Cool. I appreciate you making these things explicit.
If the bottleneck is young people believing that if they work on the really hard problems, then there will be funding for them somehow, then, it seems pretty important for funders to somehow signal that they would fund such people. By default, even using credentials as a signal at all, signals to such young people that this funder is not able/willing to do something weird with their money. I think funders should probably be much more willing to say to someone with (a) a PhD and (b) boring ideas, “No, sorry, we’re looking for people working on the hard parts of the problem”.
Cool. I appreciate you making these things explicit.
If the bottleneck is young people believing that if they work on the really hard problems, then there will be funding for them somehow, then, it seems pretty important for funders to somehow signal that they would fund such people. By default, even using credentials as a signal at all, signals to such young people that this funder is not able/willing to do something weird with their money. I think funders should probably be much more willing to say to someone with (a) a PhD and (b) boring ideas, “No, sorry, we’re looking for people working on the hard parts of the problem”.