I have the sense that training happens out in the tails via the mechanism of lineage. Lineage holders get some selection power and might be doing something inscrutable with it, but it’s not like they can cast a net for PhD candidates arbitrarily wide so they must be doing some training or we wouldn’t see the concentration of results we do. The main issue with this seems to be that it is very expensive. If I have only 10 people I think can do top tier work it is very costly to test hypotheses that involve them spending time doing things other than top tier work. Suggestion: find ways for candidates to work closely with top tier people such that it doesn’t distract those people too much. Look at how intellectual lineages do this and assume that some of it looks dumb on the surface.
Suggestion: find ways for candidates to work closely with top tier people such that it doesn’t distract those people too much.
In particular, I currently think an apprenticeship-like model is the best starting point for experiments along these lines. Eli also recently pointed out to me that this lines up well with Bloom’s two-sigma problem: one-on-one tutoring works ~two standard deviations better than basically anything else in education.
I have the sense that training happens out in the tails via the mechanism of lineage. Lineage holders get some selection power and might be doing something inscrutable with it, but it’s not like they can cast a net for PhD candidates arbitrarily wide so they must be doing some training or we wouldn’t see the concentration of results we do. The main issue with this seems to be that it is very expensive. If I have only 10 people I think can do top tier work it is very costly to test hypotheses that involve them spending time doing things other than top tier work. Suggestion: find ways for candidates to work closely with top tier people such that it doesn’t distract those people too much. Look at how intellectual lineages do this and assume that some of it looks dumb on the surface.
In particular, I currently think an apprenticeship-like model is the best starting point for experiments along these lines. Eli also recently pointed out to me that this lines up well with Bloom’s two-sigma problem: one-on-one tutoring works ~two standard deviations better than basically anything else in education.