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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Oct 14, 2022 14:27:10 GMT
It sounds really flash to have a Cambridge PhD in Economics. People from Cambridge are good at reminding us that if Cambridge were a country then it would be the country with the 4th highest number of Nobel Prizes in the world. Recall this is important because only one in each year for each award is awarded, and to get one you have to show a track record of whatever you invented/discovered has changed the world in a big way for the better. The classic was the discovery of DNA. As you can imagine, it is a place which is difficult to get in to due to it's track record. Call it the jewel in the crown of Blighty's academia. Actually getting a Nobel Prize is similar to getting a PhD because with all PhDs the rules is it has to be original, and as Economics is studied across the world by millions, originality becomes ever-more difficult.
So why the thread? Surly these two pillars of our national economic management are well qualified. For this we need to ask what did they find out?
Andrew Bailey: The impact of the Napoleonic Wars on the development of the cotton industry in Lancashire: a study of the structure and behaviour of firms during the Industrial Revolution
Kwasi Kwarteng: Political thought of the recoinage crisis of 1695–7
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Post by Orac on Oct 15, 2022 9:13:52 GMT
Some disciplines are more or less chuff much beyond O' ,or maybe, A level.
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Post by Cartertonian on Oct 16, 2022 10:28:31 GMT
Some disciplines are more or less chuff much beyond O' ,or maybe, A level. As someone who has just finished a PhD, I have some thoughts on that observation. The keyword is 'level'. I shall explain. I have made similar observations to threads that have attacked undergraduate programmes in what their detractors see as pointless subjects. All levels of achievement in study have a dual function; to indicate that something has been learned AND to indicate the level at which the learner has functioned. For example, many years ago (he's been dead for 24) my dad bemoaned the fact that he had a fast-track inspector in the police division he ran (he was a superintendent at the time) who had got onto the fast-track with a degree in zoology. I was about ten at the time and it did seem pretty stupid to me. What had zoology to do with policing? What I didn't appreciate as a ten year old but I do now, is that the police selection process was far more interested in the level to which a graduate could function than it was in the specific topic of their degree. They were recruiting someone with intellectual and cognitive skills commensurate with a graduate, because it was those skills they were seeking rather than any specific knowledge the graduate might have. What's interesting to me is that postgraduate study (I have two Masters) tends to be very topic-specific, i.e. one gains an undergraduate award that is very general in applicability and then, if one is pursuing academic advancement, one chooses a postgraduate award that is very focused. My Bachelors was - spookily enough - in nursing, but then my first Masters was in military psychiatry and my second was in education, which was deeply appropriate at the time, because I was teaching military mental health to Armed Forces nurses for a living. When it comes to doctoral level study it gets complicated, but put simply a PhD is like a 'driving test' for researchers. Just like with a driving test, once you have passed you are not restricted to only the areas you explored in learning to drive - you can go anywhere. The actual research topic you based your thesis on is largely immaterial because you have demonstrated your competence to work at PhD level. To reprise the interest from the last but one paragraph, there are other forms of doctoral study that the general public are often unaware of in the shape of Professional Doctorates or what we sometimes call in the trade 'taught doctorates'. This is to differentiate them from PhDs, the manner of which is usually, 'there's your thesis title, now piss off a write it'. There is no teaching involved. You're expected to work it out for yourself and you supervisor is only there to bounce ideas off - they will never tell you what to do. This is why in academia a PhD is seen as superior to a taught doctorate. I disagree. I sincerely wish I'd stayed on the taught doctorate I started in 2012 (EdD) because that would have allowed me to legitimately claim doctoral level expertise as an educator. Meanwhile, my PhD will only qualify me as an 'entry-level researcher' or 'post-doc' and it's highly unlikely I will be researching anything at all to do with what the topic of my thesis was. But going back to my 'driving test' analogy, neither will anyone quiz me about what my thesis was about, in the same way that no-one would challenge a qualified driver for driving on roads they'd never driven on before. If you've got 'PhD' after your name then you can research. |
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Oct 16, 2022 11:29:38 GMT
Some disciplines are more or less chuff much beyond O' ,or maybe, A level. As someone who has just finished a PhD, I have some thoughts on that observation. The keyword is 'level'. I shall explain. I have made similar observations to threads that have attacked undergraduate programmes in what their detractors see as pointless subjects. All levels of achievement in study have a dual function; to indicate that something has been learned AND to indicate the level at which the learner has functioned. For example, many years ago (he's been dead for 24) my dad bemoaned the fact that he had a fast-track inspector in the police division he ran (he was a superintendent at the time) who had got onto the fast-track with a degree in zoology. I was about ten at the time and it did seem pretty stupid to me. What had zoology to do with policing? What I didn't appreciate as a ten year old but I do now, is that the police selection process was far more interested in the level to which a graduate could function than it was in the specific topic of their degree. They were recruiting someone with intellectual and cognitive skills commensurate with a graduate, because it was those skills they were seeking rather than any specific knowledge the graduate might have. What's interesting to me is that postgraduate study (I have two Masters) tends to be very topic-specific, i.e. one gains an undergraduate award that is very general in applicability and then, if one is pursuing academic advancement, one chooses a postgraduate award that is very focused. My Bachelors was - spookily enough - in nursing, but then my first Masters was in military psychiatry and my second was in education, which was deeply appropriate at the time, because I was teaching military mental health to Armed Forces nurses for a living. When it comes to doctoral level study it gets complicated, but put simply a PhD is like a 'driving test' for researchers. Just like with a driving test, once you have passed you are not restricted to only the areas you explored in learning to drive - you can go anywhere. The actual research topic you based your thesis on is largely immaterial because you have demonstrated your competence to work at PhD level. To reprise the interest from the last but one paragraph, there are other forms of doctoral study that the general public are often unaware of in the shape of Professional Doctorates or what we sometimes call in the trade 'taught doctorates'. This is to differentiate them from PhDs, the manner of which is usually, 'there's your thesis title, now piss off a write it'. There is no teaching involved. You're expected to work it out for yourself and you supervisor is only there to bounce ideas off - they will never tell you what to do. This is why in academia a PhD is seen as superior to a taught doctorate. I disagree. I sincerely wish I'd stayed on the taught doctorate I started in 2012 (EdD) because that would have allowed me to legitimately claim doctoral level expertise as an educator. Meanwhile, my PhD will only qualify me as an 'entry-level researcher' or 'post-doc' and it's highly unlikely I will be researching anything at all to do with what the topic of my thesis was. But going back to my 'driving test' analogy, neither will anyone quiz me about what my thesis was about, in the same way that no-one would challenge a qualified driver for driving on roads they'd never driven on before. If you've got 'PhD' after your name then you can research. When I look at commercial jobs I see the diametric opposite, namely that you have to have x amount of experience in exactly what you are applying for. Why does the human brain alter so radically once it has a PhD though? Like say I had a PhD in Shakespeare's plays. I'd spent three years studying one of his plays to unearth hitherto hidden knowledge. Next day I get a job at CERN as a nuclear physicist. Well mate - I've proved I can do research? |
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Post by Cartertonian on Oct 16, 2022 11:58:44 GMT
BvL wrote I see your capacity to be obtuse has transferred seamlessly from 'the other place'... False equivalencies much? 1. If you had a PhD in Literature you would have no interest (professionally) in particle physics 2. If you were unhinged enough to apply for a job in particle physics you wouldn't even get past the paper sift stage of selection. Do try not to post like a prat BvL. A PhD is the final stage in a long academic career into which the individual is embedded. They may choose to step away from academia having gained their doctorate, but they will invariably stay within their academic field, even if they take their skills to the private sector. People don't just wake up one morning and decide they're going to do a PhD for laughs and indeed the selection process for doing a PhD would spot them a mile off and tell them to stop wasting their time. In my case, unless someone offers me an offer I can't refuse, I'm unlikely to ever further research what I researched for my thesis but given the examples you cited in your OP, you should surely expect that? My future research will exploit the specific research skills and methodological knowledge I possess and apply them to other areas within my academic field. For a STEM junkie like yourself I'm surprised you struggle to appreciate that it isn't rocket science!  |
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Oct 16, 2022 12:39:32 GMT
BvL wrote I see your capacity to be obtuse has transferred seamlessly from 'the other place'... False equivalencies much? 1. If you had a PhD in Literature you would have no interest (professionally) in particle physics 2. If you were unhinged enough to apply for a job in particle physics you wouldn't even get past the paper sift stage of selection. Do try not to post like a prat BvL. BvL ReplyIt was a serious point which you are avoiding. I picked a subject from the humanities and compared it to a mathematical discipline. Look more carefully and you will see your mistake. You defend the two in the OP by what you said previously, but the OP was an example of the one subject being humanities (history) and economics which is mathematical in the current day. Just a quick further example was a chap my parents know who got a degree in French and works in computers. It happens in some instances but it is strictly the opposite in others, and both presumably base their position on how the mind works. If the practice of research was a skill in itself which is transferable across any narrow discipline then you'd be correct, but now you contradict yourself by saying it is a long path structured for the successful outcome of what you are trying to do with it. You simply can't have your cake and eat it! Incidently there are two other economists we could test. These two have a proven track record. the first is Mark Carney, who successfully rescued the Canadian economy again the forecasts of the pundits, and similarly there is Mario Draghi who rescued the entire Eurozone crisis successfully. OK so you can see these two are more your model of a structured and well reasoned path. Now we try our country again and look at Hunt, the one who has more experience than Kwasi. This is the same as a large number of cabinet ministers and other politicians. So he has 1/3 of a BA in Economics. That's better than a PhD in Economics!(re: what we are told by the BBC et al) Cart continues:A PhD is the final stage in a long academic career into which the individual is embedded. They may choose to step away from academia having gained their doctorate, but they will invariably stay within their academic field, even if they take their skills to the private sector. People don't just wake up one morning and decide they're going to do a PhD for laughs and indeed the selection process for doing a PhD would spot them a mile off and tell them to stop wasting their time. In my case, unless someone offers me an offer I can't refuse, I'm unlikely to ever further research what I researched for my thesis but given the examples you cited in your OP, you should surely expect that? My future research will exploit the specific research skills and methodological knowledge I possess and apply them to other areas within my academic field. For a STEM junkie like yourself I'm surprised you struggle to appreciate that it isn't rocket science! BvL Concludes
Good for you but this aint good for our country. We have this ambiguity in reasoning that won't go away. I think it was either Jack Ma or Ren Zhengfei said the thing to do to become successful is decide what you are going to do and just keep on doing it until you are a master in it. This is the old school approach. |
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Post by Cartertonian on Oct 16, 2022 13:12:36 GMT
Not sure why you object then. In my case I went into nursing thirty three years ago, got a bachelors in nursing, two masters in related topics and have just finished a PhD (which is nominally, if not actually, in 'Nursing') I'd say I had mastered my profession in a manner with which you would approve!  |
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Oct 16, 2022 15:49:55 GMT
Not sure why you object then. In my case I went into nursing thirty three years ago, got a bachelors in nursing, two masters in related topics and have just finished a PhD (which is nominally, if not actually, in 'Nursing') I'd say I had mastered my profession in a manner with which you would approve! I see your path has some sort of rationality to it. Going back to our political data: "he[Bailey] went to Queens' College, Cambridge, where he gained a bachelor's degree in History". See what I mean. His Economics PhD was started on the strength of his knowledge in History. It's the same kind of blag as if say I got on to a physics PhD course and did one on the 1812 lightening strike of Bongo Bongo land, and I'd say to my victims, well dear chap it is to do with physics. But of course the blag here is I'm selecting an instance of the thing along the time domain of history and dealing with something so irrelevant to a advancement of human knowledge that no one intelligent has ever wasted their time on it, yet technically speaking it would be original research.
By the way, things do not always happen as you imagine them to either. This actually gives credence to the other side of the argument where you can diversity your area of knowledge and get away with it. When I moved here originally I rented a shared house out for 3m to find my feet in the area and the woman who owned the house was friends with a chap from Brighton who had spent a long time out of work/on the dole/casual jobs as a illustrator of books and a musician. Anyhow this chap, to save getting bored, used to be interested in mathematics and had an internet connection where I imagine much like myself, he used the internet to learn more about the subject. This was like 20 years ago and with a dial up connection. Anyhow that did not stop him and he got fascinated by number theory. He learnt the basics, used to chat to other mathematician and gradually got more into it. Eventually he was chatting to world class mathematicians on obscure number theory research, and one day something magically clicked in his mind and he saw someone that no one had seen before. He asked the experts he has formed relationships with and they said it was original and correct. He went on to write a paper and it was published in a top mathematics journal and Exeter uni awarded him a PhD and a research job for it! This was no ordinary theory, but actually very important and I dare say he has it named after him too. He's not your average kind of bloke.
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Post by johnofgwent on Oct 16, 2022 18:24:59 GMT
Some disciplines are more or less chuff much beyond O' ,or maybe, A level. As someone who has just finished a PhD, I have some thoughts on that observation. The keyword is 'level'. I shall explain. I have made similar observations to threads that have attacked undergraduate programmes in what their detractors see as pointless subjects. All levels of achievement in study have a dual function; to indicate that something has been learned AND to indicate the level at which the learner has functioned. For example, many years ago (he's been dead for 24) my dad bemoaned the fact that he had a fast-track inspector in the police division he ran (he was a superintendent at the time) who had got onto the fast-track with a degree in zoology. I was about ten at the time and it did seem pretty stupid to me. What had zoology to do with policing? What I didn't appreciate as a ten year old but I do now, is that the police selection process was far more interested in the level to which a graduate could function than it was in the specific topic of their degree. They were recruiting someone with intellectual and cognitive skills commensurate with a graduate, because it was those skills they were seeking rather than any specific knowledge the graduate might have. What's interesting to me is that postgraduate study (I have two Masters) tends to be very topic-specific, i.e. one gains an undergraduate award that is very general in applicability and then, if one is pursuing academic advancement, one chooses a postgraduate award that is very focused. My Bachelors was - spookily enough - in nursing, but then my first Masters was in military psychiatry and my second was in education, which was deeply appropriate at the time, because I was teaching military mental health to Armed Forces nurses for a living. When it comes to doctoral level study it gets complicated, but put simply a PhD is like a 'driving test' for researchers. Just like with a driving test, once you have passed you are not restricted to only the areas you explored in learning to drive - you can go anywhere. The actual research topic you based your thesis on is largely immaterial because you have demonstrated your competence to work at PhD level. To reprise the interest from the last but one paragraph, there are other forms of doctoral study that the general public are often unaware of in the shape of Professional Doctorates or what we sometimes call in the trade 'taught doctorates'. This is to differentiate them from PhDs, the manner of which is usually, 'there's your thesis title, now piss off a write it'. There is no teaching involved. You're expected to work it out for yourself and you supervisor is only there to bounce ideas off - they will never tell you what to do. This is why in academia a PhD is seen as superior to a taught doctorate. I disagree. I sincerely wish I'd stayed on the taught doctorate I started in 2012 (EdD) because that would have allowed me to legitimately claim doctoral level expertise as an educator. Meanwhile, my PhD will only qualify me as an 'entry-level researcher' or 'post-doc' and it's highly unlikely I will be researching anything at all to do with what the topic of my thesis was. But going back to my 'driving test' analogy, neither will anyone quiz me about what my thesis was about, in the same way that no-one would challenge a qualified driver for driving on roads they'd never driven on before. If you've got 'PhD' after your name then you can research. For what it is worth… The maths I used to perform a statistical analysis of the uptake of radioactive material across the cell membrane when researching the manner by which mammalian cells transport sugars from the bloodstream into the liver was EXACTLY the same as that I used to determine whether the five blips on a radar screen were five seagulls taking a shit or a missile inbound with malice aforethought. As you say, the subject material that forms the base for the content of a piece of research is not always the point. In my case interest in the subject and the answer drove my research, but the skills made me lots of money in a totally different area long after Naggie Thatcher decided she didn’t want that area of medical research funded. |
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Post by petenz on Oct 18, 2022 2:09:41 GMT
Whatever the level of Kwarteng's skills are in Economics it is unforgivable that, given his position as Chancellor, he failed to understand the impact his policies would have on the markets. Surely he has enough contacts in the City he could have run his ideas past to gauge what the reaction would be.
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Oct 18, 2022 9:24:03 GMT
Whatever the level of Kwarteng's skills are in Economics it is unforgivable that, given his position as Chancellor, he failed to understand the impact his policies would have on the markets. Surely he has enough contacts in the City he could have run his ideas past to gauge what the reaction would be. I'm starting to form the view he is a duffer and was positivity discriminated for. It's just I happen to know there are very few blacks in Oxford or Cambridge and the two institutions were under a lot of pressure to stop simply recruiting in the way they always had and make it diverse. |
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Post by The Squeezed Middle on Oct 18, 2022 10:11:15 GMT
The keyword is 'level'. I shall explain. I have made similar observations to threads that have attacked undergraduate programmes in what their detractors see as pointless subjects. All levels of achievement in study have a dual function; to indicate that something has been learned AND to indicate the level at which the learner has functioned. For example, many years ago (he's been dead for 24) my dad bemoaned the fact that he had a fast-track inspector in the police division he ran (he was a superintendent at the time) who had got onto the fast-track with a degree in zoology. I was about ten at the time and it did seem pretty stupid to me. What had zoology to do with policing? What I didn't appreciate as a ten year old but I do now, is that the police selection process was far more interested in the level to which a graduate could function than it was in the specific topic of their degree. They were recruiting someone with intellectual and cognitive skills commensurate with a graduate, because it was those skills they were seeking rather than any specific knowledge the graduate might have. What's interesting to me is that postgraduate study (I have two Masters) tends to be very topic-specific, i.e. one gains an undergraduate award that is very general in applicability and then, if one is pursuing academic advancement, one chooses a postgraduate award that is very focused. My Bachelors was - spookily enough - in nursing, but then my first Masters was in military psychiatry and my second was in education, which was deeply appropriate at the time, because I was teaching military mental health to Armed Forces nurses for a living. When it comes to doctoral level study it gets complicated, but put simply a PhD is like a 'driving test' for researchers. Just like with a driving test, once you have passed you are not restricted to only the areas you explored in learning to drive - you can go anywhere. The actual research topic you based your thesis on is largely immaterial because you have demonstrated your competence to work at PhD level. To reprise the interest from the last but one paragraph, there are other forms of doctoral study that the general public are often unaware of in the shape of Professional Doctorates or what we sometimes call in the trade 'taught doctorates'. This is to differentiate them from PhDs, the manner of which is usually, 'there's your thesis title, now piss off a write it'. There is no teaching involved. You're expected to work it out for yourself and you supervisor is only there to bounce ideas off - they will never tell you what to do. This is why in academia a PhD is seen as superior to a taught doctorate. I disagree. I sincerely wish I'd stayed on the taught doctorate I started in 2012 (EdD) because that would have allowed me to legitimately claim doctoral level expertise as an educator. Meanwhile, my PhD will only qualify me as an 'entry-level researcher' or 'post-doc' and it's highly unlikely I will be researching anything at all to do with what the topic of my thesis was. But going back to my 'driving test' analogy, neither will anyone quiz me about what my thesis was about, in the same way that no-one would challenge a qualified driver for driving on roads they'd never driven on before. If you've got 'PhD' after your name then you can research. And, as we've seen with senior police officers, politicians et al all too often it simply allows them to fuck up at a higher level. QED. |
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Oct 18, 2022 11:03:45 GMT
It's actually very easy to become a world expert in something. All you do is find something ultra-obscure and read every single thing that has ever been published on the matter. Anyway, to go back to the way we were, this in my mind is a proper PhD: "Brian David Josephson FRS[3] (born 4 January 1940) is a Welsh[5][6] theoretical physicist and professor emeritus of physics at the University of Cambridge.[7] Best known for his pioneering work on superconductivity and quantum tunnelling, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 for his prediction of the Josephson effect, made in 1962 when he was a 22-year-old PhD student at Cambridge University. Josephson is the only Welshman to have won a Nobel Prize in Physics. He shared the prize with physicists Leo Esaki and Ivar Giaever, who jointly received half the award for their own work on quantum tunnelling.[8][9] " en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_JosephsonNot only was it original, but it's something taught now to all undergraduates in the subject, so from obscure to part of the main body of physics we know today. The other stuff is cat's piss. |
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Post by crazyhorse on Oct 19, 2022 23:58:13 GMT
Whatever the level of Kwarteng's skills are in Economics it is unforgivable that, given his position as Chancellor, he failed to understand the impact his policies would have on the markets. Surely he has enough contacts in the City he could have run his ideas past to gauge what the reaction would be. No, Kwarteng failed to understand that he had no power at all unless sancitioned by the oligarchs. Truss accepts this or is a dead woman walking. Welcome to liberal democracy. |
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Post by petenz on Oct 20, 2022 0:20:33 GMT
No, Kwarteng failed to understand that he had no power at all unless sancitioned by the oligarchs. Truss accepts this or is a dead woman walking. Welcome to liberal democracy. Who do you think I was referring to by "contacts in the City"? |
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