[morelandjs]

The tail of the distribution justifies the entire distribution. I agree that a large percentage of PhD research is inconsequential, but a small percentage is massively consequential. It’s ok to whiff on a thousand STEM PhDs if you pick up one Andrej Karpathy (for example).

[ixtli]

People have really messed up views about hiring in general. I wish more people understood what you are saying here.

[gopher_space]

The number of people capable of identifying potentially consequential research is smaller than the number of people performing consequential research. And they’re all busy with their own projects.

[JuniperMesos]

Maybe this is true for academic institutions granting the PhDs (although even this I am skeptical of, training a PhD costs a lot in terms of time, money, and human effort). But that doesn't mean it implies that the federal government needs to employ a thousand STEM PhDs just to get someone like Karpathy - indeed, Andrej Karpathy does not work for the federal government! He made his name working in the private sector!

[clutchdude]

Picking only the tail ends of the distribution also tells me you don't understand how the bulk of progress is made.

It isn't always Eureka moments but also a slow grinding away at assumptions to confirmations.

[OGEnthusiast]

Maybe, let's see if AI overall is a net positive or net negative to the US overall. If AI turns out to be a net negative (which seems likely) maybe we don't want this type of AI research being funded by taxpayers.

[cbb330]

The US doesn’t have enough money to fund the entire distribution

And as a tax payer I prefer discretionary spending for high performers.

[titzer]

> for high performers.

Like $40k bonuses for ICE agents. Incidentally, $40k is about the stipend for a typical PhD student. I'll take a smart student doing nothing but eating food and digesting theorems over the absolute chaos that is being funded by our tax dollars.