Re: Degrees vs. smarts

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Oct 04 1999 - 16:56:18 MDT


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
        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


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