08/15/08 PHD comic: 'What you know vs How much you know about it'

Greg Bernhardt

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham

More...

Gokul43201

From Murphy's Laws, Chapter: Experts

Weber's Definition : An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.

Doc Al

Hilarious. This is getting posted on my office door. (Maybe people will stop bothering me.)

CompuChip

Gokul, I remember having heard your quote, but somewhere else.
But it's a nice comic nonetheless. Currently, I'm nicely in the center of the graph... I think I'll stay there for a while :)

BobG

I've heard that,too.

Moonbear

Pretty funny. One of our faculty getting ready to retire is fond of saying his goals for the year are to do nothing...well. Seems to fit pretty well with that chart.

LightbulbSun

Blah, lame. I don't approve of this chart. It's saying ignorance is ok.

humanino

It's not. One's awareness of her/his own ignorance grows with knowledge anyway. This graph contains quite a bit of insight.

LightbulbSun

Saying that increasing your knowledge has a direct relationship with knowing less is approving of ignorance. I understand it can be interpreted as you are more aware of knowing there is much more to discover and therefore you realize you know less than what you previously thought, but it can also be interpreted as approving of perpetual and willful ignorance.

Doc Al

Lighten up. It's a joke!

LightbulbSun

I understand it's a joke, but people let their guard down with comedy. Too often people reaffirm their beliefs through comedy.

humanino

The joke is directed to people who have devoted their life to knowledge. By the time you have become a world expert in your field, maybe a field you have created, you deserve to be ironical about the time you spent deepening your understanding of a problem nobody else really cares about.

Doc Al

So you seriously think that folks with PhDs are anti-knowledge?

Math Is Hard

mmm...no. You missed the joke.

LightbulbSun

And this is a problem how?

People don't care about a lot of stuff because they much rather be ignorant. This doesn't make time devoted to a particular subject wasteful.

LightbulbSun

No? I'm saying that this comic can be looked at as an appeal to ignorance. Its message isn't clear enough.

humanino

This is not a problem to me at all. I found the joke funny. It seems to be a problem to you.
You will notice that I said "once one has become a world expert, one deserves the right to be ironical about it" which implies that the person who her/him-self spent all this time (so certainly does not consider it a waste) has the right to have humor from the perspective of what she/he has accomplished compared to the initial hopes. At some point one looks back to the graduate student years, when one thought to know everything, and now can really come to the conclusion "yes, I can say I know too much in this field" <---- JOKE.

The message is not clear to you only.