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John Wilkins is an eternal student, who thinks philosophy of biology is at least as interesting as politics or sport and twice as important. He has a PhD from the University of Melbourne and worked at the University of Queensland, in Australia, before taking up a research fellowship at the University of Sydney. After a varied career, involving factories, gardening, civil service, publishing, graphics, public relations but not, unfortunately for the CV, driving a truck, John finally completed his thesis on species concepts in 2004, which he has worked into two books.

This blog ~~is designed~~ evolved to host any random thoughts that happen to be passing through my forebrain at a given moment. So there will be errors...

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Is it true? I don't know

Category: Humor
Posted on: August 16, 2008 1:57 AM, by John S. Wilkins

Find more posts in: Education & Careers

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Comments

I don't know either. But if I did, I'd be sure of all the details.

Posted by: Bob O'H | August 16, 2008 2:17 AM

When I was 16 I knew everything. As I got older I discovered that I knew a lot less, but more in detail about the things I did know. By the time I get to 60, I expect to know an infinite amount of detail, about nothing.

Posted by: John S. Wilkins | August 16, 2008 2:29 AM

Let us assume (total knowledge) = (what you know)(how much you know about it).

The graph as drawn suggests PhDs have less total knowledge than Masters degree holders, and of course, academia would never stand for such a thing.

So a much more reasonable guess for the graph would be to hold total knowledge constant, so that what you know is proportional to 1/(how much you know about it). Thus, at the two extrema, we would have "Know nothing about everything", and "Know everything about nothing".

Fortunately, this is consistent with observations, since the PhD approaches "everything about nothing", while adolescents are generally observed to consider themselves experts in everything, while demonstrating that they know nothing about anything.

Posted by: Matthew L. | August 16, 2008 2:57 AM

yup. Looks pretty good to me. I'm just about dead on in that sweet spot.

Posted by: Dorid | August 16, 2008 3:08 AM

Wifey and I tell the teens to leave home now, while they still know everything!

Posted by: KiwiInOz | August 16, 2008 5:20 AM

"Your wise man don't know how feels... to be thick as a brick" (hat tip to Ian Anderson). But how can he not know, and be wise?

Posted by: jeff | August 16, 2008 6:48 AM

But how can he not know, and be wise?

Wisdom is recognising that one is fundamental ill informed and totally ignorant about almost everything and learning to live with it.

Posted by: Thony C. | August 16, 2008 7:08 AM

This is important. (funny, but important.)

The way that University administration (and much of the public, probably) see this is totally different, in that as one moves towards PhD it is assume that breadth increases (somehow). So, faculty, for instance, are put in charge of important stuff of which they a) a clueless and b) don't care, but a) everyone assumes they are expert and b) everyone trusts that they care.

Many problems a most universities and colleges can be partly or even wholly fixed by a) removing responsibility for anything but teaching and research from faculty, and b) recognizing that not everyone is good at both teaching and research and assigning responsibility accordingly.

Posted by: Greg Laden | August 16, 2008 10:27 AM

How can we know anything for sure?:)

Posted by: James Goetz | August 16, 2008 10:31 AM

The way I have always heard this joke is that you have a choice of two career paths: either you learn more and more about less and less, until eventually you know everything about nothing, at which point you are a PhD, or you learn less and less about more and more, ending up knowing nothing about everything - as a journalist.

Posted by: Thinker | August 16, 2008 11:26 AM

I'd imagine one's breadth of knowledge increases somewhat as one moves to post doc and prof

Posted by: dveduu | August 16, 2008 11:40 AM

The Y-axis really should be labeled:

"What you *Think* you know"

(Actually, to be clearer, I'd label it "Things you think you know something about")

Posted by: Divalent | August 16, 2008 3:06 PM

John S Wilkins averred @#2