Re: Christine Thorburn to retire?

On Sep 7, 9:42 pm, "b...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <bjwei...@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Sep 5, 11:12 pm, ilan...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

I know her from being at Stanford and she is one of a fairly
significant number of top riders who ended up doing a Ph.D. in
medicine or biology (I know at least 4). I personally think that their
scientific career is a waste of time compared to their cycling. In
particular, in areas like medicine or biology, a Ph.D. is more often
than not just a drone who carries out an experiment thought out by the
adviser and the results have little or no impact on anything. The
limited discussions I had with stanford graduate students convinced me
that their research was useless but not in the noble sense. They then
end up doing a career than thousands of other people do equally well
or better when instead they have the opportunity of being the best in
the world at something, namely cycling.

Dumbass,

You think like that because you're a mathematician,
not a scientist.  Science, especially experimental science,
advances mostly by plodding.  To an outside observer,
the plodders may look like hacks, but they are the
foundation of the field.  A scientific field that contained
only geniuses and pundits would be dead within two
decades.  Even some pundits recognize this.

Ben
12K plodder

Most of the research in these fields including math has absolutely no
value or interest though at least in math it is partly a reflection of
the creativity of one person as opposed to drones getting Ph.D.'s for
being lab technicians. Even if it did have value, in these
experimental fields, anyone who is doing a Ph.D. or working for some
"important" researcher is completely replaceable, for each of the
world class cyclists who gave it up for a Ph.D. there were a dozen
other grad students from China who could have done their results.

-ilan
.

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