There is a PhD comic for that too: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1056lloyd9988 wrote:Do you mean like your solving problems that not even professors in the university can help you with??Oto wrote:And you always risk either becoming jaded, or suddenly realizing that you actually know absolutely nothing, or just going a little crazy
Basically, it's a side effect of having to specialize really narrowly and having to directly confront problems of epistemology (i.e. philosophy of knowledge - how do you know what you know?). If you keep asking yourself that question long enough, you will almost inevitably hit a wall and panic at one point or another. Closely related to it is also the feeling of being a fake/fraud. Pretty much every PhD student, especially in humanities/social sciences, will at one point dig deep enough into "do I really know this? does my work really matter?" and have to confront the answers being "no", because any proper critical philosophy of knowledge will force you to seriously consider thatt possibility. At which point you feel like the dumbest, fakest, most inarticulate and socially useless person ever.
That good news is that people normally recover from that pretty quick
And thanks for the replies guys! And yeah, writing that made me miss godix. That's one Lip Flapper interview that I would've loved to have read if it were possible...
