“The people that are the most susceptible to the corporate bullshit tended to choose the worst solutions to those problems on a consistent basis,” Littrell said.

Hmmmmmmmm.

Well that goes some way partially to explaining why management at large corporations almost as a rule are uselessly incompetent.

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[–] 29 points 7 months ago (16 children)

Littrell noted the workers who participated in the study all came from highly educated backgrounds in HR, accounting, marketing and finance, had bachelor’s degrees and even PhDs, which shows the findings go beyond simply assessing the intelligence of the study participants.

Actually, I'm not convinced that we've managed to eliminate that hypothesis. The only group that gives me pause is accounting.

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  • [+] 14 points 7 months ago (9 children)
  • [–] 8 points 7 months ago (8 children)

    A PhD is when you know everything about one specific rock on the beach, is how I put it. You know exactly where it is, all of its properties, and can go to it any time. Outside of that one rock, maybe a slightly above-average person, but nothing special.

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  • [+] 4 points 7 months ago (7 children)
  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (6 children)

    Generally speaking a PhD requires producing original research. Which ass-tier PhDs are you referencing that only require learning?

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  • [+] 8 points 7 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago*

    PhD is really mostly a proxy for how rich or educated your parents were. And rich people always score higher on general intelligence because they are better educated due to money. Less than a 1/3 of PhD students are first-generation. Meaning 2/3 of them have parents who have advanced degrees.

    I was a first gen PhD student. I was the only one in my cohort of 20 students who was. Everyone else had highly educated parents. I ended up quitting because the deck was so incredibly stacked against me, and my dream job/career was basically the lazy fall-back career of folks who had generations of education and money carrying them through life.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    I mean that's mostly true. Coming up with novel ideas and how to test them is a small (but critical) part of the job. Still I agree, you don't actually spend that much time on it.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago* (2 children)

    No it doesn't. You are confusing the ideal of a PhD with the reality.

    Most PhDs are doing bland derivative safe stuff, to get their degree and get a job. Very few are doing anything legitimately original. And most of them won't get a job in their field anyway. We have way too many PhDs because they are the cheap labor for teaching in the university systems, that have over-enrolled for decades so they have to hire less faculty.

    Most of my cohort in grad school did not belong there, at a mid-level state school. Only about 1/4 of us were serious about our studies. Yeah, at elite schools you will be doing original research for sure, at most low/mid level programs (and there are a lot) most PhDs are just people with good grades killing time tying to figure out what they want out of life, and a PhD is a good way to do that for 5-10 years. The time to graduate has been going up to over 6 years on average now.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago* (1 child)

    Mmm you know that's a good point, I never even considered looking at mid or low tier programs when I was school shopping. Your point reminds me of Mike Israetel's embarrassing doctorate that he likes to use as a kudgle. I could have done his dissertation without the typos and I am educated in a completely different field.

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  • [–] 8 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    All of those sound structured backgrounds that apply fixed definitions and derivatives based on that. They lack a developed sense of creativity outside the rigidity of their domain and so, are pretty much biological LLMs after a decade of purposed training and instructions.

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