Have you looked through the FLI faculty listed there? How many seem useful supervisors for this kind of thing? Why?
If we’re sticking to the [generate new approaches to core problems] aim, I can see three or four I’d be happy to recommend, conditional on their agreeing upfront to the exploratory goals, and that publication would not be necessary (or a very low concrete number agreed upon).
There are about ten more that seem not-obviously-a-terrible-idea, but probably not great (e.g. those who I expect have a decent understanding of the core problems, but basically aren’t working on them).
The majority don’t write anything that suggests they know what the core problems are.
For almost all of these supervisors, doing a PhD would seem to provide quite a few constraints, undesirable incentives, and an environment that’s poor. From an individual’s point of view this can still make sense, if it’s one of the only ways to get stable medium-term funding. From a funder’s point of view, it seems nuts. (again, less nuts if the goal were [incremental progress on prosaic approaches, and generation of a respectable publication record])
Have you looked through the FLI faculty listed there?
How many seem useful supervisors for this kind of thing? Why?
If we’re sticking to the [generate new approaches to core problems] aim, I can see three or four I’d be happy to recommend, conditional on their agreeing upfront to the exploratory goals, and that publication would not be necessary (or a very low concrete number agreed upon).
There are about ten more that seem not-obviously-a-terrible-idea, but probably not great (e.g. those who I expect have a decent understanding of the core problems, but basically aren’t working on them).
The majority don’t write anything that suggests they know what the core problems are.
For almost all of these supervisors, doing a PhD would seem to provide quite a few constraints, undesirable incentives, and an environment that’s poor.
From an individual’s point of view this can still make sense, if it’s one of the only ways to get stable medium-term funding.
From a funder’s point of view, it seems nuts.
(again, less nuts if the goal were [incremental progress on prosaic approaches, and generation of a respectable publication record])