just my own dissertation) and doing my own reading/research. His idea (shared by many faculty members) is that for a few years at the front end of the PhD, you mostly do about 80% general utility work and infrastructure work, just to build experience, write code, get involved… then after you get into some publications a few years later, the roles switch and you shift to more like 80% writing and doing your own thing (research). The problem is that if you’re a passionate student with good ideas, then that first few years of bullshit infrastructure work is a complete waste of time. The run-of-the-mill PhD student (who generally is not really all that smart or hardworking) might do fine just being told what to program for a few years, but the really intellectually curious people will die inside. Plus, for those really smart PhD students out there, I think it’s in my best interest that they be cleared of all nuisance responsibilities and allowed to just work.
As for point (b), my reasoning would be like this: “in a poorly constrained area such as transhumanism, grand ideas are not enough, and that’s exactly why a PhD is irrelevant and I have no reason to think that someone has better or more useful or more important ideas than Eliezer just because that person has been published in peer reviewed journals.”
Eliezer,
See poke’s comment above (which is so on the nose, it actually inspired me to register). Then consider the following.
You will never get a PhD in the manner you propose, because that would fulfill only a part of the purpose of a PhD. The number of years spent in the building can be (and in too many cases is) wasted time—but if things are done in a proper manner, this time (which can be only three or four years) is critical.
For science PhDs specifically, the idea isn’t to just come up with something novel and write it up. The idea is to go into the field with a question that you don’t have an answer for, not yet. To find ways to collect data, and then to actually collect it. To build intricate, detailed models that answer your question precisely and completely, fitting all the available data. To design experiments specifically so you can test your models. And finally, to watch these models completely and utterly fail, nine times out of ten.
They won’t fail because you missed something while building them. They will fail because you could only test them properly after making them. If you just built the model that fit everything, and then never tested it with specific experiments… you could spend a very long time convinced that you have found the truth. Several iterations of this process makes people far less willing to extrapolate beyond the available data—certainly not nearly as wildly and as far as transhumanists do.
A good philosophy PhD can do the same, but it is much more difficult to get an optimal result.
Don’t take this the wrong way. I respect and admire your achievements, and I think getting a PhD would be a waste of time for you at this point. But it is entirely true that getting one—a real one—would increase the acceptance of your thoughts and ideas. Not (just) because a PhD would grant you prestige, but because your thoughts and ideas would actually get better.
Which finally brings us to the reason for the dichotomy you noted in your post. Your rationality musings are accepted because a) they are inspiring, and b) they can be actionable and provide solid feedback. A person can read them, try the ideas out, and see if those ideas work for them. Transhumanism, alas, falls under “half-baked” category; and the willingness to follow wildly speculative tangents from poorly constrained models… well, in order to have any weight there, you better either show concrete, practical results… or have credentials that show you have experienced significant model failure in the past. Repeatedly. And painfully. With significant cost to yourself.
As a current grad student myself, I could not disagree with poke’s comment and this comment more. I work for a very respected adviser in computer vision from a very prestigious university. The reason I was accepted to this lab is because I am an NDSEG fellow. Many other qualified people lost out because my attendance here frees up a lot of my adviser’s money for more students. In the mean time, I have a lot of pretty worthwhile ideas in physical vision and theories of semantic visual representations. However, I spend most of my days building Python GUI widgets for a group of collaborating sociologists. They collect really mundane data by annotating videos and no off the shelf stuff does quite what they want… so guess who gets to do that grunt work for a summer? Grad students.
You should really read the good Economist article The Disposable Academic. Graduate studentships are business acquisitions in all but the utmost theoretical fields. Advisers want the most non-linear things imaginable. For example, I am a pure math guy, with heavy emphasis on machine learning methods and probability theory. Yet my day job is seriously creative-energy-draining Python programming. The programming isn’t even related to original math, it’s just a novel thing for some sociologists to use. My adviser doesn’t want me to split my time between reading background theory, etc. He wants me to develop this code because it makes him look good in front of collaborators.
Academia is mostly a bad bad place. I think Eliezer’s desire to circumvent all the crap of grad school is totally right. The old way was a real, true apprenticeship. It isn’t like that anymore. Engineering is especially notorious for this. Minimize the amount of tenured positions, and balloon the number of grad students in order to farm out the work that profs don’t want to do. For almost all of these people, they will just go through the motions, do mundane bullshit, and write a thesis not really worth the paper it gets printed on. The few who don’t follow this route usually just take it upon themselves to go and read on their own and become experts across many different disciplines and then make interconnections between previously independent fields or results. Eliezer has certainly done this with discussions of Newcombe-like problems and friendly A.I. from a philosophical perspective. He’s done more honest academic work here than almost anyone I know in academia.
When I used to work at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, a colleague of mine had a great saying about grad school: “Grad school is 99% about putting your ass in the chair.” It is indeed about spending X years in building Y and getting Z publications. Pure mathematics is somewhat of an exception at elite schools. To boot, people don’t take you any more seriously when you finish. It continues on as a political/social process where you must win grants and provide widgets for collaborators and funding agencies.
There is much more to be said, and of course, I am a grad student, so I must feel that at least for myself it is a good decision despite all of the issues. Well, that’s not quite true. Part of it is that as an undergrad, all of my professors just paid attention to the fact that I was energetic and attentive when they talked about topics they liked, and it created a cumulative jazzed-up feeling for those topics. I expected grad school to be very different than it really is. I should also add that I have been in two different PhD programs, both Ivy League (I can talk more specifically in private). I transferred because the adviser situation at the first school was pretty grim. There was only one faculty member doing things close to what I wanted to study, and he was such a famous name that he had not the time of day for me. For example, I once scheduled a meeting with him to discuss possible research and when I arrived he let me know it was going to be a jointly held meeting with his current doctoral student. While that student wrote on a chalkboard, I got to ask questions. When the student was finished, this prof addressed the student for various intervals of time and then came back to me. This sort of pedantic garbage is the rule rather than the exception.
I find myself having to constantly fight the urge go home from a long, wrist-achingly terrible day of mundane Python programming and just mentally check out. Instead, I read about stuff here on LW, or I read physics books, or now A.I. complexity books. Hopefully my thesis will be a contribution that I enjoy and find interesting. Even better if it helps move science along in a “meaningful way”, but the standard PhD process is absolutely not going to let that happen unless I actively intervene and do things all on my own.
Anyone considering a PhD should consider this heavily. My experience is that it is nothing like the description above or poke’s comment. I think Bostrom should advise a thesis with Eliezer because it would be a great addition to philosophy, and I don’t want Eliezer burdened with nuisance coursework requirements. We should be unyoking uncommonly smart people when we find them, not forcing them to jump through extra hoops just for the pedantic sake of standardization.
Ok, so—I hear what you’re saying, but a) that is not the way it’s supposed to be, and b) you are missing the point.
First, a), even in the current academia, you are in a bad position. If I were you, I would switch mentors or programs ASAP.
I understand where you’re coming from perfectly. I had a very similar experience: I spent three years in a failed PhD (the lab I was working in went under at the same time as the department I was in), and I ended up getting a MS instead. But even in that position, which was all tedious gruntwork, I understood the hypothesis and had some input. I switched to a different field, and a different mentor, where most of my work was still tedious, but it was driven by ideas I came to while working with my adviser.
If your position is, as it seems to be, even worse—that you have NO input whatsoever, and are purely cheap labor—then you should switch mentors immediately. If you don’t, you might finish your PhD with a great deal of bitterness, but it is much more likely that you will simply burn out and drop out.
Which brings me to b). As I said above, it would be pointless for Eliezer to go to grad school now. Even at best, it contains a lot of tedious, repetitive work. But the essential point stands: in a poorly constrained area such as transhumanism, grand ideas are not enough. That is where PhD does have a function, and does have a reason.
Actually, my mentor is among one of the nicest guys around and is a good manager, offers good advice, and has a consistent record of producing successful students. It’s just that almost no grad student gets to have real input in what they are doing. If you do have that, consider yourself lucky, because the dozens of grad students that I know aren’t in a position like that. I just had a meeting today where my adviser talked to me about having to balance my time between “whatever needs doing” (for the utility of our whole research group rather than just my own dissertation) and doing my own reading/research. His idea (shared by many faculty members) is that for a few years at the front end of the PhD, you mostly do about 80% general utility work and infrastructure work, just to build experience, write code, get involved… then after you get into some publications a few years later, the roles switch and you shift to more like 80% writing and doing your own thing (research). The problem is that if you’re a passionate student with good ideas, then that first few years of bullshit infrastructure work is a complete waste of time. The run-of-the-mill PhD student (who generally is not really all that smart or hardworking) might do fine just being told what to program for a few years, but the really intellectually curious people will die inside. Plus, for those really smart PhD students out there, I think it’s in my best interest that they be cleared of all nuisance responsibilities and allowed to just work.
As for point (b), my reasoning would be like this: “in a poorly constrained area such as transhumanism, grand ideas are not enough, and that’s exactly why a PhD is irrelevant and I have no reason to think that someone has better or more useful or more important ideas than Eliezer just because that person has been published in peer reviewed journals.”
http://www.caseyresearch.com/cdd/doug-casey-education