Incoming links: PhD Comics
Sometimes Ciro Santilli regrets not having done a PhD. But this section makes him feel better about himself. To be fair, part of the merit is on him, part of the reason he didn't move on was the strong odour of bullshit oozing down to Masters level. A good PhH might have opened interesting job opportunities however, given that you don't really learn anything useful before that point in your education.
twitter.com/togelius/status/1584611702691483648:
The "real world" is full of people who couldn't make it in academia.
I failed in academia by Andy Stapleton (2021)
Source. 6 Dirty Tactics Found In Academia & Universities by Andy Stapleton (2022)
Source. Rise to the Top: The Habits and Mindset of Top 0.1% PhD Students by Andy Stapleton (2023)
Source. 
Profzi scheme by PhD Comics
. A Ponzi scheme that trains people in new skills is not necessarily a terrible thing. It is a somewhat more useful version than standard exam based education.
Perhaps the problem is "forcing" 35 year olds to go down that path when they might also want to have boring stuff like families and security.
If people could get to the PhD level much, much sooner, it wouldn't be as obscene: Section "Students must be allowed to progress as fast as they want".
A major difficulty of getting such this to work is that may university teachers want to retain closed copyright of their work because they:
- want to publish a book later and get paid. Yes, the root problem is that teachers get paid way too little and have way too little job security for the incredibly important and difficult extremely difficult job they are doing, and we have to vote to change that
- are afraid that if amazing material is made freely available, then they would not be needed and lose their jobs. Once again, job security issue.
- believe that if anyone were allowed to touch their precious content, those people would just "screw it up" and make it worse
- don't even want to publish their notes online because "someone will copy it and take their credit". What a mentality! In order to prevent a theft, you are basically guaranteeing that your work will be completely forgotten!
- don't want students to read the notes and skip class, because spoken word has magic properties and imparts knowledge that cannot otherwise conveyed by a book
- are afraid that mistakes will be found in their material. Reputation is of course everything in academia, since there is no money.So it's less risky to have closed, more buggy notes, than open, more correct ones.This can be seen clearly for example on Physics Stack Exchange, and most notably in particle physics (well, which is basically the only subject that really gets asked, since anything more experimental is going to be blocked off by patents/interlab competition), where a large proportion incredibly amazing users have anonymous profiles.They prefer to get no reputation gains from their amazing contributions, due to the fear that a single mistake will ruin their career.This is in stark contrast for example to Stack Overflow, where almost all top users are not anonymous:List of top users: physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=Reputation&filter=all and some notable anonymous ones:
- physics.stackexchange.com/users/2451/qmechanic
- physics.stackexchange.com/users/50583/acuriousmind
- physics.stackexchange.com/users/43351/profrob
- physics.stackexchange.com/users/84967/accidentalfouriertransform
- physics.stackexchange.com/users/56997/curiousone
- physics.stackexchange.com/users/139781/probably-someone
- physics.stackexchange.com/users/206691/chiral-anomaly
Therefore the only way is to find teachers who are:The forced option therefore seems like a more bulk efficient starting point for searches.
- enlightened to use such licenses
- forced by their organizations to use such licenses
No matter how much effort a single person puts into writing perfect tutorials, they will never beat 1000x people + an algorithm.
It is not simply a matter of how much time you have. The fundamental reason is that each person has a different background and different skills. Notably the young students have radically different understanding than that of the experienced teacher.
Therefore, those that refuse to contribute to such platforms, or at least license their content with open licenses, will inevitably have their work forgotten in favor of those that have contributed to the more open platform, which will eventually dominate everything.
Perhaps OurBigBook.com is not he killer platform that will make this happen. Perhaps the world is not yet ready for it. But Ciro believes that this will happen, sooner or later, inevitable, and he wants to give it a shot.
Also worth checking:
- jornal.usp.br/universidade/usp-de-sao-carlos-oferece-aulas-de-graduacao-em-matematica-e-estatistica-abertas-ao-publico/ "Open Classroom" program from the University of São Paulo. We should Google for "Open Classroom" a bit more actually.
- open.ed.ac.uk/about/: talk only
Each comic page has an "Emergency Button" below it, which redirects to a mock PDF formatted as a research paper, so you can quickly pretend to be working. Epic.
The evolution of intellectual freedom by PhD Comics (2011)
Source.