Another implication John didn’t list, is that a certain kind of illegible talent, the kind that can make progress in pre-paradigmatic fields, is crucial. This seems to strongly conflict with the statement in your post:
>Of the bottlenecks I listed above, I am going to mostly ignore talent. IMO, talented people aren’t the bottleneck right now, and the other problems we have are more interesting. We need to be able to train people in the details of an area of cutting-edge research. We need a larger number of research groups that can employ those people to work on specific agendas. And perhaps trickiest, we need to do this within a network of reputation and vetting that makes it possible to selectively spend money on good research without warping or stifling the very research it’s trying to select for.
Do you think that special sort of talent doesn’t exist? Or is abundant? Or isn’t the right way to understand the situation? Or what?
Another implication John didn’t list, is that a certain kind of illegible talent, the kind that can make progress in pre-paradigmatic fields, is crucial. This seems to strongly conflict with the statement in your post:
>Of the bottlenecks I listed above, I am going to mostly ignore talent. IMO, talented people aren’t the bottleneck right now, and the other problems we have are more interesting. We need to be able to train people in the details of an area of cutting-edge research. We need a larger number of research groups that can employ those people to work on specific agendas. And perhaps trickiest, we need to do this within a network of reputation and vetting that makes it possible to selectively spend money on good research without warping or stifling the very research it’s trying to select for.
Do you think that special sort of talent doesn’t exist? Or is abundant? Or isn’t the right way to understand the situation? Or what?