Fwd: "Genius" finding

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Begin forwarded message:

From: Scott Page
Date: February 14, 2015 at 07:16:47 EST
To: Joichi Ito
Subject: "Genius" finding

Joi,

I've been thinking about your question of how to identify amazing people. Here are several thoughts that don't necessarily cohere.

I think your approach has to depend partly on the goal. The algorithm I would construct to find the next great artist would differ from one to find a teacher, mathematician, cancer researcher, brain scientist, etc. If you're totally wide open as to subject area, then it seems to me you want to cast a wide net.

I would be tempted to try the Bayesian Truth Serum and ask something like: Pick a really smart friend, who would that person say should win a genius award.

Rather than try to identify people, you might instead seek out papers/projects/programs/ideas and then identify the person after the fact.

You might want to consider asking people for the "coolest thing they know that's NOT on the web (yet)

So much filtering and assessment already goes on that most programs free ride on that -- giving awards to people who have already won awards. This suggests that one place to look is at the "losers" - contact MacArthur, NIH, NSF, DARPA, GOOGLE, and ask who do you regret not funding?

Once you've got a long list of possibilities you have many options. Here are some you may not have considered:

You could also pay people on mechanical turk to write up little blurbs on each one and then seed them on Facebook, Twitter, etc., and then only look at the ones that get retweeted.

You could use Matt Salganik's pairwise comparison website.

hope this helps. Happy to think more.

scotte

Scott E Page
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
Santa Fe Institute