Put the “Ph” Back in PhD (opens in new tab)

I don't think the problem is with PhDs failing to engage with philosophy, but rather, with the name "philosophy" having been hijacked and turned towards something that isn't worth studying. When you say students should learn more epistemology, I'm 100% on board - but when you say students should learn more "philosophy including epistemology", I suddenly anticipate them being exposed to a bunch of low-quality thinking reflecting long-dispelled confusions.

Most of the good philosophy work has moved to other labels, like "rationality", out of a need to distance itself from the concentrated confusion being taught in universities. If you want to teach good philosophy, great! But please, please don't expose your students to the concentrated confusion that passes for most of philosophy; apply a strong filter and teach your students to apply that filter themselves.

Conceptually, I agree with his view that without a better understanding and appreciation for philosophy, humanity is limited by the progress science makes. But if I'm understanding his reasoning, he wants more philosophy so that scientists can become well-rounded generalists, reduce competitiveness, and better communicate to voters and politicians. These might be valuable benefits but, to me, humanity could benefit most if scientists had a much better understanding of rational ethics. IMO, universities are churning out too many unethical scientists and, for proof, I offer how much money goes into government-related projects (e.g., weapons, surveillance, control). A rational understanding of ethics is needed to reduce the research and funding of the plethora of destructive and control-oriented efforts. Not to mention that if scientists ever truly learned rational ethics, they'd no longer ask for government grants as they'd know it's wrong to take stolen money.

When Casadevall (and others) argue for more ethics and epistemology in the first year of a PhD program, they should be transparent that they would take away time and attention for much of the material currently taught in the first year of PhD programs.

I'm not arguing that it's not a worthwhile tradeoff. I just wish we were more transparent about these tradeoffs when discussing what we add to a curriculum.

I don't necessarily see that this is particularly relevant. The point of a PhD is surely to show that a student is capable of performing at the very peak of their field. The well-roundedness should come later, and just like an undergraduate degree is not "Job Training" and postgraduate one doesn't instantly make you a leading scientist.

Also, from what I saw of other students doing PhD's in the US, they already take several years longer than us in Europe because of the lack of specialisation in undergraduate degrees - they spend the first few years in effect "Catching up".

The issues facing scientific advancement and discourse have nothing to do with a lack of "thinking big" in postgraduate education. A lot of people do think big, but there are plenty of economic barriers - some intrinsic, others artificial, that prevent whatever vague idealism the author is going for.

Nor is it the fault of scientists that voters and politicians do not understand them. More often than not, it's a refusal to understand or apathy towards doing it. In fact, politics is not inherently concerned with factual information almost at a fundamental level. If voters have no drive to autodidact, there will be no one out there to spoonfeed them information.

Quantitative skills are already part of scientific practice at its core. So is ethics, particularly over the past half century. Learning to code and debating utilitarianism will not change anything that the author is concerned about.