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satt comments on Deliberate Grad School - Less Wrong
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I am of the opinion that if you do grad school and you don't attach yourself to a powerful and wise mentor in the form of your academic adviser, you're doing it wrong. Mentorship is a highly underrated phenomenon among rationalists.
I mean, if you're ~22, you really don't know what the hell you're doing. That's why you're going to grad school, basically. To get some further direction in how to cultivate your professional career.
If you happen to have access to an adviser who won a Nobel or whose adviser won a Nobel, they would make a good choice. The implicit skills involved in doing great work are sometimes passed down this way. The adviser won't even necessarily know which of their habits are the good ones. I'm thinking specifically of a professor I knew whose adviser was a Nobel laureate, who would take his students out for coffee almost every day. They would casually talk shop while getting coffee. This professor's students were generally well above average in their research accomplishments.
I mostly agree, but would add two caveats.
Relying too much on getting one very specific advisor is risky. Most advisors are middle-aged (or outright old), especially those with Nobel Prizes, and they do sometimes die or move away with little notice. If that happens, universities can be very bad about finding replacements (let alone comparably brilliant replacements) for any students cast adrift.
Also, an adviser's personality & schedule are as important as their research skills: a Nobel Prize winner who's usually away giving speeches, and is a raging, neglectful arsehole when they are around, is likely to be more of a hindrance than a help in getting a PhD. Put like that, what I just wrote is obvious, but I can imagine it being the kind of thing potential applicants would overlook.