Re: "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
lgorithm I would construct to find the next great artist would
differ from ne to find a teacher, mathematician, cancer
researcher, brain =cientist, 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
=omething 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
=he 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 award 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
=egret 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..
nd then only look at the ones that get retweeted.

Sent from my iPhone

Begin forwarded message:

On the right track-like the bayesian method. I think that the
environment matters a lot too- the people that we look for aggregate
n places like Cambridge, where they can be with others who they can
resonate with. My guess is that many times they might not have
ormal positions, but are visitors to labs, research groups, etc. Is
there =ny way to get lists of such people???

I think the brute force way of getting the interesting
³attractors²-labs like George's to give us a list of the people who
think would it this model.
The problem is, and I'm working on this at MIT, most researchers =nd
post docs are sort of ³ undocumented immigrants² that we don't
ormally tracks

• Joi

Yes, exactly - this is how it is at Harvard too, but very soon people
now who the top minds are, and which are impostors - word spreads,
and hose with the good minds get invited to lunches, talks, the
american =cademy, etc. there must be some way to crack this...

Yes...

BTW, I am going to recruit, possibly, Cynthia Greenleaf, Jonathan =anton's wife, to help. Jonathan is now the president of the American =cademy and Cynthia was Associate Provost at U of C and until recently =n executive search person in academia. They have experience with the =acarthur Fellows and have access to all of the stuff flowing through =he American Academy... So I am definitely tapping into that pipe.

I'm also going to FOO and Sci FOO this year and will be very =ystematic about it. I'll use some sort of algorithm on the attendees =o figure out who to meet.

We're also doing two faculty searches and now am screening all of the =ncoming applications and nominations.

• Joi