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.
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sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS Typing in Dvorak Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way