As Raemon noted, mentorship bottleneck is actually a bottleneck. Senior researchers who should mentor are the most bottlenecked resource in the field, and the problem is unlikely to be solved by financial or similar incentives. Motivating too much is probably wrong, because mentoring competes with time to do research, evaluate grants, etc. What can be done is
improve the utilization of time of the mentors (e.g. mentoring teams of people instead of individuals)
do what can be done on peer-to-peer basis
use mentors from other fields to teach people generic skills, e.g. how to do research
I can probably spend some time (perhaps around 4 hours / week) on mentoring, especially for new researchers that want to contribute to the learning-theoretic research agenda or its vicinity. However, I am not sure how to make this known to the relevant people. Should I write a post that says “hey, who wants a mentor?” Is there a better way?
Important not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. There’s almost certainly a better way to find mentors, but this would be far better than not doing anything, so I’d say that if you can’t find an actionable better option within (let’s say) a month, you should just do it. Or just do it now and replace with better method when you find one.
As Raemon noted, mentorship bottleneck is actually a bottleneck. Senior researchers who should mentor are the most bottlenecked resource in the field, and the problem is unlikely to be solved by financial or similar incentives. Motivating too much is probably wrong, because mentoring competes with time to do research, evaluate grants, etc. What can be done is
improve the utilization of time of the mentors (e.g. mentoring teams of people instead of individuals)
do what can be done on peer-to-peer basis
use mentors from other fields to teach people generic skills, e.g. how to do research
prepare better materials for onboarding
Some relevant bits from Critch’s blog, relevant to the “use mentors from other fields for generic skills” include:
Leverage Academia
Using “Get into UC Berkeley” as a screening filter.
Deliberate Grad School.
I can probably spend some time (perhaps around 4 hours / week) on mentoring, especially for new researchers that want to contribute to the learning-theoretic research agenda or its vicinity. However, I am not sure how to make this known to the relevant people. Should I write a post that says “hey, who wants a mentor?” Is there a better way?
Important not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. There’s almost certainly a better way to find mentors, but this would be far better than not doing anything, so I’d say that if you can’t find an actionable better option within (let’s say) a month, you should just do it. Or just do it now and replace with better method when you find one.
Off-the-cuff: I think making that post is probably good. In the longterm hopefully we can come up with a more enduring solution.