Going back to this post, a lot of things that puzzled us then are way more obvious now. But one angle remained unexplored for some reason. Here it is: if people catch on that you got a PhD just to persuade them, your PhD won’t help you persuade them. As Robin said, people often don’t have “true rejections” on the object level because they don’t understand the object level. Instead they feel (correctly) that controversial scientific arguments should not be sold directly to the public, and apply multiple heuristics on the meta level. And the positive heuristic “this guy has a PhD” can be beaten thoroughly by the negative heuristic “this guy got himself a PhD in order to sell me something”. Drexler’s PhD does much less to persuade me than an actual lab report demonstrating that some small part of the vision works.
So… study your field out of curiosity, build a community of curious researchers, make genuine progress, publish the results, and you will have the impact you wanted. Adding more trappings of respectability to your advocacy operation doesn’t work, and IMO it’s good that it doesn’t work.
Going back to this post, a lot of things that puzzled us then are way more obvious now. But one angle remained unexplored for some reason. Here it is: if people catch on that you got a PhD just to persuade them, your PhD won’t help you persuade them. As Robin said, people often don’t have “true rejections” on the object level because they don’t understand the object level. Instead they feel (correctly) that controversial scientific arguments should not be sold directly to the public, and apply multiple heuristics on the meta level. And the positive heuristic “this guy has a PhD” can be beaten thoroughly by the negative heuristic “this guy got himself a PhD in order to sell me something”. Drexler’s PhD does much less to persuade me than an actual lab report demonstrating that some small part of the vision works.
So… study your field out of curiosity, build a community of curious researchers, make genuine progress, publish the results, and you will have the impact you wanted. Adding more trappings of respectability to your advocacy operation doesn’t work, and IMO it’s good that it doesn’t work.