Are you talking about free time pre- or post-quals? And do you include work that goes towards your thesis but that you "have" to do (e.g. for a conference or internal deadline) as free time or non-free time?

My experience (and I would guess many of my labmates, though I don't know for sure) is that quals are really easy to pass, you spend at most 2 weeks of your life studying for them, and otherwise you're just doing research plus a few classes. Stanford is an outlier in that it has particularly few class requirements compared to other top CS departments, but it seemed like MIT grad students also often started doing research fairly early on, from my perspective as an undergrad there.

Depending on your funding situation, your actual time spent doing research may be more or less beholden to what grants your advisor has to do work towards. I'm on a fellowship and so can do whatever I want, the only consequences being that if my research after 5 years is uninteresting then I'll have trouble getting academic jobs.

Agree. The lab work in CS is also large, though it comes in huge blocks rather than on a steady schedule.

Quals are the GRE, right?

I have been talking about this very issue for ages here on LW. "Rationalists" (the tribe, not the ideal platonic type) share a ton of EY's biases, including anti-academic sentiment.

It's striking how much value there is in academia that I didn't notice, and that a base-level rational person would've noticed if they'd asked "what are the main blind spots of the rationality community, and how can I steelman the opposing positions?".

Well, to bloat my own ego, one of my most consistently banged-on themes has been, "HEY ACADEMIA BASICALLY TELLS US THINGS FOR FREE!"

I think the idea is that you're supposed to deduce the last name and domain name from identifying details in the post.

How hard your quals are depends on how well you know your field. I went to a top 5 physics program, and everyone passed their qualifying exams, roughly half of whom opted to take the qual their first year of grad school. Obviously, we weren't randomly selected though.

Fellowships are a crapshoot that depend on a lot of factors outside your control, but getting funding is generally pretty easy in the sciences. When you work as an "RA" you are basically just doing your thesis research. TAing can be time consuming, but literally no one cares if you do it poorly, so it's not high pressure.

But this is a red flag:

Let’s assume you have the financial aspect of your PhD taken care of (e.g. You have an easy/enjoyable TA job). What other requirements are there other than passing Quals? Could I read interesting books indefinitely until I find something interesting to publish?

That isn't how research works, at least in the sciences. Research is generally 1% "big idea" and 99% slowly grinding it out to see if it works. Your adviser, if he/she is any good, will help you find a big idea that you can make some progress on and you'll be grinding it out every week and meeting with your adviser or other collaborators if you've gotten stuck.

That said, a bad adviser probably won't pay any attention to you. So you can do whatever you want for about 7 years until people realize you've made no progress and the wheels come off the bus (at which point they'll probably hand you a masters degree and send you on your way).

How much TAing is allowed or required depends on your field and department. I'm in a statistics department that expects PhD students to TA every semester (except their first and final year). It has taken me some effort to weasel out of around half of the teaching appointments, since I find teaching (especially grading) quite time-consuming, while industry internships both pay better and generate research experience. On the other hand, people I know from the CS department only have to teach 1-2 semesters during their entire PhD.

I mostly agree, but would add two caveats.

Relying too much on getting one very specific advisor is risky. Most advisors are middle-aged (or outright old), especially those with Nobel Prizes, and they do sometimes die or move away with little notice. If that happens, universities can be very bad about finding replacements (let alone comparably brilliant replacements) for any students cast adrift.

Also, an adviser's personality & schedule are as important as their research skills: a Nobel Prize winner who's usually away giving speeches, and is a raging, neglectful arsehole when they are around, is likely to be more of a hindrance than a help in getting a PhD. Put like that, what I just wrote is obvious, but I can imagine it being the kind of thing potential applicants would overlook.

Yes... but is it about mentorship, or connections? Anyway, one problem is that powerful and wise mentors don't have anything to say to you until you've got a dissertation topic, and the curriculum is structured so that this seldom happens before someone's third year in grad school.

My experience at the U. of Buffalo was that there were 2 kinds of student-advisor relationships: The exploitative kind, where the "mentor" gets the student to do gruntwork on the advisor's project, and write a whole bunch of code for him, and keeps them around, ungraduated, as long as they can; and the pro-forma kind, where the advisor cheers the student on in whatever the student is doing, then puts his or her name on the resulting papers. The idea that a dissertation advisor teaches something did not correspond to the reality I observed.

I think it depends more on specific advisors than on the university. If you're interested in doing AI safety research in grad school, getting in touch with professors who got FLI grants might be a good idea.

Why do you say Carnegie Mellon? I'm assuming it's because they have the Center for Formal Epistemology and a very nice-looking degree program in Logic, Computation and Methodology. But don't some other universities have comparable programs?

Do you have direct experience with the Carnegie Mellon program? At one point I was seriously considering going there because of the logic & computation degree, and I might still consider it at some point in the future.

Is Academician's identity supposed to be secret?

Grad school is free. At most good PhD programs in the US, if you get in then they will offer you funding which covers tuition and pays you a stipend on the order of $25K per year. In return, you may have to do some work as a TA or in a professor's lab.

The real cost is the ~5 years of your life.

I don't think lurking around campus is going to lead to the same results as being immersed in a research environment full-time (especially if you're not doing research yourself). I generally think that a large amount of useful knowledge is tacit and that it's hard to absorb without being pretty directly involved.

Also as others have noted, a PhD is free / paid for so (economic) cost isn't that much of a consideration.

Is there any way to do these things without paying a large pricetag? Could you just lurk around campus or something? Only half-joking here.

Moving to europe, and (maybe) not exactly GB, should for the most part allow you to do that.