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Fair enough on the medical school thing, but is this really a serious barrier in something like physics? How hard is it for a talented researcher to learn to write a technical, scholarly document in a timely fashion? Do you know of any good, hard working scientific talents denied access to resources because of their writing ability? Because I know lots and lots of mediocre researchers who are nevertheless perfectly adequate scholarly authors. It doesn't seem like a demanding filter. In my experience most journal articles are terribly written (much worse than your sequences, for example), so the standards can't be that high.
Eliezer is perhaps thinking of someone like himself, who can write very well, but not very quickly.
Many people seem to assume that because Eliezer is highly intelligent, he would succeed in school. But personally, I think he would have a hard time. He'd be the Intel Science Fair winner with the 2.0 GPA. In fact, I'm not even sure he would make it through college, let alone high school (which is much harder). The reason? He described it in Two More Things to Unlearn from School:
The only way it would work would be if he had a powerful mentor looking out for him, so that he either wouldn't have to go through this insanity, or it wouldn't stop his advancement if he did it poorly. Absent that, he -- and probably a fair number of other similar people -- would fall through the cracks.
That may be. Has he tried seriously to get into academia? My impression is that he doesn't think it would be worth his time. I graduated high school with a GPA of around 2.0 as well, and I do okay. Being productive in school, if you really want to, isn't a very hard thing to get into. And if it is, for whatever reason, very difficult for someone to become productive then they're probably unsuited for research anyway. My take on EY is that he would do fine if he found the right institution and was really inclined to go through it.
This is the notion that I would like to disabuse you of. School filters select strongly for Conscientiousness and weakly against Openness; whereas the former plays at most a minor role in research as such, and the latter is crucial.
Someone might, therefore, have too much Openness and too little Conscientiousness to make it through the filter, despite having enough of these traits (a large amount of Openness, and a bare minimum of Conscientiousness) to function as a brilliant researcher.
And my point is that that is a big "if".
So, I've definitely both underloaded and overloaded myself academically (well, by 'overloaded' I mean 'had to drop all non-school projects to do my school projects well enough'). I feel tremendous sympathy for people who, for whatever reason, don't line up with the university standard: one of my friends in undergrad would be able to work solidly for around three months, but then have a breakdown for about a month, before the cycle would repeat. This was tremendously unhelpful, because semesters were four months long- but if he were on a trimester schedule, he would probably be fine.
And so people do slip through the cracks, who could probably be great researchers. (He had a terrible time keeping regular jobs as well, because they don't like to give three months of vacation a year.) But it's not clear to me how large an issue that is. Someone who can only do two courses a semester can get a college degree eventually- the system is just not set up to encourage that, and if you believe strongly in the importance of youth for research (which I mostly don't) then you might want to dissuade the people who be able to devote a smaller portion of their youth to research than others.
Okay, why do you think conscientiousness plays a relatively minor role in research? What do you mean by openness, and why do you think schools filter against it?
The word "Openness" in his original post is a hyperlink. Clicking on it will produce a definition of the term :)
The former is the vast majority of research. And most things.
I don't believe it. The relentless and systematic pursuit of one's own obsessions is not the "virtue" taught by schools.
I commented about conscientiousness. To the extent that the 'virtue' you describe here is still contentiousness you are not using a straw man. Conscientiousness and political savvy are the what is required for success and productive output in research.
Conscientiousness is what you need in order to finish what you start, when what you started is something that somebody else told you to do. When it's your own thing, you need a lot less of it.
As for political savvy -- that isn't required at all. Unless by "research" you mean "political success in the human occupation customarily but misleadingly labeled 'research'." (The "as such" qualifier a few comments above was intended to rule that out.)
I really, really wish this were true. At some point in the process of doing your own things you are going to have to do work. Mundane details, repetition, parts of the process you don't like. For example, you have to write up findings, crunch numbers, prepare details of any experiments you may be doing, double check stuff for reliability and proofread.
Not true. Political savvy makes a huge difference to your actual ability to produce research output.
I don't like it, but politics really does improve your ability to do research---and just about anything else.
I said less of this personality trait was required; I didn't say zero.
Are you really disputing the notion that it takes less conscientiousness (other terms: "self-discipline", "willpower") to work on projects of one's own choosing? That's actually almost the definition of "one's own choosing": what one does by default.
Like I suspected, we're talking past each other. Everything you say either pertains to the human occupation (and not just the act of coming up with good ideas, and maybe -- with minimal Conscientiousness -- writing them up in articles), or else is only the case because the system is set up in the suboptimal way it is.
http://www.pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir/pguo-PhD-grind.pdf demonstrates, I think, both the use of Conscientiousness and the politicking.
This strikes me as untrue for most people. Can you give me examples of people who were not conscientious and were nonetheless able to complete large, multi-step projects?
I actually find myself much more capable of finishing large, multi-step projects when they've got social implications riding on them. I enjoy my private projects more when I'm doing them, but have trouble finishing them if they take more than a few hours of serious work.
The first category does include things that others didn't directly tell me to do, though: there's also things I'm doing as favors to others, public-facing projects I came up with independently, and so on.
Not really the issue in this discussion, which is about the negative effects of a filtering system that excludes a certain small but highly valuable population.
As I've suggested earlier, EY is a pretty good example of the type of personality I have in mind.