Something I didn’t notice in the comments is how to handle the common situation that Bob is a one-hit wonder. Being a one-hit wonder is pretty difficult; most people are zero-hit wonders. Being a two-hit wonder is even more difficult, and very few people ever create many independent brilliant ideas / works / projects / etc.
Keeping that in mind, it seems like a bad idea to make a precedent of handing out epistemic tenure. Most people are not an ever-flowing font of brilliance and so the case that their one hit is indicative of many more is much less likely than the case that you’ve already witnessed the best thing they’ll do.
Just anecdotally, I can think of many public intellectuals who had one great idea, or bundle of ideas, and now spend most of their time spouting unrelated nonsense. And, troublingly, the only reason people take their nonsense seriously is that there is, at least implicitly, some notion of epistemic tenure attached to them. These people are a tremendous source of “intellectual noise”, so to speak, and I think discourse would improve if the Bobs out there had to demonstrate the validity of their ideas from as close to scratch as possible rather than getting an endless free pass.
My biggest hesitation with never handing out intellectual tenure is that might make it harder for super geniuses to work as efficiently. Would von Neumann have accomplished what he did if he had to compete as if he were just another scientist over and over? But I think a lack of intellectual tenure would have to really reduce super genius efficiency for it to make up for all the noise it produces. There’s just so many more one-hit wonders than (N>1)-hit wonders.
Something I didn’t notice in the comments is how to handle the common situation that Bob is a one-hit wonder. Being a one-hit wonder is pretty difficult; most people are zero-hit wonders. Being a two-hit wonder is even more difficult, and very few people ever create many independent brilliant ideas / works / projects / etc.
Keeping that in mind, it seems like a bad idea to make a precedent of handing out epistemic tenure. Most people are not an ever-flowing font of brilliance and so the case that their one hit is indicative of many more is much less likely than the case that you’ve already witnessed the best thing they’ll do.
Just anecdotally, I can think of many public intellectuals who had one great idea, or bundle of ideas, and now spend most of their time spouting unrelated nonsense. And, troublingly, the only reason people take their nonsense seriously is that there is, at least implicitly, some notion of epistemic tenure attached to them. These people are a tremendous source of “intellectual noise”, so to speak, and I think discourse would improve if the Bobs out there had to demonstrate the validity of their ideas from as close to scratch as possible rather than getting an endless free pass.
My biggest hesitation with never handing out intellectual tenure is that might make it harder for super geniuses to work as efficiently. Would von Neumann have accomplished what he did if he had to compete as if he were just another scientist over and over? But I think a lack of intellectual tenure would have to really reduce super genius efficiency for it to make up for all the noise it produces. There’s just so many more one-hit wonders than (N>1)-hit wonders.