andensande

I second this -- Harl's courses are fantastic, and really enjoyable to listen to.

In a similar vein, for Australian Rules football, there is the unbelievable AFL Tables [1]. There are the headline statistics you'd expect, but it also has really detailed, player-specific statistics for each match. The records - although they are incomplete - go back to 1897.

[1] https://afltables.com/afl/afl_index.html

I went into a PhD programme in Australia straight out of my undergrad degree, and while it certainly wasn't great for my financial security, I'm glad I did it. Anecdotes don't make data, of course, but this is background to what follows.

I had a really easy time getting admitted to the program, was fully funded and received a scholarship. I had a lot of freedom in terms of topic and got to travel every year of the PhD, so I think the actual experience was much better than it sounds like other people have it in the linked study.

What I did see, however, was a university system that was pushing through students at what I would consider an irresponsible pace. This was especially the case with foreign students, who were fodder for the supervisors' career aspirations (the supervisors having to see through a number of students to completion per five-year period to advance). The quality of the resultant PhDs was shockingly low in some cases, but there is no incentive for good theses, just complete theses. And for a university system like Australia's, which is to a large degree reliant on exporting education, these incentives are probably far worse now than they were when I was in the midst of it in 2015-16.

The other major problem is that a PhD is, essentially, an apprenticeship for academia. In Australia, we have a apprenticeships in trades (like electrical, plumbing, etc.) in which you learn 'on the job'; you're paid poorly, you do the menial jobs, but at the end you have a career. A PhD is like that: you do almost everything a lecturer or professor does, except -- and here's the catch -- there's no job prospects whatsoever at the end. And it seems like it'll get worse. Imagine working for four years on something that you love, that you're passionate about, and that you think will change the world intellectually, to only end up being some cheap labour to get publications for others more advanced in their careers -- and then you're done, and shown the door.

I was incredibly lucky in that I got a two-year postdoc, but I had to change fields (which I wanted to do), and I ended up paying for my own post-doc doing contracted research through the university. My heart wasn't in being an academic, and the applied side appealed to me a lot -- but I imagine this would be intolerable for many candidates.

These are factors I tell anyone who is thinking of a PhD. It is a highly-specific apprenticeship for a single industry that is, in Australia, collapsing substantially as the result of its own mismanagement, poor education funding policy at the Federal level, and (of course) the pandemic. It's no wonder that PhD candidates are so discontent, in my view -- despite my having had a wonderful and very fulfilling time.

The conclusions of the article seem a bit far-fetched to me, and seem to ignore the rhetorical style of poetry and theatre at the time. One of the examples the author gives (where they missed a contracted instance of "the"):

[...] Look like th' innocent flower,/But be the serpent under ’t.

It is still acceptable in modern English to say something like

Seem like the innocent flower, but be as the serpent underneath it.

Certainly not casual, everyday speech -- but using a rhetorical strategy of referring to an archetypal innocent flower, or an archetypal serpent. I think it's an enormous stretch to claim that Lady Macbeth and Macbeth had a specific innocent flower in mind when they were speaking.

You can gloss it with 'under observation' I think fairly well. But the problem with

(1) She would have had to have been observed.

is that it misses out the gerund form preceding 'observed', which alters the meaning slightly in my opinion. It's difficult to get at precisely but I feel like the original sentence has a feeling of time-boundedness around when she was observed which you don't get without that gerund. I think?

The difficulty of mastering the tenses is something that I think a lot of English speakers overlook. There's a lot of really precise and difficult-to-explain subtleties in English. (Of course, English isn't unique in this regard -- but I feel like certain things are taken for granted).

Something that catches a lot of English as second language people out is the correct time to use the gerund form (i.e., the '-ing' form). For instance,

(1) I am walking to the shops.

is clear -- it is occurring in that moment. But what about the subtle difference between (2a) and (2b)?

(2a) I live in Berlin.

(2b) I'm living in Berlin.

To me -- a native English speaker -- (2b) implies that the speaker generally lives elsewhere, while (2a) doesn't. But they're both technically correct if the speaker is, at that moment, a resident of Berlin.

There are more examples I could give. Teaching these sorts of subtleties, though, and mastering them can be very difficult.

A final example that I really like, and one that my syntax lecturer used to use a lot:

(3) She would have had to have been being watched.

Seven (or maybe six, depending on how you view 'watched') verbs in a row! Native English speakers grasp this really intuitively, but non-native speakers may have trouble parsing these into a coherent picture. To illustrate this -- try and gloss this sentence another way while conveying the meaning. If you speak another language, try and translate it! English verbs are hard.

Not related as such, but worth pointing out. The author of this discussion - and the project manager of Audacity - is Tantacrul, who is, in my opinion, one of the best music youtubers around. His video[0] on corporate music was fantastic, and his video on Shostakovich[1] made me totally reconsider his music. Plus, he's funny! So there's that. Highly recommend!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G77ev9pks4I

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCxzMYVvHBg