I had an interview with one of these organizations (that will remain unnamed) where the main person I was talking to was really excited about a bunch of stupid bullshit ideas (for eg experimental methods) that, based on their understanding of them, must have come from either university press releases or popular science magazines like New Scientist. I was trying to find a “polite in whatever culture these people have” way to say “this is not useful, I’d like to explain why but it will take a while, here are better things” but doing that eloquently is one of my weak points.
From what I’ve seen of the people there, ARPA-E has some smart people (“ordinary smart”, not geniuses) but the ARPAs are still very tied to the university system, with a heavy reliance on PhD credentials.
I had an interview with one of these organizations (that will remain unnamed) where the main person I was talking to was really excited about a bunch of stupid bullshit ideas (for eg experimental methods) that, based on their understanding of them, must have come from either university press releases or popular science magazines like New Scientist. I was trying to find a “polite in whatever culture these people have” way to say “this is not useful, I’d like to explain why but it will take a while, here are better things” but doing that eloquently is one of my weak points.
From what I’ve seen of the people there, ARPA-E has some smart people (“ordinary smart”, not geniuses) but the ARPAs are still very tied to the university system, with a heavy reliance on PhD credentials.