Re: Degrees vs. smarts

Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Mon, 04 Oct 1999 17:56:18 -0500

Whether or not degrees are relevant depends on the order of the problem you're trying to solve. PhDs are great if you have to solve a problem that only one person in a thousand can handle. If it's one in a million, they count for very little; at one in a billion, they're simply irrelevant. I would estimate PhDs as being between two and four sigmas worth of uniqueness; it's not relevant as a credential to any problem harder than that, because a problem harder than that is going to take a genius so weird that the usual correlation between education and intelligence can't be counted on to apply.

Quod erat demonstrandum.
--

           sentience@pobox.com          Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
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