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Having students, and in particular PhD students, was one of my main motivations to work in Academia. What could make more sense, be more gratifying, than teaching others whatever you could? When I started, I was thus more than happy to have students that were eager to learn skills, learn about research, learn how to publish papers and navigate the research ecosystem. I was happy to see my students' technical skills grow, to see them graduate and to see them get fancy jobs in big companies. Ten years later, while I still like my students and like to see them happy, this really doesn't feel like enough, and not by far the most important. This is one of the main reasons I started to write opinion pages on ecology, academia or domination. Disclaimers: I am a researcher in an extremely privileged environment and very specific field, AI. The following is thus of course a very subjective view, based on the environment I know. It also touches topics (e.g., ethics) I know very little about. The main things one expects to learn from a PhD in AI are of course technical knowledge and skills. Knowledge in Mathematics, Computer Science, AI. Coding skills, debugging skills. Just as important are 'soft' skills, project management skills, paper writing skills, communication skills (ask my students how many times they redo figures, and how many comments they get on every presentation). At the end of a PhD, one gets a diploma. The aura of a PhD, of the lab, potentially the aura of highly cited peer-reviewed scientific publications (note that both citation count and peer-reviewed acceptance are very bad indicators of the quality of a work) are likely to give students access to privileged jobs and positions of power in society (note that most of my students already come from privileged socio-economical environments). Their knowledge and skills in themselves also increase their agency. From the start, it was also obvious to me that another key thing I wanted to transmit was some sort of critical thinking. I believe that deep and constant questioning is central to science. Questioning yourself, what you did, what you do, whether you made errors in your reasoning or in your implementation (the main obstacle to debugging, a key part of computer science, is the deep belief that you didn't do any mistake). Questioning whether what you read is true or misleading, questioning the beliefs of the research community, questioning authority. Also questioning why: whether what you want to do is actually interesting or valuable, whether what the research community does is meaningful, why things are as they are. I believe that asking such questions seriously should lead to a strong dose of humility. Indeed, the answer to most of these questions is that you don't know, that your guess isn't worth much more than anyone else's and that what you believe is most likely wrong or not very interesting. This should lead to a complicated balance, you should try to develop and follow your intuition, trust yourself, persevere, while keeping in mind that you are likely wrong, and that you should be mindful about what others think and do. I somehow thought that helping my students develop critical thinking and humility was enough for me. I realized that it was easy to restrict the use of critical thinking to a portion of your life, your job, and not apply it to broader ethical or moral questions, which to me is the main reason to cultivate it. While in no case my expertise, Ethics is however much more important to me than Science. To me, Ethics is mainly thinking, again and again, about who you want to be, how you want to live, how you want to interact with others. Complicated questions again, without any clear universal truth, but questions worth asking, and that should impact the way one lives. On these questions again, I believe critical thinking should lead first to humility, realizing that you are in no way better or worth more than others. It should also make you question the way society works, the domination dynamics you are used to and a part of yourself. Realizing you are privileged and in positions of power should give an increased feeling of responsibility. To me this responsibility should not only be a remote one, like advancing science, fighting poverty or climate change, it should also be present in your daily life, in every action and interaction. Today, one of the most important things I would like my students to get is the importance of caring about and being mindful of others. I would like to see them practice this during their PhD as much as publishing papers. I have no clue how to achieve this, and my belief that being a good scientist would lead them there seems very naive. |