Are there good reasons to get into a PHD (i.e. in Philosophy)? And what to optimize for in such case?
There are pretty strong reasons to be wary of academic philosophy. And the question here is whether there are good things to optimize for which come alongside a PHD generally, and also in particular in philosophy. So what to optimize for when pursuing a PHD?
Some alternatives include:
1) Smart students
2) Excellent advisor (with the cost of very little time and attention for you)
3) Young but still good advisor (no time-cost)
4) Level of similarity between what you want to research, and what your prospective advisor researchers
5) Freedom to do what you want in terms of directing your research
6) Confortable physical environment (Campus with sports area, good weather, and comfy social areas, nice café′s to study)
7) Good contacts—Whatever that means within philosophy PHD’s
8) Whatever works—meaning apply to all you can and think later, which implies that it is worth applying because it gets you a phd, not because of what it offers to you in other ways.
9) Nothing to do with academia—in this case, once you guarantee you’ll get your phd, you optimize for something else, like social environment, being New York, hot students, having a beach and hiking area, etc...
Maybe some of these can be extended to pursuers of a PHD in other areas. Also, I’m assuming price is not a consideration (either all give you scholarships, or are free)
It seems to me that education is one of the things that people are most irrational about, with a lot of people going the 8 route by default, not decision, for instance. And paying the cost (in motivation, success and happiness) later down the road.
You should get a Ph.D. in Philosophy if you consider the material studied in philosophy to be an end in itself. Philosophy is a truthseeking discipline, so if you find that inherently rewarding and could imagine doing that for a large part of your life it’s a good decision. Don’t worry about the wariness of philosophy: I can guarantee you that the criticisms levied here against philosophy have been addressed tenfold in actual philosophy departments, by people with sympathies closer to Luke’s than you’d think.
That said, a lot of people go into graduate programs for bad reasons. Here are two I’ve been tempted by:
#1.
Minimizing Status Risk. A lot of people think about risk in terms of financial gain or loss, but few think about risk in terms of status when it’s a real concern for many people. Graduating college can be intimidating, especially if you’re at a prestigious college, because you’re about to be stripped of your hierarchical standing among people your age. If you’ve attended, say, Harvard for four years, you’ve spent those four years thinking of yourself on the top of the food chain relative to other college students.
Once you’re out of college, this is no longer true, and you’re measured by what kind of job you have. It’s extremely tempting to avoid this by applying to graduate school, because graduate school allows you to continue the imagined hierarchical standing that you’ve had for the past few years. Eventually you’ll get a Ph.D. and be on top of the intellectual food chain. This has nothing to do with “avoiding the real world”, because “the real world” as an employment area is conspicuously centered on office jobs or whatever the majority of people happen to do for money. (I wonder if farmers consider everyone else to have a “fake” job. Probably.)
It’s a way of avoiding vulnerability to your status, because working as a clerk or receptionist or barista or server or whatever after college is generally not prestigious and makes you feel like your intellect isn’t worth anything. That’s an uncomfortable feeling, sure, but make sure you’re not eyeing a Ph.D. just to avoid that feeling.
#2.
Even if you’re not avoiding Status Risk, make sure you’re not getting a Ph.D. just to feel like an intellectual hotshot anyway. A lot of people reason about competence in binary ways (expert or non-expert) even though competence obviously exists on a spectrum, so it’s tempting to get a title that lends you immediately to the “expert” end of any discussion. That way, you can throw your weight around whenever there’s a clash of words.
With philosophy especially, it’s enigmatic to a lot of people. There’s a mystery of what you’re actually learning in an advanced program. So a Ph.D. looks like a “certified smart person” badge to a lot of people, and that’s tempting. Make sure you’re not getting it for that reason either.
Here’s the litmus test. Ask yourself: “would I self-study this material anyway if I had the next three-five years paid for? Would this occupy a large part of my time regardless of what I’m doing?” If so, it’s worth it.
Philosophy makes a good hobby. You can do it anywhere, and no special equipment is required.
Doing it right, of course, likely requires having good mentors who can guide you away from the path to crankdom. Whether these mentors are best found in academic philosophy programs, I am not certain.
Yeah, woodshedding isnt good in philsoophy—it usually results in incomprehensible output. But it is easy to find critics if you want to.
I agree with this. However, I wager that actually wanting to find critics is a nigh-impossible task for the average person.
And it frees you to pursue some other job activity, which, you know, pays your bills.
Philosopher Michael Huemer has a page “Should I go to graduate school in philosophy?” It begins:
This link may have changed my life. Thanks for sharing it. Really, thanks.
You could say much the same about most academic departments. A lot of people go to grad school because school is what they’re good at.
I think the main benefits of getting a PhD are:
Surrounded by smart people and intellectually curious people (graduate school is probably on the pareto boundary for this criterion)
Learn things about your field that would be impossible to find in books
Learn how to do research (in particular, how to pose and solve problems that take months to years and that no one has solved before)
Learning to do research involves, among other things, learning to reason about what approaches are likely to work and solve interesting problems, which is particularly difficult because you’ll be able to bring P(success) up from 1% to 30% but not all the way up to 100%. So the other side of this is being relentlessly critical of your own ideas, even after you’ve sunk weeks into them, so as to prune away the other 70% of the probability mass after a couple weeks of time investment instead of after a couple months / years of time investment.
If you are optimizing purely to get a degree, then you’ll probably want to hit up some combination of all of those factors. However, be sure that you’re not really asking ‘how can I optimize my degree such that it’s useful for X later’.
Since the degree itself is largely worthless, it may be better to optimize not for the phd, but for the contacts and social status needed to do anything with it.
Alternately, perhaps the answer is ‘get a degree in a useful field instead’.
I tend to agree with all that quite intensely.
One way of thinking about this is “optimize for having good 4 years of your life” not “optimize for something you can get from having spent those 4 years in a phd program”. If you consider it, there is actually very few things you can get after having a phd in philosophy, that you could not having a phd in other field, like economics. This includes sometimes even a career as a professional philosopher.
About your link, it shows that going through the degree is worthless, whereas the degree itself still signals some things, I know someone who is pursuing a PHD (DPhil) because it signals earning capacity, which he’ll later turn into banking to earn to give.
One interesting remark about the status and contacts, is that it may cost 10 times less money, and half or a quarter of the time, to get the exact same contacts and status if you optimize for contacts and status than if you actually were pursuing a PHD. But people usually are not willing to go outside that outside the box box.
By and large then I agree with your conclusion, specially when considering the 1⁄20 − 1⁄50 chances of actually making into a philosophy PHD program.
Have you ever seen this actually work? It’s usually pretty obvious to me when someone is pursuing this strategy and I usually avoid such people because they are trying to extract value from me without much to offer in return.
When someone wants to befriend you despite not belonging to your class you run away?
For me, I would minimise contact if this person appears overly ingratiating,
If you’re hoping to teach philosophy for a living 90-95% of what you’re optimizing for should be a) program ranking and b) getting published as much as possible in the most prestigious journals. It’s an absurdly competitive job market and failing to optimize for the above will leave you teaching at community colleges in places you probably don’t want to live in.
What is your goal? Why would get a PhD help you meet it? Is your goal to have a PhD?
My comment at a recent thread includes a list of the necessary conditions, as I see it, to want to go for a humanities PhD. If you can optimize for those criteria, you are doing well.
I would suggest NOT optimizing for
“3) Young advisor” (Why care about his/her age?)
“4) Level of similarity between what you want to research, 5)Freedom to do what you want in terms of directing your research” (A PhD is only worthwhile if your adviser is wise and benevolent and you are fully prepared to be guided in your learning by him or her.)
“6) Comfortable physical environment” (You don’t want some concrete jungle nightmare, but most prestigious universities [the only worthwhile type] have a pretty good environment.)
“7) Good contacts” (You probably won’t get an academic job, but if all the conditions exist to get you an academic job, like a good adviser, prestigious university, etc., then good contacts will be follow naturally.)
or
“9)Nothing to do with academia” (Why are you bothering with a PhD?)
As to 3) : Philosophy PhDs can sometimes take a long time, compared to other disciplines—in part because unlike, say, chemistry, there’s no objective criterion to appeal to. I knew a philosophy PhD who spent >15 years in grad school, and part of that (several years lost each time) was because she had not one but two (old) advisers die on her.
6) There are huge differences among say Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, and Berkeley’s environments. All are good, but in meaningfully different directions
7) You cannot hope for contacts to fall into your lap. No matter where you go, it takes work to meet people and maintain relationships. And yet, these can be absolutely key in all sorts of endeavors, so taking steps to reduce the work needed can be very valuable.
Can’t a person want to get a PhD and also want other things at the same time?
You can, but you can’t get a PhD while wanting other things. Or, at least, it often seems that way.