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How to get work done whilst feeling crippling shame?
In academic work, when we are writing or have written a paper for example, there might be strong feelings of shame about the work done or to be done. These feelings can get in the way of finishing or revising the paper, or sending it to colleagues. These feelings may often lead to the writer feeling, quite strongly, suicidal. For example, when shame is the first thing they think of when they wake up. Not getting work done also leads to further feelings of inadequacy and panic over the future. Hence, these feelings make writing difficult, but overcoming these feelings requires finishing the work to a good standard.
As per the title:
How can a researcher write and research when they feel ashamed?
The shame is about the style of writing and the depth of the content/research. It is not about there being something wrong with the research. For example, I might read what I have written and feel too bad to fix it. Or, I might feel that the content (the research) is simply not deep enough, which makes going deeper difficult. Through perseverance, I finish writing papers. But, it takes a long time in an environment where both quantity and quality are important.
I have in the past seen and asked a university psychologist, but they didn't have any specific advice. The psychologist was also supporting too many other members of staff and students to really give enough time to this problem, so I am not sure that this is an option to take again.
I am looking for techniques, founded in psychology, and ideally with some supporting evidence. But more general advice is also welcome.

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.

This sounds a lot like depression, first step is to go see a professional. The fact that you are sharing your experience and identifying what is going wrong is already a good step in the right direction. Share more, don't walk this journey alone. The best I can offer is general advice (things that worked for me). I believe too many people suffer without sharing, so thank you for sharing your story.
What helped me get through it was as follows:

Identify the next exciting thing that you would rather want to start with or do once this is out of the way (a new job, a vacation, a new task, a hobby).
Break down the work into the smallest possible chunks you can (e.g. write a paragraph on X, containing the following points, or improve on X by trying things 1 - 10, or code one six line function).
Then every day, just try to tick one of those off the list. Write one sentence, the next day try to get to two, the next day to three and so on.
The hardest part is to start. Just start. Think of one thing and just type that out, even if it is nonsense and you know it is. You can always come back later and improve on it.
Forget perfection, just get the stuff on the paper and tick off the tasks, see the progress.
Once everything is "done", critique the work, and write the things that suck about it as recommendations for future work.

Edit:

Forgive yourself every day! What you are going through is a completely valid experience, and you don't have to beat yourself up about it.

The upside of this experience is that you can now more easily identify the next time it pops up and act on it more quickly.
Best of luck. Its not easy but definitely doable even though it does not feel that way.

I agree, this sounds like generalized depression (possibly with a helping or two of anxiety and low self-esteem). These are things that need to be addressed by a counselor/therapist -- one with whom you can have regularly scheduled appointments with to track the behavior/feelings and any progression toward addressing it. In the end this is a question for a qualified professional, not the internet.

The OP said their university psychologist wasn't helpful. I personally haven't seen a university psychologist/therapist, but my friends and family who have all say that they weren't very helpful. My (non-university) therapist was extremely helpful for me, and I've experienced similar symptoms to the OP. @AnonymousScholar, I encourage you to not give up on therapy, perhaps even speak to a doctor. If you're feeling suicidal, please call a suicide help line.

Perhaps imposter syndrome, coupled with depression? And per @mgarey's advice, if you are feeling suicidal, PLEASE DO NOT DO THAT! PLEASE call a suicide hotline immediately!

One tip to perfectionist writers: don't wait to write until your inspiration is perfect. Start writing. Write, write, write, even if it isn't perfect.
If you do not like it afterwards, throw it away and write again. And, if necessary, again.
It's good to be a perfectionist critic. It's not good at all to be a perfectionist creator - separating the two can help you balancing quality and quantity and be more productive while making progress.

This is very hard to do, but it's good advice. Just starting is the most important thing, but for those perfectionists out here (me included), the hardest part.

The opposite of shame is compassion, I have learned. (If you do look for books or therapists or meditations, "self-compassion" might be a good keyword.)
For the writing part specifically, I highly recommend the book "The 7 Secrets of the Prolific: How to Overcome Procrastination, Perfectionism, and Writer's Block". Some of it is about recognizing and calming your inner critic, and some of it is useful writing advice about finishing. (Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird is a more literary, humorous take on writing advice.)
On shame in particular, Brene Brown is an expert who has written excellent self-help books based on her research. (She has a Ph.D. in social work, so sometimes her examples even come from academia, and I've enjoyed her methodological appendices to an unhealthy degree.) The Gifts of Imperfection is the one most centrally about not letting shame get in the way, and it's the book she generally recommends people start with. She has some videos on her website (including her TED talks, where I believe I first heard of her).
Good luck, Anonymous Scholar! You are not alone in struggling with shame about your work, and you deserve to feel better!

AnonymousScholar, hello!  I am a mental health professional, and I treat suicidal people.  I am not, however, your mental health professional, and my replying to you here does not make me your mental health professional, or otherwise establish a clinician-patient relationship between us, and it does not constitute medical treatment.
I wanted to reach out to you because feeling suicidal is a rather big deal.  It may not seem like that you.  Often people in your situation experience so much suicidal feeling for so long, that it becomes rather ordinary to them.  Like, "Oh yes, another paper, another day of wanting to kill myself, ho hum."
But it's not.
Posting to StackExchange, asking for pointers for how to write papers while feeling so much shame you feel suicidal is sort of like posting to ask how to focus on writing papers while the room around you is on fire.  This being StackExchange, you'll get a bunch of friendly, helpful replies that try to answer your question as asked.  But really, the answer to "how do I focus on writing my paper when the room is on fire" is not creative attentional hacks to focus despite the flames, it's evacuate the building!  Similarly, the answer to "how do I manage to write while burning with shame to the point I want to die" is not really how to manage to write while feeling like you do, it's treating your agonizing shame before it kills you.
Because, realistically, the answer to "how do I write while feeling crippling shame" is, obviously, "with enormous difficulty, if at all, and great suffering".  And you knew that already, but I think maybe you needed somebody to point out to you that that's not really negotiable, and that the problem here is not how to write, but how to feel less shame.
I'm glad to hear you've reached out to a psychologist in the past.  I hope when you talked to them, you didn't just ask for pointers for writing papers while feeling shame, but I'm suspecting that's what happened.  When you go to a mental health professional and say, "Hey, I'm having so much shame I'm having trouble doing my work" you get one sort of response - and sorry to say, it might not be much of a response, at an overworked university clinic.  You can anticipate getting a very different response when you go to a mental health professional and say, "Hey, I'm having so much shame I want to commit suicide."  That's a very, very big deal for mental health professionals.  Really for most health professionals of any sort.  We take that very seriously, and it's the sort of thing which justifies health systems mobilizing resources for you, that might not otherwise be available to you.
And if you did tell the psychologist that you were feeling suicidal in response to the shame you feel about your work, and they didn't respond with concern and additional resources, then I'm very sorry that happened.  That doesn't sound right at all.  I would beseech you to try again with a different mental health professional.
The standard of care where I am is that someone who is regularly experiencing the urge or inclination to kill themselves should, at the very least, be having a weekly treatment appointment with a psychotherapist.  "Psychotherapist" is the general term for a whole bunch of different sorts of mental health professional who can provide psychotherapy, which is treatment for emotional problems.  It includes psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, social workers, and various other sorts of professional.  Your jurisdiction may vary in what professions it credentials or licenses.
What the psychotherapist would help a person in your situation with is feeling less shame.  Unfortunately, that's not something that can be fixed overnight.  Would that it were so!  Alas, as you have probably noticed, pernicious thoughts and feelings can be very tenacious and hard to shift.  It can take a while, and quite a lot of effort.  It's easier with professional help and guidance.
I don't know where on the planet you are, and even if I knew, I might not know what resources are available to you besides your university's counseling service.  I recently learned that at one school near me – MIT – the students all have a commercial health insurance product that they can take off campus to get treated anywhere that health insurance is accepted; the MIT counseling center only does very brief therapy, and if a student needs longer or more involved treatment, they're expected to use their insurance to go find a psychotherapist in the community.  Most MIT students don't even know this is an option.  So I encourage you to look into what options for treatment you might have, and not know about.
In much shorter term, though, I wanted to mention: if your suicidal feelings get so bad that you think you might act on them to end your life, or if you resolve to act on them, that's a medical emergency and you should call for an ambulance to take you to a hospital (call 911 in the USA and Canada, 000 in Australia, 112 in the EU, 111 in NZ, and 999 in the UK, Ireland, Singapore, Hong Kong and a bunch of other places), or, if you can manage it, take yourself to an emergency medical service (e.g. an "Emergency Room" or "Urgent Care" in the USA or an "A&E" in Britian).
If you're struggling with suicidal feelings, but aren't thinking of killing yourself imminently, you can in some countries and locations call a suicide hotline to talk to a trained listener who can provide emotional support and help you access mental health treatment resources.
In the USA, you can call 1 (800) 273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.  For elsewhere, Wikipedia has a list of suicide hotlines by country.
Please take your condition very seriously, and seek professional help.  The amount of suffering you're going through is terrible – and needless.  There is help in the world for what you're struggling with, but you may have to let it know where you are and how badly you need it for it to reach you.
And then it would be a whole lot easier for you to write research papers.

So glad to see this! For a very broad and convoluted question like this, it's hard to know which parts to ignore, which parts to postpone,  and where is the crux of the matter that needs immediate addressing. Exceptional answer. If you didn't post it, I would have to, but my version would be so much worse.

@kubanczyk - Let's just say so much less good.

I am looking for techniques, founded in psychology, and ideally with some supporting evidence. But more general advice is also welcome.

This answer is squarely in the 'general advice' category, filtered somewhat by personal experience.

You raise two areas of concern with your writing:

style
content

Let's take these separately.
With writing style, revising your work can help a lot. Naturally, if a later revision is 'better' than an earlier version, it stands to reason that the earlier version is 'worse' than the later version. But without the earlier version, you're not going to get the later version. So just get started - then you have something that you can improve ... and you don't have to publish any of the early drafts.
With content, it's sometimes the case that things that look amazing can feel quite mundane when you peel back the layers to look at how things were actually put together. Look at the recipe for (say) your favourite cake, for example. You might be over the moon with the final product, but the ingredients are likely to be simple, and (at a deconstructionist level, at least) there's nothing particularly wow about applying heat or directed energy.
Your familiarity with the content can make it seem less exciting than it might look to someone else. However, even if you deem it to really be nothing all that exciting, your 'job' is to document the work you've done. So long as the reason(s) you had for conducting the research in the first place still hold, it doesn't matter that you're documenting a somewhat boring piece of the whole - in academia, it's still important to communicate what you've done.
It might help also recall the anecdote about the stone cutters and the cathedral builder. Regardless of the work itself, how you view it affects your enthusiasm: cutting stone vs earning a salary vs building a cathedral.

In terms of style, it may be appropriate to deliberately (well, at least knowingly) write in a non-default style, e.g. first person discursive (so I said to Joe, this formula is all wrong..) in the knowledge that at least you can get your thoughts down, and then later use a semi mechanical process of extraction and conversion of the points into the (finished article's) desired style. Once the conversion technique is highlighted it can be easy to do.

@PhilipOakley Yes, even jotting ideas down in point form can help. The key is to produce a first draft.

THANK YOU for reaching out instead of hiding it.  Please continue; it’s a healthy action.  Suicide does not end the pain; it only transfers it to people who love you.
I suspect that the feelings that your writing is bad are lies from “demons.”  Not necessarily actual spirits, but thoughts triggered by physiological problems that a psychiatrist could help with, or past traumas that a psychologist could help with.
But also, please keep reminding yourself that even if your writing were terrible* that there are people who still love you.  Maybe I’m one—writing this through my tears
Or maybe I’m crying because I’ve been there.  I’m 64 years old, and though I still haven’t overcome my excessive perfectionism, I am thankful to God and many others that nothing I can do will stop them from loving me.  I am praying a similar story for you.
*and we know your writing isn’t bad after reading your question.

One angle that hasn't been voiced yet is to own it. A key part of science is acknowledging the limitations of what you have done.
If you did some research and it failed to produce any meaningful results because of a critical error in the trial design (for example).  Don't try and squeeze some meaning out of it just because you feel you have to,  write a frank and honest appraisal of why the experiment was flawed, detailing what should be done by future researchers wishing to investigate the same subject again, and how they could perform a better study.  But don't forget to explain what you did well, and what you did learn.
Every time you think "I should have done this, I wish I'd done that" etc.  Don't think of it as a failure, think of it as more content for your 'Future work required" section and move on.
Your professors will read thousands of papers explaining why some naively designed study into something pointless was the pinnacle of scientific achievement, surpassing all previous human endeavours   An honest, grown-up, paper will be a breath of fresh air.

I'd split off the "suicide" parts from this question. While you should certainly stay in contact with a professional about that part, there also likely is an outside problem, typically a lack of technical support, regular feedback and intellectual stimulation, that leads to you actually spending too much time on individual tasks, making you feel slow and inadequate and frustrated.
I hate it if I feel bad and the someone tells me oh look others have it much worse. ;-)
For your present writing problem, my above doesn't help much, but just in case you notice things being too slow in your next project: That's bad and needs adressing before it turns first into a writing (or funding not extended etc.) problem and then a psychological/health problem.

Write a paper, spend a decent amount of time on it, then stop and submit it to colleagues. If you feel like it was an inferior paper, laugh about it and say "HaHaHa! Even my inferior work is awesome! Onto the next paper!" By not caring so much about the quality, you can work hard without being distracted by depression and shame. Then, occasionally, spend a lot of time on one paper you can be proud of so that it is perfect. You end up with 3 mediocre papers and one perfect paper. Your perfect paper will inspire admiration from your colleagues. Your mediocre papers will inspire others to do more research on the topic. Enjoy what you do. Be happy.

Disclaimer: I am not a medical professional, and this is not medical advice or a substitute for medical advice. Follow the advice at your own risk.
These feelings might be memories of past experiences, that are activated by various "triggers" in the present.
In my opinion, the correct approach to treating such feelings, is to use trauma treatment techniques. You weren't born with these feelings, you got them from damaging situations in your past. Also known as traumas.
A simple technique that you can do at home, is called EMDR - Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. There is scientific evidence that it works for trauma.
EMDR steps (my version):

Face something other than a white wall, preferably something far away.
Think of or notice the problematic memory, feeling or trigger.
Hold your finger up in front of your face and quickly move it left and right while you follow it with your eyes. Keep your head still.

After doing this for several seconds, up to a minute, you should get a sensation that your feelings are clearing up.
If it works, keep doing it many times a day.

Also not a medical professional: I can possibly understand how this would work for a trauma where someone is reliving a distant reality, and this makes the brain process that they are in the here-and-now. (This is my guess at the mechanism.) However, if the problem is some sort of rumination (more cognitive- or thought-based), it may be unwise to poke at it on purpose.

The shame is about the style of writing

If you are embarrassed about your style to the extent that you can't ask what people think about it, then that may obstruct you too much. Have you read widely enough? Perhaps you should take time to read for love of reading rather than love of the subject-matter, pick up random books and find writers of non-fiction whose style you enjoy, and then emulate them.
Start a writing project purely for fun to take the focus off your sense of commitment and allow for uninhibited self-expression. Or write about something you care deeply about and write your feeling. Try writing to highlight injustice and appeal to emotion in your writing. Don't bottle anything in. This type of exercise could help "unblock" you.
Alternatively you might simply need a non-academic friend to read your work and offer thoughts or suggestions based purely on the style. This could help to round out a person's writing style, which will be apt to change and evolve throughout his/her life anyway.

I think the psychological issues are of course a related problem, but the writing problem may also have a separate or additional solution. You sit down, you look at what you've written, and you just feel too bad to actually fix what is wrong and write something good.I am wondering if there is something one can do for that specific moment.

Yes. Your body is the key to your mind, whether you need some nutrient that is exhausted in your body by over-work or poor diet, or need to take more exercise, or you're just generally not exerting enough influence over your mental state, by withdrawing regularly from the vexations of the world and the intellect, and concentrating undividedly on pleasant physical sensations in your body. Spending five minutes doing just this can recharge, reset, recalibrate and reprogram body and mind, and it's very easy to do, so long as you're comfortable and fully relaxed, not excessively hungry of thirsty, cold or warm.
FIRST Close your eyes and let go of everything in your mind, and feel muscular tension leave every part of your body
Think of your arm as very heavy and very warm
Allow this heavy, warm feeling to encompass your four limbs and your neck and develop this feeling by dwelling on it exclusively with your mind
After a few minutes of complete relaxation your breathing will feel more effortless and shallower as if it is breathing you in and out
Think of a pre-selected positively-phrased motto and calmly and confidently assert it inwardly:
I Can Do It or I Will Do It or I Shall Do It
I will take a break and return fresh, free and clear
I will view previous work objectively and work on it assiduously until it is complete
Or I will break on through or I will win
Or I will push to deeper content/research or I will complete each task in the right sequence
Anything positive that will help should it ever become a reality - so carefully pick a phrase in the first place, and ensure it has a positive formula, excluding the words not, no, none, never, and so on.
The main thing here is to remain calm and confidently detached, but gradually develop a firm will and a sense of undeflectable determination. Any muscular tension that creeps back in here should be let go as it arises
LAST Emerge from this state of deep relaxation with following formula:
With your eyes still closed, and thinking of your arms as strong and firm, you get rid of the feeling of heaviness and warmth by making fists with your hands and pulling in your fists to your shoulders and pushing them out in front of you in one gentle controlled motion
This will cause you to breathe in deeply
Then open your eyes and think "Awake!"
Get up and rub your hands together to shake off any sleepiness that remains. Falling asleep or being disturbed in your meditation will automatically make you come out of deep relaxation
Repeat at least once a day, but take it one day at a time, and if you experience dangerously suicidal thoughts please seek counsel with an expert.

Your post brings two things to mind.  First:

In the 19th century, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) was known as the "doubting disease." OCD can make a sufferer doubt even the most basic things about themselves, others, or the world they live in. I have seen patients doubt their sexuality, their sanity, their perceptions, whether or not they are responsible for the safety of total strangers, the likelihood that that they will become murderers, etc. I have even seen patients have doubts about whether they were actually alive or not. Doubt is one of OCD's more maddening qualities. It can override even the keenest intelligence. It is a doubt that cannot be quenched. It is doubt raised to the highest power. It is what causes sufferers to check things hundreds of times, or to ask endless questions of themselves or others. Even when an answer is found, it may only stick for several minutes, only to slip away as if it was never there. Only when sufferers recognize the futility of trying to resolve this doubt, can they begin to make progress. From an article about OCD by Fred Penzel.

Does any of that resonate with you at all?
There is unfortunately a shortage of therapists who have the training and expertise to evaluate for OCD.  There are legions of therapists who are great at what they do, but who don't recognize OCD when it's present, because they haven't been trained to recognize it.
If you're interested, you can contact the International OCD Foundation for help finding someone with expertise in evaluating for OCD (and treating it).  See related answers: A, B. (But note, those questions are somewhat different from yours.)
Important note: I am NOT expressing an opinion as to whether you do or do not have OCD.
Second (this will require some background information -- please bear with me):
My son has Tourette Syndrome.  For five years, I struggled with his school district, to get him the support he needed.  It was an uphill battle.  School districts can play very, very nasty, and they certainly did in our case.  All of us -- my son, my spouse, and I, experienced a lot of trauma throughout that time.
I eventually reached my goal of establishing his eligibility for special education under IDEA, playing the role of lawyer (without any prior formal legal training) in an impartial hearing, and then appealing to my State Review Officer.
However, nothing changed in practice, and seven months after I won on appeal, I moved an hour away and put my son in a different school district.  That was last September.
My son has recovered to a great extent, but it's taking me longer.  This is a comment I've heard from other parents of children with Tourette Syndrome who've been through similar experiences.
It seems that I have some form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Our current school district is more supportive than the previous one.  But whenever I have to send an email to a teacher or administrator, or attend a meeting at school, I find myself spending ages analyzing the situation, to try to strike the right balance.  I want to advocate clearly for my son's needs, but without antagonizing staff in our new district, without annoying them or pestering them.  I edit every email painstakingly, and then after hitting "send," I still go around and around in my head, asking myself a million anxious questions, such as, "Are they going to see me as a trouble-maker?  Are they going to get fed up and start giving me the cold shoulder?  Are they going to try to declare my son ineligible under IDEA?"  I suffer through agonies of doubting.
But I am starting to recover.  In November I looked for a therapist with expertise treating PTSD using Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and other techniques. The therapy is helping.  I've been improving, slowly.
The interesting thing about this is that I wouldn't have won the legal matter if I hadn't been pretty obsessive about researching relevant case law, building a strong case, and writing a well-documented closing brief, and later, a strong petition of appeal and memorandum of law.  But that some obsessiveness has, more recently, been making it hard to function.
(Again, I am NOT expressing an opinion as to whether you do or do not have PTSD, or anything else.)
Bottom line: these problems are treatable.

Something I haven't seen noted elsewhere - get a reality check.
From what you've said, you have already completed papers (and, presumably, published them if appropriate).
If you haven't, then sit down and assess the reaction to your past work.

Are there critiques of your style?
Are there complaints about your content?

If so, then you may have existing, outside data you can use to help improve future work.
If not, then you can assume that your normal work is acceptable (at a minimum!).
You can go over existing feedback with a psychologist - someone who may be able to help you objectively assess the feedback. You may tend to exaggerate or misread statements as being more negative than intended.
If there's insufficient feedback (pro or con), then (as others have suggested) you may need to bring in a colleague of some sort who will give you that feedback directly.
Of course, that deals with objective reality. It may be of little help (especially immediately). But, it can be an important step.
As others have noted, we suspect that (regardless of the objective reality) you may have a condition of some sort that exacerbates your problem. I personally have dealt with depression for my entire life (on medication since 1990), and understand that such things can make you ignore objective reality.
This is why its important to seek medical assessment and assistance, if at all possible. in the throes of depression, I can blow off objective reality, at least for a while. But, with appropriate treatment, I find that I can get to the point where I'm ready to deal with objective reality relatively quickly. And, at that point, this exercise may help make you more comfortable with your own work.
An additional personal note: I have been told in the past that I generate emails that are more detailed than all the recipients need, and that are very long (the expression "books" has come up). Having gotten feedback, I've worked to trim out things that are unnecessary; to highlight key points; to direct those who don't need complex details around sections they may not need to read. My emails have gotten generally shorter, and I've gotten good feedback that they're much easier to digest.
The point of the anecdote is to accept your weaknesses, and seek explicit ways to improve them. Initially, this may take at least as long as what you're doing now; but, the more you do it, and the more positive feedback you begin to get, the easier it will be to do, and the faster it will go.

authors: Bob Jarvis - Слава Україні


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Can a person of average intelligence get a PhD in physics or math if he or she works hard enough?
Or is a PhD a ceiling that they'll never be able to reach, no matter how hard they worked?
By average intelligence I mean a person who has an IQ of 100.

of course they can

It might be interesting to repeat the IQ test after doing the PhD. Does several years of practice at problem solving lead to an increased score on a typical  IQ test?

I don't like this question. On the one hand one could get a definitive answer by giving one positive example, but probably this is not the real question asked here. One the other hand it is pretty clear that "intelligence" is a very vague concept - one may be tempted to answer "got a PhD" is a kind of definition for "above average intelligence" (although Pete's answer below indicates that at least the IQ is correlated with academic success). Finally, I do not like the conditioning on "worked hard enough". Hard work is always necessary for a PhD, but never sufficient.

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it's not well posed.

I voted to close the question because I don't think it's well posed. There are statistics about the IQ of PhD grads. You could ask about that, for example. See https://brainsize.wordpress.com/2014/07/12/the-iqs-of-academic-elites/

This also supposes that "a PhD" is a uniform standard.  In practice the level of "achievement" needed to earn a PhD, and the specific skills required,  vary greatly across institutions, countries, advisors, subfields, etc.  There may not even be any clear minimum threshold.

It costs about $200USD to buy a PhD from a diploma mill.  Thus a clear minimum threshold has been established.

@emory: I'll sell you one for $195!

are terms like 'smart' or 'IQ' really scientific though? see NNT aka Nero, Dweck and salman khan

I recently reread Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, which has a discussion of this very point, i.e., IQ versus academic success.  The gist of it is that, like it or not, the IQ test robustly measures something so that a score below X will, with high probability, prevent academic success at level Y.  E.g. a child with an IQ below 50 will have trouble taking classes with other students.  I just checked the passage, and he claims, quoting from Arthur Jensen's book Bias in Mental Testing, that with high probability someone with an IQ of below 115 cannot graduate from a university with grades that will get them into graduate school.
One key phrase in the above is with high probability.  Thus no one is claiming that such success is impossible, but it becomes significantly more unlikely.  Another important point -- in fact, the whole point of this part of the book -- is that while having an IQ above the threshold seems to be important, the importance quickly disappears past the threshold.  In particular, though we may disagree whether the IQ threshold for getting a PhD in mathematics is 100 or 115 or whatever, beyond a certain level there is no significant correlation between IQ and academic success.  You might expect someone with an IQ of 175 to have a huge mathematical advantage over someone with an IQ of 125.  But this really seems not to be the case.
Let me say finally that this answer should not in any practical sense be discouraging to anyone.  If you or anyone else is wondering whether you have the intellectual capacity to get a PhD in mathematics -- you don't find out the answer by taking an IQ test, you find out the answer by studying mathematics and doing the best you can.  Someone who has a measured IQ of, say, 95 but gets a degree from a reputable university with excellent grades in challenging courses and competitive test scores: of course such a student should seriously consider getting a PhD in mathematics if they are interested, and should not be dissuaded at all by their "low IQ".

+1 for the only answer that actually addresses the question and uses references instead of first-principles reasoning to do so.

Nice answer, but given that probably most of the academics around the world do not take an IQ test, I wonder how much the research of the book is reliable, and whether the author considered both STEM fields and the humanities.

I wouldn't put much faith in anything Gladwell writes.  He's smart but very lazy and tends to do a lot of cherry-picking to back his premises.

@Carl: In this particular case, Gladwell is directly quoting from a book that I identified.  If you look it up, you will see that this is a serious academic work that has been subjected to an immense amount of scrutiny.  Which of course is not to say that one should simply accept its conclusions -- many academics have been critical of the work -- but simply brushing it aside doesn't do justice to the academic process.

Just as the relationship between IQ and academic success is complicated, the relationship between academic success and any other kind of success is complicated.  Even assuming a certain individual was unlikely to succeed in a PhD program, the same individual might make an outstanding President of the United States.

I'd tend to echo @CarlWitthoft's hesitancy about M. Gladwell as reliable source: yes, he does tend to "cite" things, but in a fashion that amounts to choosing hypotheses after a statistical test has been run, rather than doing an honest test of one's pet hypothesis against The Null Hypothesis. Obvious conflict of interest interpretation, too, in the MG "needs" to come up with stuff to sell books... and concluding that things work the way you'd always thought may not do that selling so well.

@paul: I agree broadly with what you and Carl are saying.  I read Gladwell for entertainment first.  If something seems worth "using," I certainly check for it elsewhere.

Brains (IQ level) may get you into post-grad study but character (perseverance etc) is, by far, more significant in graduating...   as a PhD will require personal qualities that IQ does not measure...
With fewer formal assessments and milestones than an undergraduate degree there is a greater requirement for these characteristics.   Things that I found important were persistence, imagination, literacy, time management, able to take criticism and respond appropriately and so many more.
As there are many bright people on the planet who did not have the interest or opportunity to study at university level, people for whom a PhD would be readily achievable it is unwise to make arbitrary decisions based on a couple of IQ points.  Consider emotional intelligence and various other measures of human characteristics as well e.g. Autism Spectrum conditions

This seems like an answer to the question "Is a high IQ sufficient for a successful PhD" - but that's not the question that was asked.  The question asks whether a high IQ is necessary, not whether it is sufficient.

I noted that many people capable of PhD level work do not graduate so just a high IQ is insufficient.  I am aware of one field where "below average intelligence" is IQ < 70, presumably "average" is 70-130?  Arbitrary limits e.g. if IQ<130 then PhD = nil may be difficult to enforce.  Until peer-reviewed evidence shows an arbitrary IQ level is the sole arbiter of academic success, my experience is that personal characteristics are a big influence on academic success.  Additionally, PhD selection is competitive and relies on assessed undergraduate work with course average being important.

I agree that perseverance is far more important for the kind of people who are admitted to grad school -- people who got good grades in undergrad, get good letters of recommendation and have decent GRE scores. But that is already filtering the pool for something like high IQ. It doesn't follow that someone who had none of these features would do well, regardless of how persistent they were.

It's hard to get a PhD with an IQ of 100, but not impossible.
There are several ramifications of "IQ." One possibility is that someone of an average (100) IQ will take longer to master a subject than someone with a 115-120 IQ or that the lower IQ person will need to repeat some courses. If such a person "gets it" eventually, that person will need to work longer and harder than some others, but can achieve the PhD eventually. This is known as the speed versus power dichotomy.
In another instance, the lower IQ might refer to a "cap" in the level of someone's intellectual ability. That is harder to deal with than the situation in the previous paragraph, and more planning is required. For instance, someone with a 100 IQ who is good in mechanics might be a poor candidate to study atomic physics, but his/her knowledge of everyday mechanics might make it possible to get a PhD in "lower level" physics.
As the New York Times reported, psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky have found a distinct difference between "intelligence," and "rationality" (both of which are important in physics). Thus, a person of average "intelligence" might be highly rational, which is enough compensation, at least for the more mechanical, less theoretical part of physics.
In fact, a person with a high IQ that lacked other essential qualities such as rationality/logic, diligence, and tenacity might have a harder time getting a PhD, at least in physics, than some others.

Are these supposed consequences of IQ actually supported by evidence?

@Tom Au is saying that there are various branches in physics, with alot of room for almost everyone. For example, mathematical/theoretical physics might be harder to understand than numerical simulations(many body physics), or experimental/data analysis. Most of my peers who have done very poorly in courses like quantum mechanics or advanced quantum mechanics, electrodynamics, are about to finish a PhD in experimental physics with a lot of group publications, even first author papers.

@NateEldredge: I added two links to support my hypotheses. Is the post better now?

are terms like 'smart' or 'IQ' really scientific though? see NNT aka Nero, Dweck and salman khan

The "speed vs power" link is really bull.... Unrelated to this subject.

While the question has some merit, I still think it is ultimately the wrong question because it puts too much stress on number evaluation.
Choosing a subject for study is mostly not for pure interest, but to choose what you want to do in your professional life afterwards (Another thing is if you really get to work in this specific job, but noone, really noone I talked to repented studying his favorite subject).
So if you have a keen interest in physics and/or math, the best thing to do is trying it out. If you are not qualified, you will soon see reason because you seem to be incarcerated in inscrutable reasoning. The thing is if you are qualified, you will have precious light-bulb moments, their frequency increasing with your ability.
Feynman, the Nobel Prize winner, gloatingly declined the invitation to Mensa, the intelligentsia club, because he had only a 125 score. And many, many experimental physicists are struggling with math requirements, but are
shining in their necessary strengths of meticulousness and perserverance. Intelligence is an umbrella term for many kinds of thinking, so yes, you may have weaknesses, but also strengths and if those strengths allow you to study math and physics, do it (While I have now decades of English experience, languages are not loving me and vice versa).
So the answer is: Yes, if you have the necessary other talents, even average intelligence will allow you to get an PhD.
I suspect there are other reasons why you are asking, especially because you asked for the PhD, not studying itself. The problem is that many people, especially parents, simply do not understand or do not want to understand that success in math and physics cannot be achieved by sheer willpower and perserverance. If you do not have the talent (intelligence one core talent, but not the ultimate deciding factor), pursuing math and physics is wasting lifetime. To make progress, you must (!) understand the concepts involved because they are the fundamental basis for the next steps, see how they are interact with each other and get a "feeling"/"view" for the situation. This is the basis for the next step and so on and so on. Rote memorization is useless.
On the other hand, if you have the talent, both willpower and perserverance are godsends and it is unlikely that you will succeed to get an PhD if you do not have those qualities.
The often-heard Edison phrase in this context "Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration." is a severe misconception because it is highly dubious that Edison ever personally worked on or invented himself something. He simply had his payed workers and took credit for the things other people developed. Innovator, not inventor.

"[B]ecause it is highly dubious that Edison ever personally worked on or invented himself something." You are making a contention that differs from all the biographical and historical material I have seen.  See e.g. http://edison.rutgers.edu/biogrphy.htm which describes how Edison spent his early years as an "independent inventor", including several years without any assistants of any kind.  Since presumably you do not have personal knowledge of these events that took place more than 100 years ago, I wonder if you could identify the source material that led you to this dissenting opinion.

@PeteL.Clark This will be a longer story, so if you are really interested I suggest we are meeting in chat so I can show how I come to this dissenting opinion.

@PeteL.Clark Hint: The link you give strangely fails to mention the time from 1869 where he worked together with Franklin Leonard Pope and that part of life was erased in the chronology of Rutgers. From 1871 on (Newark) he always worked with a team, there were no "early years". Most "inventions" claimed by Edison were perfecting already existing designs and neither Pope nor Tesla hold him in high regard as inventor. And foremost, I did not find any instance where Edison actually claimed that he personally invented the things ascribed to him.

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text:
Paper has been rejected for being published in conference proceedings, but accepted for oral presentation. What does this mean?
I am a senior undergrad. My paper has been accepted in a conference for presentation but rejected from being published in conference proceedings.
I had a few questions regarding this:

What does this imply?
Can I put this on my resume, and if yes, how do I mention it?
Is it a good look when I apply for grad schools?
Should I withdraw the paper and publish it elsewhere?

One should know details and the field. But an oral presentation is good per se. Proceeding remains and can be cited but most of the time are just annoyance (though it won't be in this case) and can correspond even to poster presentations. So, a talk is surely good for you don't overthink.

If your paper isn't in the proceedings it will be difficult for people to cite your work, or even to know the details unless they happen to be among the few that attend your presentation. As to your questions:

What it means should be explored with the conference committee. Probably it means that only the title will appear.

Yes you can put it in your CV as long as you list it properly as one that was "presented at ..."

Yes, it won't hurt you in grad school applications and will probably help, though a paper that is formally published would be better. People will be looking for evidence that you will be successful in academia and this is a positive thing, even if it doesn't appear.

Maybe it would be better to try another venue, but there is risk in that. It might not be accepted and even if it is, it might not be accepted in time to show up in your grad school applications.

You might ask a trusted advisor for advice, and should certainly explore it a bit with the conference committee. Perhaps you can present it here and publish a complete version elsewhere. It would be very odd if they expect you to give up rights under these circumstances. If they do ask for copyright it would seem to me to be a red flag.
Also, at the point you are in your career the effect will be small overall. Any research line in your CV is a good line when you are an undergraduate.

Noted, I will try submitting it elsewhere, or atleast get a preprint out. Thank you so much, Dr. Buffy!

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text:
Ibid on different pages of an essay

Ibid on different pages of an essay

Context:

I think if you've read Part 1 and 2, you probably have a good idea of the context, but here goes:
In my efforts to use footnotes for the first time in my essay, I've come across a few problems. Now, I've made some progress, but I noted that one of my sources which I referenced in my essay was the last on one page, and subsequently the first on the next!
I attempted to look up whether I use ibid or put the reference again, but usually the question is misinterpreted as different pages within the source, not different pages within my essay referencing the source, for example in the question at the bottom of this WikiHow.

Question:

So, if I reference the same source twice, but on different pages of my essay (not different pages of the source, different pages in my essay), do I use ibid referring to the previous page or repeat the full footnote once again?

To my knowledge, there isn't any universal set of rules for this sort of thing. Certainly citation styles differ between fields. You could obtain any widely used style guide (e.g. the Chicago Manual of Style) and follow that.

If this is an assignment for a class, you could ask your professor what she prefers; if it's a journal submission, see if they have any style guidelines; etc.

You might want to find some published material, in a similar genre to whatever you are writing, and imitate their formatting choices. For example, if you are an undergraduate mathematics student, you could look through back issues of the American Mathematical Monthly. If practices differ, then pick something which you think looks good.

Keep in mind that "different pages" is ambiguous. As you work on the essay, footnotes that appeared on the same page might later appear on different pages, or vice versa. Also, if you submit your work for publication, then the published version would be likely to have different pagination, and the copyeditors might edit things like "Ibid." to be in their own style anyway. So I'd recommend you choose something that doesn't cause yourself a lot of tedium.

+1 for "different pages is ambiguous." Copy pages that you submit are (often) different from the proof pages that are then published.

What about in the Harvard Referencing system, for example, @academic?

@Gill I don't know.


text:
ibid or Ibid (Capitalisation)?
ibid or Ibid?

Context:

In my efforts to use footnotes for the first time in my essay, I've come across a few problems (which you might know if you've seen Part 1 of the ibid journey.
I recently read online that it makes a difference whether you use ibid or Ibid (capitalization) in your footnotes and that there are even rules around this, at this site (I don't go to the school running this site).
They say:

‘Ibid’ should always be capitalized when it appears at the start of a footnote. If there is a pinpoint reference, that is, a reference to a specific place in the cited text, and the next footnote is to the same work and to the same place in the cited text, use ‘ibid’.

But, isn't ibid (or Ibid) always at the start of a footnote, so shouldn't it be always capitalised?

The Question

When should I use "ibid" or "Ibid" in my text? What difference does the capatilisation make?

So what does your school suggest? As your source is not from your school...

Looks like it is answered in the answer here : https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/154201/72855

Sorry, @SolarMike but I don't see where that answer mentions capitalisation... I think I would've noticed as I asked that question...

If you read the answer, each time ibid is used in each of the examples it is in lower case... But surely you saw that as you read it.

I did see that @SolarMike, but that doesn't answer the question as to when it is capitalised?

@SolarMike: As I see it, the other question gives examples but does not say if there are cases where capatalization is obligatory or up to the author to choose.

@user111388 so ask the author of the answer to clarify...

@SolarMike: I don't see the other author in a need to clarify. It's a seperate question and it's a good thing Gill made a new question to ask about the capitalisation issue.

The short answer to this question is that it depends on the style guide. Style guides will be provided from the press or journal to which you are submitting your paper. If this paper is for a class, the style guide will depend on either what your university prefers, the conventions for your academic discipline, or what your professor has requested you use for the specific class that you are taking.

But, isn't ibid (or Ibid) always at the start of a footnote, so shouldn't it be always capitalised?

If your style guide does not explicitly give an answer to the question of whether or not ibid should be capitalized, the general rule of thumb is to think about footnotes as complete sentences, where there is a period at the end of a thought and a capital letter at the beginning of a sentence. You are correct that ibid is typically used at the beginning of a sentence, but this is not always the case.

As user Anyon points out, ibid can be used in the middle of a sentence "For X, see ibid."
Ibid can also be used after a semicolon that separates cited sources. For example, you could cite "Source A." in footnote 1, and in footnote 2 you could cite "Source B; ibid." where the ibid refers to Source A. This is unusual, but possible if it corresponds respectively to the information you are citing in your text.

Ibid is not a proper noun, so it's not capitalized as a matter of course. (Your own question contains several examples where lowercase 'ibid' is used correctly.) Whether it should be capitalized at the start of a footnote depends on the style guide used. For example, OSCOLA uses lowercase 'ibid', whereas the Chicago and Harvard styles use the capitalized form. When used for in-text citations it is typically lowercase, however.
Finally, when used with footnotes, 'ibid' doesn't necessarily occur at the start. In books I've seen 'ibid' occurring after parenthetical remarks, such as "For X, see ibid p. 50". Sometimes a single footnote is also used for multiple references, as in this example from the Physical Review style guide, where 'ibid' refers to the journal name:

J. M. Smith, Phys. Rev. B 26, 1 (1982); R. Brown, ibid. 24, 3 (1981); C.
Green, ibid. 24, 22 (1981).

Would the downvoter care to offer any feedback?


text:
Does it make sense to provide a 'CRediT statement' when I am the sole author?
CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) offers 14 roles that, when enumerated alongside a mult-authored publication, renders individual contributions visible.
Here is a simple example from this paper (involving three authors):

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
Felix Bittmann: Methodology, Software, Formal analysis, Writing—original draft, Writing—review & editing, Visualization. Alexander Tekles: Software, Data curation, Writing—review & editing. Lutz Bornmann: Conceptualization, Supervision, Project administration, Writing—review & editing.

Now if a journal requires an "author contribution statement" based on CRediT, then does it make sense to provide one if I'm the sole author?

Well, not every project requires all roles, so I would say "yes," especially if it's required by the journal.

For many journals, author information is provided not just in the human-friendly rendering of the article as a PDF or webpage, but also in machine-readable database form in order to better support indexing, search, citation analysis, etc.
Thus, if the journal is going to be able to provide this information about complex multi-author papers, they need to populate the database with the appropriate information for all of their papers, including single-author papers.
Furthermore, just because you are the only one playing the roles doesn't mean you're playing all of the roles in the paper: for most papers, many roles go unfilled.
Bottom line: it may feel a little bit silly, but it's easy, doesn't take long, and is valuable for the journal.

If the journal requires it, then yes, you must provide it. You are, in effect attesting that you are, indeed, the sole author and no one else should be.

Did you really do all this yourself? Yes. Yes I did.

It is a formality. It details those things that might rise to the level of authorship, though not in every case. It is a helpful checklist to think about contributions of any collaborators. But if it is required, then provide it.

It's not just a formality, per my answer above.

There is a high chance, that you not did all 14 roles. For examples a PhD student often does not the funding acquisition, resources, or supervision. If some roles are missing, it is an indication, that there are larger structures behind the author, he could rely on.
This might help to distinguish researcher outside of academia and industry, that lack such structures. And it can help young fellas to recognize the amount of work related to these roles.


text:
Status from decision in process to with editor meaning in Elsevier review system
In the Elsevier review system, my paper status was initially "with editor" then "under review" then "under editor evaluation" then "decision in process" and now again "with editor."
What does this mean?

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text:
How do I tackle the interview question "why join here and not your former college"?
Background : I did both my bachelor's and master's degree from the same institute, let's call it institute X. I liked it there during my bachelor's and since very few institutes near by offered a master's degree in the subject I wanted I joined it. It is a decision I regret. The level of the course and syllabus was very poor and most lectures couldn't give us proper guidance on the books one should refer to for self study. I did manage to find out through a very helpful professor from a highly reputed institute how to go about things and managed to get in to a good institute for a PhD. Now I am on verge of finishing and plan on applying to institute Y for teaching position.
Question : I am bound to be asked by the interview panel of institute Y why I am choosing to apply for a teaching position there and not in my own institute. What is the best way to answer?
The real answer to the question is that standards in institute X are falling and the academic environment there is deteriorated. More importance is being given to looking good on paper than to teaching. For example, they show statistics of how you have such a great number of students doing exceedingly well in exams but having written those exams myself I know that they aren't all that challenging to begin with. There are similar exaggerated facts that make the institute look good on paper. I know that I won't be happy there unless there is a radical change.
I don't think I should be saying all this to an interview panel though (or should I?). I really want to give an honest answer but I certainly don't want to come off as some one who insults their Alma Mater even if what I say is true. So what is the best way to answer? Or is there a polite way to say that I don't like the atmosphere there?
EDIT - I would like to add that I am from Bangalore, India.
Thank you.

"I am bound to be asked by the interview panel of institute Y why I am choosing to apply for a teaching position there and not in my own institute" - in my field and geographical location, it would be totally bizarre to ask this in an interview.

Well it isn't a bizarre question in my geographical location so it would be really nice if someone could use their imagination and give me some advice. Thank you.

The general rule is to replace every phrase of the type "they are worse than you" with one of the type "you are better than they" but otherwise tell the truth (though you are never obliged to tell the whole truth). Beyond that the answer, indeed, depends on many details you haven't provided.

I'm obviously missing something. How does Y even know that you're not applying to X? Surely you're not applying to only one department?

It's not a good idea to give people advice based on "imagination."  I could imagine all sorts of situations each of which I would give very different advice for!

If they ask, be diplomatic. Slagging off your old institution doesn't send a good message. Something like:

While I enjoyed my time there and feel they helped me to grow into an independent researcher, I'm now looking to gain experience of working in a different department in order to develop these skills further.

might work, if true (or at least true enough for a job interview).
Then expand on this by explaining why you chose to apply to this new institution, rather than elsewhere, by explaining what you see as their positives.

I agree that it is better to talk diplomatically about the previous institution. Ultimately, an interview panel is not looking for the reasons for why an applicant didn't choose other universities. Instead, they are interested in why the applicant chose their university.

You are leaving X because they are too focused on statistics and not so much on good teaching. Instead, you are joining Y. One should thus assume that you did some research and know how Y deals with teaching. This can be used as an argument, e.g.

I think that it is important to put high priority to good, quality teaching. As I read on your homepage/as professor A from your institute told me when I met him last week/..., you seem to agree.

In this way, you don't blame your former institute, as you don't say that they have bad teaching there. Maybe they just have "regular" teaching and you are looking for the best there is, meaning institute Y?
Furthermore, I would suggest to find out about teaching policies at Y if you haven't already, you don't want to end up at an institute that is even worse than X, do you?


text:
How do you prepare for a meeting with a potential masters thesis advisor?
I want to do a thesis masters with a specific teacher in the field of Antennas. I am supposed to meet with him to discuss about this in 2 weeks. I am undergraduate in electrical engineering graduating this May.
How can I prepare for this meeting?What to expect?
I guess I should bring my CV and transcript. Maybe personal projects.

When I meet with potential students, I am trying to find out whether we have mutual interests and compatible working habits. Sometimes I have a specific project in mind that I'd like to staff, and I am looking for a student with specific skills or background. Hopefully, the student is trying to find out whether he/she wants to work with me. There are a few things you can think about in advance to have a more productive meeting.

Look at some of his recent publications, and recent publications of students he is supervising. You don't have to read every word, but you should get a sense of what the advisor works on. If you happen to think of an intelligent question or potential extension to his work, great, you may bring it up in the meeting if it seems appropriate, but if nothing comes to you, don't force it.
Expect that he may ask questions to find out more about your interests, strengths, and goals, so be prepared to talk about these. I often ask potential students questions like,

What kind of work do you like to do?
What specific areas of research are most interesting to you?
Are there any classes that you especially enjoyed?
What do you want to do next (e.g. after the MS)?

Think about what questions you might want to ask him. For example, depending on your own working habits and goals you might want to know:

Where do his students end up? Do most go on to industry jobs, or PhD programs?
How does his group operate? Does he have regular one-on-one meetings and/or group meetings with students he supervises? Is his group very collaborative or do most students work individually? Does he have specific expectations about when his students will be their offices, or is he OK with students who work unusual hours or from other locations?

If you have specific technical skills that you believe will be helpful in your MS research, be prepared to bring them to his attention. (For example, if you have taken a course with a lab component that involves techniques relevant to your research interests.)

And yes, it might be helpful for you to bring your CV and transcripts to the meeting, and also email them to him a day or two before. I usually like to look at these before a meeting so that I can see if there's anything specific in them that I want to ask more about. ("I see you're taking [some course] this semester, how are you finding it? ")

I've never done this, but I would send via email or drop off a package with your CV and transcript now or at the latest a week before the meeting. This is so he can review it beforehand rather than be flipping through it at the meeting.
If you haven't, you should review his recent papers and website, if he has one, to gain knowledge about his current research interests. If possible, you might also try to review master's theses or Ph.D dissertations that he was the advisor for. Try to come up with some ideas on ways to further that research.

What did you talk about when you met the teacher?

When I said I've never done this, this equals meeting with a potential thesis advisor. I had one assigned to me by the department.


text:
Safely negotiate a salary for a PhD offer - Germany
I have recently received an offer from a group which pursues topics I find very motivating and whose equipment is above average for my field.
The salary offered is 50% of the German TV-L E13 salary, which I think is acceptable by academic standards. However, all other offers which I have received are 65% of TV-L E13, though all of these other groups pursue topics which to me are slightly less interesting. To give you a bit of background, 50% has been the standard for a long time, but since a couple of years ago most groups in my field are deciding to award their PhD employees 65%.
I am very motivated by my particular interests, and had the salary been equal for all offers I would have taken this one without question. Sadly, the situation being as it is, I am quite split. Additionally, the professor made it quite clear that I would also have to get involved in teaching (not all other groups were as forward about this) - which I do not mind in the slightest, but which I think would give cause for extra consideration when calculating a salary. Regarding the professor's interest, he seemed very keen to have me on board, but also very confident I would take his offer.
I would like to ask whether he could accommodate for 65%. But, since I am yet to decide, I would not like to lose the offer or put great strain on our future relationship if he refused.
The way I see it, academic culture treats monetary interest with a certain disdain, and I would like to ask you how I could best formulate my request.
FEEDBACK: I have followed the advice offered here, and stated in an email to my prospective PI that I had received better paid offers, and that I would ask him if he could increase the pay, though I am aware of how difficult this could be for him. He took some time to reply (which initially gave me cause to worry), but apparently now he managed to arrange for 65%. I would encourage any of you to follow the advice presented here; and do try to negotiate as long as you do it very respectfully!

I don't feel qualified to give a full answer, but in the negotiation I would certainly mention that you have other offers at 65%, and that the 50% offer is your preferred project. However, that 15% difference (something like 350 euros per month after tax?) is a lot of money for a young person, especially if you have a partner or family. If the professor won't (or cannot) raise your salary, he should at least compassionately understand why you refused the offer.

Thanks for providing the feedback. Glad to hear it worked out well for you!

This is very dependent on the field and PI. In computer science, you can easily get 100% position. I already have 100% position for four years.

One of the mods here is a professor in a german university, I think he is able to add a better answer or at least confirm or discard mine.
Some considerations:

As far as I know, many german PhD students, at least in CS, are actually employed full-time, which I assume means 100% TVL-E. In that sense, both 50% and 65% seem somewhat on the low side to me. At the very least, negotiating for 65% does not seem so unreasonable that it should offend anybody.
However, don't be too disappointed if your negotiations go nowhere. I have heard from multiple people that academic salaries are oftentimes entirely unnegotiable in Germany (though not always)
German PhD student salaries are internationally quite on the high side (also if you take costs of living into account), so even if you cannot negotiate, 50% might still be ok compared internationally. That being said, the question is always if the salary is enough for your standard of living / circumstances. If you have a partner and two kids, maybe 50% simply does not allow you to live. If you are alone and live in a dorm, maybe 50% is plenty.
In germany, some amount of teaching is usually part of the job. That the one professor told you this before is a good thing. However, there is teaching and there is teaching. I have certainly seen groups where teaching load could add up to about 75% of a PhD student's work time. This is obviously terrible (independent of money issues). The hard part is figuring out whether this is the case in your specific group. The best way is to ask one of the current PhD students.
Don't be too afraid that you may annoy your future professor. In my experience, the entire "academics frown upon money issues" is a bit of a show. The same professors who says such things at the same time have no quarrels at all negotiating their own contracts or department budgets. If your future professors gets annoyed by you mentioning that you have a number of better offers, you should likely go somewhere else anyway.

Now, for the actual negotiation, I would follow moriary's remark from the comment - simply mention (friendly and non-threatingly) that you are torn on accepting the offer, as you have counter-offers at 65%. As said, nobody should get annoyed by that. We are all adults, right?

Re your 1st point: yes, Computer Science will typically pay 100% (because prospective Ph.D. students have attractive alternatives). But in other fields, e.g., Psychology, 50% is standard. This depends very much on the field. It would be helpful if the OP could indicate the field he is in.

I'm the mod you're thinking of, and the basic facts are correct. However, there are some additional issues here which make me think that the negotiations won't likely work out (see my answer for the full explanation, but it comes down to how PhD positions are funded).

This depends a lot on the field, in Chemistry and Biology 50-65% positions are the common case in Germany. 65% also seems to be a more recent development.

There are two fundamentally opposing issues here. One is that

You will not get a higher salary unless you negotiate.

while at the same time

The only way to avoid the messiness of failed negotiations is not to negotiate.

You have to be prepared for the possibility that negotiations will not go the way that you want. So, really, the question is if the extra pay is so important to you that you are willing to walk away from the position if things don't work out the way you want.
Funding for research groups in Germany can resemble a zero-sum game: faculty members get a fixed budget from the university, as well as a mostly set budget from funding agencies: they get a certain allotment of positions to fill, and get paid based on the salary needed to fund those positions. But what this means is that to give you the extra 15 percent of the position, they need to come up with the funding from somewhere. This may or may not have been budgeted for in the original proposal; if not, finding the money to do so can be quite difficult, particularly in non-science fields (where there may not be a large amount of third-party and industrial funding available).
Even if the funding comes from the so-called Planstelle (or university funding), the issue is fundamentally the same: giving you an extra 0.15 position means that there's that much less for somebody else. So 2.0 Planstelle positions could be used to hire four graduate students at 50 percent, or three graduate students at 65 percent.
Furthermore, some faculties may have guidelines on what faculty members can offer potential PhD students; it may be worthwhile to contact the person responsible for doctoral students at the department in question to see if this is the case here.
However, unless the group is rather large, I'm rather pessimistic of the ability of the advisor to increase the offer. (If he could have, he probably would have done so, already knowing the state of competition in the field.)

All of this is correct. However, large groups that existed for some time tend to also have a "dirty little secret", an additional account which contains various leftovers accumulated from previous projects (my PhD advisor used to call this his war chest). This money can be used without all too many restrictions. Of course professors tend to be rather protective with this money, but ... I guess my point is that trying to negotiate is often not entirely without hope.

I did mention large groups as being a caveat. Again, though, this tends to apply more to STEM fields than to humanities and social science fields.

I'd suggest that the style of negotiation would make a big difference.  Avoiding any adversarial stance and instead focusing on fairness and generally-accepted standards as a way to resolve differences is the best approach.  Asking the person making the offer to explain why that salary is fair and then asking about any differences between that offer and other offers elsewhere generally produces a non-threatening, collegial result.

My 2 ct:

Who is funding the position? (I.e.: is the offer for a concrete project, funded by some funding agency)? If so, look up the funding agencies policies for PhD student funding (e.g. DFG recently changed the recommendation to 65%).
Anyways, I don't think it will hurt to ask whether 65% are possible. After all, that is now the DFG recommendation. So you are not asking for an outrageous amount of money.
And, if they are not willing to increase the offer, they can easily tell you that this is not possible at the moment due to how positions are tied to projects or even that they don't do this in order not to have one highly paid student at the cost of some other student. (I've been in an institute where positions were more or less rotated among the PhD students in order to have roughly equal pay to everyone in the long run).
Are you asking for better wage without more work or are you asking for more money, possibly for more work, e.g. because you need to feed your family. Particularly the latter reason may be a good point to tell during the negotiation (depending on where the position is - noone will believe that you'd be able to survive at 65% wage in Munich if you cannot do with 50% in Leipzig).
There may be other ways to get more money, e.g. it may be possible to get paid the additional 15% if you are borrowed out to do teaching at some other institute for the respective amount of time. I've also been doing work contracts for university though my experience with (one) German university was that they took extremely long to pay (close to 6 months - seems rather usual: I've since heard that other universities have similarly bad reputation). However, this is IMHO only an option if you anyways think about running a free-lancing side-business - otherwise the burocracy will not be worth the hassle.
Consider also asking whether and when you can expect an increase to 65%.

Update ("soft" advise triggered by the OP's comments)

The comments look to me as if the moment for wage negotiation is already in the past:
Prof: "[blabla] at the usual pay."
Chimera: "... which I take to mean 65% TVL-13"
Is the moment I'd have considered the point to open wage negotiations.
IMHO a vague offer like "usual pay" needs to be clarified into some hard number - so pinning that to something more concrete is not necessarily blurting out.  After all, "usual pay" could be anywhere from 50 to 100% TVL-13 (and formerly even from 50% WHK upwards - but I don't know whether that is still done)
Maybe the most important point that comes to my mind now: Wage negotiation does not safe you from making up your mind about what you want. Quite the contrary: you need to know those beforehand, otherwise you'll have no footing for the negotiation.
In any case, having messed up these negotiations (assuming you could have gotten the interesting project and the higher wage which we don't know) is an experience for life. It may be good to settle your emotions by writing it off as "Lehrgeld". Yes, 10 000 € net difference over the 3 a hurts (that pain will make the lessons learned last...). On the other hand you're probably going to make more expensive decisions (and even mistakes) during your lifetime (e.g. buying once during our lifetime new car instead of a used one will easily cost you more).
At some point the most expensive mistake will be to keep fretting about this possible mistake instead of looking forward and trying to have a better next negotiation.
I think there is a deep wisdom in the advise to practice job interviews and negotiations several times with jobs you are not really interested in getting before applying where you seriously want to go. Includes clarifying for yourself the lessons-learned (also by asking questions like this here).
10 000 € hurt, but as others have menioned, larger important points aren't negotiable (e.g. how much time you'll spend for teaching)
or can be negotiated independently of the 50% vs. 65% question (e.g. your prof may be able to throw in helping you to get an international research stay etc.).

The remaining thoughts are my very personal point of view.

The unknown confounding factors ("Munich" vs. "Leipzig", family or not) are too large here to give much advise. Obviously, with a job offer in Munich and a family to feed I'd negotiate more (possibly to the point of trying to reopen negotiations) than as a single applying in Leipzig.
Personally, I'd say that the 15% are in general not sufficient "pain compensation" for me for taking an uninteresting position. Of course that wouldn't stop me from negotiating.
But in order to weight this point you need to know that
My personal experience (Germany, Canada, Italy) underlines rather strongly that the wage : costs of basic living are extremely favorable in Germany compared to other countries. To the point where I think that with few exceptions, even for students money problems are usually (exceptions being feeding a family in Munich - you get the idea) rather on the side of expenses than on the side of generating income.
But take that as a very personal thing - your priorities may vary: I'm aware that I happen to

have inexpensive hobbies (not very interested in cinema and pub tours and instead hiking, wild camping, biking and having the beer & wine at our own camp fire/BBQ - and I don't need the alps that urgently if I have the Sächsische Schweiz or the Thüringer Wald just a few km away; also not feeling an urgent need to get to the Andes or the Himalaya as there are large parts of Europe still unknown to me).
be quite good at repairing/renovating stuff
enjoy cooking our own meals with friends which also happens to be much cheaper than the pizza service and still cheaper than the mensa.
have studied in Dresden where rents were cheap, and now live in Jena which has crazy expensive rents compared to, say, Leipzig, which are however still low compared to about everywhere in former West-Germany. And to Italy (Trieste).

Anyways these points gave me the independence even as a student to be rather free in the decision what job offer to take and to follow my interests.

To put it the other way round: my advise is to make up your mind also how much this kind of independence (which can tremendously help your negotiation position) is worth to you. If you make up your mind now, you'll be settled when the more important negotiations come after the PhD. If you find out that you are not the person who is willig or able to go that way, that is perfectly OK as well. But it will safe you a lot of pain to know and act accordingly.
(You asked for safe negotiations, not e.g. for successful negotiation or how to avoid basic mistakes during wage negotiation.)
(And, just to let you know @TheChimera, of course I've also messed up job interviews. I believe everyone does at least once in a while.)

I don't know exactly where the money is coming from. He did not tell me when he made the offer. As he made the offer, 65% slipped my tongue, and he seemed surprised. Should I maybe send a link/reference to the dfg recommendation, or would that be too crass?

@TheChymera: I would not send a link. That would have a Gschmäckle that he doesn't know his job. The DFG is important enough that we can safely expect  every German professor to know their recommendation for PhD funding. I was thinking of a an oral negotiation (which allows more flexibility on both sides). If you already mentioned the 65%, you can maybe ask him why he was surprised by that. Although your comment sounds as if the negotiations had already taken place - renegotiating afterwards does sound weird to me and I'd expect low probability of success.

no, we didn't really negotiate, just that when he made the offer, he said "the usual pay" and for some reason i felt like blurting out "yeah, sure, 65% is ok". I felt a bit uncomfortable after that so i did not mention it again.

I agree with aeismail that negotiation is probably not going to work. He seems to know about universities; I work at a research centre from the Helmholtz group. At our research centre, some professors are already trying to get 65% for PhD researchers. But it is a matter which the board of directors decides once for the whole organisation, not something a single professor can decide for his/her chair. So, until the professors get the board to agree, it will be 50% for everybody.
You can still talk to the professor, the ones I know are reasonable and open in salary matters and I haven't experienced a hostile atmosphere in talks involving money/responsibility/tasks negotiations. But there is a very high chance that he has no say in the matter. Besides, it is rare for a professor to have to fill a position quickly; if you don't accept the position, they can just wait for the next good candidate (and there are enough of them). So, I am afraid you probably don't have many levers, even if the professor sympathizes with you and wants to work with you.
My advice is to try it (there isn't anything to lose), but don't get your hopes too high.


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Should I, as an amateur, get my result published based on a well known professor's opinion?
I don't have any formal education in mathematics that the large part of mathematicians have but fortunately I have the ability to use intuition to obtain results in higher mathematics that many professional mathematicians find interesting.
So recently I happened to send this famous professor (whom I've been corresponding with for some time) one of my results and he responded by saying that "indeed he thinks the result is new"
So what's the next step? Should I try to get the result published?

Do you think that the rest of the message was encouraging? One can write "meh - this result is new, but I am not thrilled; probably it has very little use", or "this result is new; I find it very interesting, you should definitely try to publish it".

I am quite puzzled that you, after conversing with this "famous professor" about your research already, come to this forum to ask whether you should publish it rather than asking her/him. So much so, in fact, that I suspect that you are not telling us the full story here.

In addition to being able to give a more informed reading on whether to try to publish, the famous professor should be able to advise on a choice of journal.

Did "the famous professor" check the proof? If the result is new and the proof is correct, I see no reason not to try to publish (where exactly to publish is another question). If you communicated the result only, I will be way more skeptical: after all, anybody can announce any wonderful result he wants at any time (not necessarily intentionally cheating; honest mistakes happen way more often than people think they should).

The next step is to reply to the famous professor: "Thanks for your encouragement. What's the next step?"

I've often wondered what I'd do in such a situation. To be honest, I think you should make a YouTube video presenting your result. That way, people will know that you did it. They will also know when you did it. You'll have name and face recognition for your accomplishment.

Well, the result may be new, but unless you have a proof, it is a conjecture only. This is valid, but you should get together with a professional in the field (e.g. this professor, if he is interested) to bring this to a closure. However, you didn't - so, why not?

@Inquisitive Posting a Youtube video appears to me to be the least effective way possible to disseminate a new mathematical result. Widely worse than submitting a paper or posting to arXiv, likely even worse than posting it to Facebook or on LinkedIn, and on about the same level of effectiveness as shouting your proof from a barrel at your town square.

Assuming the following premises are true:

The professor you state is well-known and established in his field
You have produced a tangible result in this field
The professor endorses your result to be new

Then,

Get the result published!

I do not see any reason for this not to be published. Better yet, contact the professor for further directions (see comments).


text:
Want to change university, but concerned about "downgrading" from institute head, and about colleagues learning about my job search
I got my Ph.D. in Chemistry in an eastern European country in 2008. The same year I got a lecturer assistant position in a university in the same country.
Working there, I got promoted, first to lecturer (2010), then to assistant professor (2012).
From 2012 I started thinking about moving to another country: academic salaries are quite low and the political situation became very unstable. I even started to send my CV to several positions, and there was one offer. But due to some management changes, I became a department head at the end of 2012, so I refused the proposal and stayed in the university. A year ago I became an institute head inside the university.
Every year from 2012, I thought that it's not the best year to leave my position because my resignation would put my department/institute into a difficult position. There is no open job market for academic positions in our country (due to the ridiculous salaries) and it would be difficult  to find a replacement for a head of an institute in our city.
I can't say that the management position is very unpleasant for me, but I feel that I'm not a good fit, and I would prefer to stay in an assistant professor / professor position. Today I feel that the bureaucracy takes over and I can't get time to do research or to teach. When I raise these concerns with the management of our university, I get a response, like "When did life ever run smooth? You need to concentrate, and you would be OK. Now, take this new project."
Moreover, I can't openly submit my requests to positions in other universities I like, because it will require me to provide a set of recommendation letters. All colleagues who know me well and who can give me such a letter would be VERY surprised when they will find out, that I want to change my occupation. The sphere of chemistry academia in our country is very small, everyone knows everyone.
So, what should I do next?

Should I try to make an open statement to the university head
that I think the position is not for me and I want to leave? It
would be a very tough conversation, I would become a "lame duck" in
the university without any guarantee of finding a "job of my life".
Also, this conversation would be very unspecific, because I have no
other proposals. From the other side, then I would be able openly to ask my colleagues to provide a recommendation letter for me.
Should I try to find another academic position without informing the management? But I don't know how to provide a good set of recommendation letters then: people would start talking about my activity, and it would become public.
If I send a CV to an assistant professor/professor position, should I mention, that I am a head of an Institute? I'm afraid that it can raise a lot of questions like "why do you want to downshift from such a good position to become a teacher/researcher".
Maybe there is something that I am missing?

Can you find recommendation letters from someone who is not in your country?

Yes, I have several colleagues who are not in my country. Part of them are my friends, that are on their post-doc positions, so it would not be enough for a recommendation letter. Another part - are colleagues we are making projects with. Asking them to provide me a recommendation letter means that they would loose a connection point to my university when I would leave. So I do not know, if it would be OK for me to ask them for a recommendation letter.

I've never heard of anyone being promoted so nonchalantly. It makes me suspicious. Typically people who are directors of institutes fought long and hard for what they do, and would certainly never admit "it's not for me". Do you think there's a chance something is about to go horribly wrong and they want you to be responsible at the time? Alternatively, did the person who previously had your job recently get employed as a professor in another country? If so, you found the progression plan... :)

It makes me nervous to, as you can see. The previous director of the institute became a head of the university. I was his deputy for the education, when he was a head of the institute, so his position was proposed to me.

First of all, you need to decide what's best for you long term. If you decide to abdicate and apply elsewhere, then do it and don't look back.
During this process, you'll want to choose letter writers you trust, and ask them to keep it in strict confidence. You'd do the same for them, no?  People move on, it happens.
Despite your best efforts, word will always get out...hopefully slowly.  But, see my first point. If you've decided, you've decided, so it's just a matter of time, uncomfortable as it may be.


text:
Why do undergraduates pay for their education, but postgraduates are paid?
Per title. Undergraduate tuition often costs tens of thousands of dollars per year, but postgraduates are commonly paid a stipend. Not a lot of money, but still much better than having to pay for tuition too.
Why do undergraduates pay, but postgraduates are paid? A first guess is that postgraduates contribute to the "output" of the department so they deserve to be paid, but that doesn't seem like a complete explanation because the number of students taught is also an "output".

If the typical university could also get away with charging PhD students an extra fee directly, they probably would, but they don’t because then the supply of PhD students would go to zero. On the other hand, they can and do charge very heavily for other graduate degrees, such as JD’s, MD’s, and MBA’s. Prices are never about what people “deserve”... they just charge the highest price they can.

One reason: we need undergraduate students to subsidize the tuition fee of research students.

Graduate students are arguably under paid, since they can make more money usually getting hired to go into an industry role.

Obligatory "academia varies more than you think": https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4471/academia-varies-more-than-you-think-it-does-the-movie#4475 Here in Japan I know plenty of PhD students paying tuition from their savings, from money from their other jobs, from their parents savings...

@Robin that would indicate though that "the supply of PhD students would go to zero" might not be correct, and so universities worldwide can charge PhD students.

In some parts of the world, education is considered a public good and free (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_education).

This question needs a country tag, imo. Tuition is not charged everywhere, and even if it is, it is rarely "tens of thousands of dollars".

You're looking at it the wrong way. Both undergrads and grad students are charged tuition by the university. This tuition is used to pay faculty, administration, operating costs, etc. Some undergrads receive full or partial scholarships. You might say they are not "paying" for undergrad, but the university is still getting paid, just from a different source. The same occurs with grad students; many of them are given research assistantships, meaning that their advisor found external grant money and is using it to pay both tuition and a stipend to the grad student. Grad students without teaching or research assistantships, such as many MBA or law programs, still have to pay tuition out of their own pockets.
Teaching assistantships are not external money, but essentially a department is saying that they have to pay someone to provide instruction, so it's cheaper to pay grad students to assist a professor than to hire more faculty. The university is still getting the tuition paid by the department.

It depends on how the internal accounting is done. Regardless, it's still almost always cheaper per course to hire teaching faculty than grad students. Universities pay grad students because they want to have grad programs.

PhD students are paid to do work.
Undergraduate students pay money to learn.
There is nothing similar about these situations.  You can tell because PhD students who do their research and teaching work, but do not learn anything (perhaps because they knew the material it already) continue to get paid.  A PhD student who learns but does not do teaching or research work will not continue to be paid.  A portion of the PhD students' pay may be in the form of education.

(US-specific) As was pointed out in the comments, grad-level professional programs generally do charge tuition, often a lot of tuition. Many academic master's programs do too, as do arts master's like MFA and MMus.
But very few people would make the commitment for an academic PhD if they had to go deep into debt to pay 5+ years of tuition in order to earn an assistant professor's salary (if they're lucky) at the end of it. Even lower-ranked law schools have been having trouble attracting students because most lawyers just don't make enough money to pay back the loans.
Universities can recoup some of the cost of having grad students by using them for teaching and lab duties, but having a grad program is overall a money-losing proposition. They do it because it enhances the reputation of the university and because faculty want to teach grad students (and want grad students to do the work they don't want to do).

In addition to the other fine answers here, I think a more general answer is that, as with other markets, price is determined by supply and demand (and any distortions in the market).  Looking at things from this economic perspective, the main reason why postgraduates are more likely to obtain substantial amounts of scholarship support than undergraduates is that postgraduates have far better employment options than undergraduates, so you need more money to attract them away from these available alternatives.  (In economic parlance, the supply curve for postgraduate 'labour' is higher than for undergraduates.)


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Is there a platform/forum where (phd) students can share their experiences?
Is there a platform/forum where (phd) students or post-docs can share their good or bad experiences with their supervisors?

Aside from the obvious issue that this comes dangerously close to washing one's dirty underwear in public, I think even for big labs the sample size per supervisor will be way too small for this platform to be useful.

There certainly are lots of questions here about dealing with 'bad' experiences, with supervisors or otherwise. It would not surprise me if there was a forum somewhere that specialized in it. But, what do you want out of it? Validation, solutions, just to vent?

What about ratemyprofessor?  It's not specific to this, but I would think it could include this.

@aparente001 yeah, that's one I just found yesterday ... not sure it works  also for phd/post-docs

I am also not sure about this but I don't see why one couldn't post there.

@ Jon Custer: well, (not only) my idea is to have a platform where people can share theirs experiences (and solutions).  This is motivated by the fact that there are many cases of researchers afraid to react, or they don't know how to do it. Reading stories maybe similar to yours might help (as much as people already do for cancer or similar diseases) . Of course has to be done in a way that both privacy and researcher and prof are protected, etc...

@aparente001 I am new in this community... I also don't see it too bad (or maybe I don't know enough about  'shopping questions') ... I thought this is a interesting topic, given the importance that mental health is getting in the scientific community - saying this from a global health perspective. Furthermore, in our phd student association, we are trying to measure students' mental health  through surveys and see how we can improve the support provided by the university...

jjrr, if your group wants to create such a platform, more power to you, but I don't think it would be productive for you to discuss the merits of this idea, or the nitty gritty of the design here at Academia SE.  Of course, after launching such a site, you would then be in a position to post an answer to the question you posed here.

Isn't this what The Grad Cafe is for? That said, I'll echo what everyone else said about "this sounds like a very bad idea."


text:
How competitive are faculty jobs in the UK, as compared with the U.S.?
I wonder when a faculty position at a top UK university is advertised, how many applications will be submitted. I am just asking about an estimate of the average. For example, consider a Reader position in an engineering field.
I wish to know how competitive are the faculty jobs in the UK in comparison with the US.

Depends on uni, department and location.

in comparison with the US — Your baseline for comparison also depends on university, department, and location.  You really need to be more specific.