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There are finite resources for paying salaries, and people (before tenure) get cut based on how promising their ideas are as judged by their local peers (the te

There are finite resources for paying salaries, and people (before tenure) get cut based on how promising their ideas are as judged by their local peers (the tenure committee). You can imagine an alternate system where you poll the larger community, but this is liable to degenerate into a popularity contest as each voter spends a tiny amount of time choosing people with whom they are not familiar. In contrast, the tenure committee is able to invest more time looking carefully at a single candidate.

jessriedel 10y ago
It just dawned on me that I should of course disclose I work at the Perimeter Institute. However, I actually disagree a lot with Neil Turok on hiring philosophy and what PI's priorities should be, in a way that makes me very sympathetic toward this former physicist. But I know nothing about her actual work (she left before I arrived), and for all I know Neil made the right decision and it wasn't close.