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”.
Not exactly sure what I was trying to say here. Probably using the PhD as an example of a path to credentials.
Here are some related things I believe:
I don’t think a PhD is necessary or the only way
University credentials are not now and should not be the filter for people working on these problems
There is often a gap between peoples competencies and their ability to signal them
Credentials are the default signal for competence
Universities are incredibly inefficient ways to gain competence or signal
Assessing people is expensive and so reviewers are incentivised to find cheaper to assess signals
Credentials are used as signals not because they are good but because they are cheap to assess and universally understood
Credentials are often necessary but rarely sufficient
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”.