Leo D.M.J. Aurini - March 03, 2015


Aurini's Insight： Advice for a History PhD Candidate

Topics
zero-sum game
Hosted by
Leo D.M.J. Aurini
Mentioned
Aaron Clary John C. Wright Jared Diamond
Aurini's Insight： Cars, Horses, Civilization, and Freedom Aurini's Insight： The Correlation of Liberalism & Keynesianism

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

132.93

Word count

1,450

Sentence count

95

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about what a PhD in history means to me, why I think it's worth it, and why you should consider getting a PhD. I also talk about why it's a good idea to get a PhD even if you don't have a masters.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Music
00:00:28.000 So this is a requested video from a student finishing his PhD in history.
00:00:39.620 This is going to be a general strategic analysis of where he finds himself, where he can go
00:00:47.360 from here, and what he should be doing and focusing on right now.
00:00:55.880 So to kick it off, we all know Aaron Clary's book Worthless.
00:01:02.120 We all know that a PhD in history is basically financially worthless.
00:01:07.680 And I spoke to this guy a little bit, and he told me I wish I'd read that book years
00:01:13.960 ago because I was seriously considering going into biology.
00:01:17.020 So all of you young kids that are learning from our mistakes, please learn from them.
00:01:24.340 He wishes he'd gone into biology because there are tons of applications for that.
00:01:28.900 And furthermore, I was saying to him, imagine if you'd gone into biology but maintained history
00:01:36.420 as a passion.
00:01:38.280 You could have, you know, Jared Diamond wrote some interesting books, Guns, Germs, and Steel,
00:01:45.420 which have a lot of good history in them with a few liberal biases.
00:01:49.340 But, you know, if he'd gone into biology, you know, hindsight being 20-20, then he still
00:01:55.660 could have written about history but with this information from his biology background.
00:02:03.660 It could have been absolutely wonderful.
00:02:06.240 So if you're a young kid, no, stay away from the humanities.
00:02:09.580 They are incredibly expensive and ultimately pretty bloody worthless since most of your learning,
00:02:15.760 everything you can do in your spare time, you're honestly not going to learn that much from
00:02:20.440 these profs.
00:02:21.440 It really is a giant Ponzi scheme.
00:02:27.000 Now that said, I'm going to break from Aaron's stance somewhat in that I think that there is
00:02:36.860 a lot of value to be had from living in a society where people do have PhDs in history, in English,
00:02:46.540 in philosophy.
00:02:47.540 Certainly, the system is completely broken right now and they're shoving everybody and
00:02:52.460 his kid brother into these degrees.
00:02:55.080 And the average IQ of universities is just plummeting.
00:02:59.840 But there is some value to having these educations.
00:03:03.740 It's just a shame that they're not doing a very good job anymore.
00:03:08.460 So for this guy, because he's so close at this point, like he's got his masters, he's
00:03:17.680 working on his PhD.
00:03:19.260 At this point, you know, in for a dime, in for a dollar, you might as well finish it.
00:03:25.340 That's the basic advice.
00:03:26.720 You know what?
00:03:27.720 Finish it because then you can put a doctor next to your name.
00:03:30.380 And suddenly, even though you probably learned more about history because of your passion
00:03:37.180 than you did from the actual school, despite that, that doctor next to your name will make
00:03:43.580 a difference in a way that, for instance, BA won't.
00:03:49.360 Even the masters is a decent accomplishment. 1.00
00:03:52.160 Even if other people that got the PhD or the masters are complete morons. 0.99
00:03:56.320 So, obviously, at this point, stick with it. 1.00
00:03:59.940 That would be my initial advice.
00:04:02.820 Now, on the broader level, and this is where it gets interesting, in a broader level, ask
00:04:11.320 yourself what you're doing.
00:04:13.120 See, on the one hand, right now, you've kind of made some mistakes, you're here now.
00:04:19.360 Your first goal, your primary goal, is get the PhD and then secure a paid position from
00:04:27.820 a college or a university.
00:04:32.500 Realize that what you're doing at this point, the TAing that you're doing for other students,
00:04:39.380 the research that you're working on, the papers you're writing, don't be doing this with this
00:04:47.540 naive notion of you're part of the intelligentsia and, you know, noble calling to expand the knowledge
00:04:54.280 of the human race.
00:04:55.160 That stuff went out the window at least 50 years ago.
00:04:59.840 What you're doing is playing a political game.
00:05:03.160 There are very few positions for professors, and there are a lot of applicants looking for
00:05:10.560 those easy dollars.
00:05:12.940 You are in a very hyper-competitive, zero-sum game.
00:05:17.320 And that's the important part to remember, zero-sum.
00:05:21.440 Every PhD candidate, you know, that gets one of these positions is one person that doesn't.
00:05:27.120 It's not a growth industry, okay?
00:05:29.180 There's only so many slots each year.
00:05:31.120 It is zero-sum, and you need to fight tooth and nails to get into one of those positions,
00:05:38.020 and you need to say the right things.
00:05:39.740 You need to be politically correct.
00:05:41.400 You need to fit in with these people and get along with people.
00:05:45.260 So certainly studying the art of getting along with people, studying game to understand how
00:05:51.120 women work, all of this extremely valuable. 1.00
00:05:55.980 If you're smart and charismatic, then you can likely get a position.
00:06:01.680 So that's part one, the zero-sum part.
00:06:05.880 Part two is not zero-sum.
00:06:11.820 And this is where you make your contribution to humanity.
00:06:17.360 Because doing this whole PhD thing, it's very cynical, it is very depressing.
00:06:22.060 Nobody wants to be a mercenary like that, but you need to be a mercenary because it's
00:06:26.060 zero-sum.
00:06:27.060 Only one person wins a war.
00:06:30.360 The part where you contribute to humanity is the part that is not zero-sum.
00:06:36.720 And that is the market in general.
00:06:41.540 You see, when somebody sells a book, you know, for instance, I have a science fiction novel
00:06:47.780 for sale.
00:06:48.780 When John C. Wright sells a science fiction novel, that's not a sale that he stole from
00:06:54.560 me or that he took away from me.
00:06:56.920 No, by him selling a good science fiction novel, that person now wants to read another
00:07:02.400 good science fiction novel.
00:07:04.440 It's a growth market.
00:07:06.020 You know, that's the beautiful thing about the free market is that it's always growth.
00:07:12.520 Unless if somebody, you know, completely steals all the money out of the economy, thank
00:07:16.040 goodness that's not happening.
00:07:19.960 So ask yourself what your market is because, yeah, this whole university intelligentsia
00:07:27.480 bubble, it's going to pop at some point, you know, maybe, maybe not in the next 20 years,
00:07:32.160 but it is going, it could be in the next two years, who knows, you know, get there while
00:07:38.300 you can fight for that zero-sum nonsense, but look at how you're going to contribute to
00:07:44.820 humanity in this non-zero-sum way.
00:07:46.960 How are you going to take this knowledge of history that you have and create a product
00:07:52.640 that people want?
00:07:55.140 And there's several ways you can go about this.
00:07:58.920 You could, if there's a particular field of history that fascinates you, you know, don't
00:08:04.600 write boring white papers that only other PhDs read. 0.98
00:08:08.360 Like, what a waste of your bloody time. 0.97
00:08:10.600 You know, write the papers they want to read. 0.98
00:08:12.740 Don't try and write the truth for them.
00:08:14.940 What you should do instead is take this knowledge and start putting it into books, for example.
00:08:20.620 You know, if you can put a doctorate next to your name, and if you're tenured at a college,
00:08:26.320 and you write a book for mass consumption, you know, for the layman out there, you've just
00:08:33.620 contributed to the overall level of erudition in this society.
00:08:38.620 You've just done something great, and you've given people a product that they want.
00:08:43.300 Alternatively, YouTube videos.
00:08:46.680 You know, you have experience putting together these lectures for when you're TAing.
00:08:54.100 You know, you have this broad depth of knowledge.
00:08:57.780 You are very familiar with researching things in the library and citing them correctly.
00:09:03.480 And I dare say that you might know all the legalities controlling how you use images.
00:09:10.780 You know, or maybe you don't.
00:09:12.780 But if you don't look into that, you could be putting together great YouTube videos, great
00:09:20.120 historical, informative things that are entertaining and fun to listen to.
00:09:25.180 And with these, you've got long-term residual income coming in.
00:09:33.860 You could also look into places like Khan Academy.
00:09:36.580 Now, there might be some non-compete agreements if you do get a position, but, you know, nonetheless,
00:09:44.040 you might be able to do videos for Khan Academy, which offers free history lectures, which,
00:09:50.360 you know, both you and me wish we'd taken advantage of rather than shelling out for the
00:09:55.160 paper.
00:09:56.160 But, yeah, it really separated into these two things.
00:10:00.340 You've got the growth industry where you actually contribute to humanity, and then you've
00:10:04.540 got the cynical, political, zero-sum game that you need to win.
00:10:10.980 But aside from that, you know, if you're this close to a PhD, yeah, you could have spent
00:10:16.680 the money better, hindsight's 20-20, but it sounds like you're in a pretty good position.
00:10:21.320 You just need to think creatively, think in new ways.
00:10:25.780 Play the game the way they want you to play the game.
00:10:28.360 But on your own time, make up your own game.
00:10:31.320 Anyway.
00:10:32.320 Irini out.
00:10:33.320 Irini out.
00:10:34.320 Irini out.
00:10:35.320 Irini out.
00:10:40.320 Irini out.
00:10:45.320 Irini out.
00:10:46.360 I'll see you next timektorẫ' 0.91
00:10:52.500 You