No, no, no, no, no. You still don't understand what you
wrote.
Get off the smart thing - you're too hung up on it and it's
totally irrelevant here.
Okay, let me see if I can give you the crayon version of the
point here.
1) Just=only.
2) Knowledgeable=possessing or exhibiting knowledge.
3) "It just means he's knowledgable"= "He is only in possession of
knowledge".
My point right from the start is that you are incorrect because,
in stringing "just" and "knowledgable" is the same statement you
have excluded the analysis required in the production of the
required thesis for a PhD.
Is that simple enough for you, or do you still not understand
what you wrote?
Now, as for the grave you have further proceeded to dig, I put
it to you that you have not met your fair share of PhD
holders. If you had, you would realise that it is possible to
fail a PhD. It doesn't happen often, but it does
happen.
One of the reasons why you don't often see PhD failures is that
in getting to the point of starting the PhD, the candidates will
already have had to demonstrate the basic skills required to
complete the thesis. Oddly enough, I have come across one
case in which the candidate was so hopelessly inept that after
three reviews by markers, the fundamental problems with his
research were still not addressed and they had to show him the
door.
Second, whoever told you that anyone with sufficient time can
obtain a PhD is patently wrong. Candidates are given a
specific about of time in which to complete the PhD - the period
varies with the institution. Exceed that time without
reasonable cause and the candidature will expire.
Third, you don't seem to understand how a PhD thesis is
marked. Simple regurgitation of known facts is insufficient
for the thesis to be passed. A peripheral point is that more
often than not, external markers are brought in to mark the theses,
and the markers' academic reputations hang upon the quality of
their marking, so they cannot afford to not be stringent. The
requirements are that the thesis needs to contain original analyses
and conclusions, and as such someone who writes an 80,000-word
"liam keng" session will simply not pass.
Fourth, I'll disagree with your point that, "With easily
available knowledge supplied to anyone, they can all earn a PhD and
be a PhD holder". Just look at some of the posts on this
forum - I won't name names, but you can see that some posters here
cut and paste huge swags of newspaper articles and then present
conclusions that get everybody going "WTF?!". Like it or not,
it takes a certain amount of intelligence to first identify the
relevant facts, reject the red herrings, collate all of the
information, identify the underlying concepts (not just concrete
points) and turn it all into a coherent argument. Anybody can
pull a whole lot of facts together - it's turning the facts into
something that is more than the sum of its parts that makes a PhD
thesis, and that is in fact a form of the creation that you've
written about.
Fifth, the World Wide Web is a poor choice of examples to
support your argument. The Internet began life as a DARPA
(Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) project, created by a
bunch of military and academic researchers with - you guessed it -
PhDs. Whoops.
Also, PhDs as we understand them today were introduced in the
early 1800s in Germany, while the Stock Exchange started in 1792 in
New York. Not quite fair to ask someone to invent something
retroactively, is it?
For what it's worth, I do agree with you in part. In 1904,
a fellow by the name of Charles Spearman presented the concept of
g, or the general factor of intelligence, which roughly
approximates what you're trying to describe, and in the 104 years
since he presented the idea, nobody's ever been able to work out a
way of measuring it.
Not that I'm trying to rub it in, but knowing a few educated
people sinmply isn't enough to form the conclusion that "PhD =
Nerd/Geek". Sure, I've had enough classmates who have two
left feet and couldn't boil an egg if you held a gun to their
heads, but by the same measure more than enough of my
contemporaries are more than capable and competent in areas of
their lives outside their academic fields. It's simply not
reasonable to make sweeping generalisations, especially when you
can't explain how having a PhD automatically makes one a geek.
