A discourse with DaveM

Had a chat with Dave M just now. We were discussing our worries (my worries mostly) on the development and direction of our PhD. Unlike some other students in our vicinity, both our PhD started with a very broad subject..which is data analysis. No model no nothing. Told him that I haven't been up to the level of being 'opinionated' about things. He said that we will not reach that stage unless we know a lot. Which is true. Although he did say that Jim(junior lecturer) says that sometimes you will not be at that stage even when you are in your post PhD position. DUn want to be that! Dave did ask BB1(we share the same supervisor), how would he know if he has done enough because Dave seems to think that he hasn't done enough because he hasnt got much interesting results. BB1 told him that sometimes to get a PhD, it depends on how you package it ... really aaa??? Dave was putting a picture that we are wearing the 'same shoes' but that I am in a better position than he is, this time last year (he's a year senior). Let truth be told that he is waaayyyy ahead of me. I feel that of course he dabbles with methods but he goes deep into the methods. For instance when he started doing his SVD last year, he somehow rerouted himself to the path of latent variables. While I did similar works on SVD but just stop there because my purpose in doing SVD was to apply it to the data in order to reduce its dimension. FULL STOP. I guess maybe this is where my weakness is, i.e. since I made a full stop there and not a pit stop to go deeper. As a result, I can't even answer BB1 question(till now) of why I did the SVD. The only reason I can give BB1 at the moment is they show consistent results in my clustering which BB1 said "ooo.. that's a pragmatic way of doing it", which certainly doesnt carry any weight in his books. Anyway, the discussion with Dave M was quite enlightening.