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.”
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