The Value of Credentials in Identifying Talent: A Necessary Evil

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Credentials are becoming a necessary but costly evil as they don't serve their original purpose anymore and there are better methods to identify talent.
Credentials have increased in cost, particularly in academia.
At scale, the credential by itself doesn't tell you what you need to know about a person's chops for a particular job.
Problems with credentials exist as problems of scale.
Creating new GitHub repos or contributing to open source may become a new way to identify talent.

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How are curiosity and innovation connected? What's the most important problem in your field? And are you working on it? Why or why not? Is curiosity the best heuristic — either for an individual or for society at large — for finding valuable problems to work on? What mental models do people tend to use by default? How much is an academic degree worth these days? What are some alternatives to degrees that could count as valid credentials, i.e., as unfakeable (or very-hard-to-fake) signals of someone's level of skill in an area? Can people learn to fake any kind of signal, or are there some that are inherently unfakeable?

Rohit Krishnan is an essayist at Strange Loop Canon, where he writes about business, tech, and economics. He's been an entrepreneur and an investor and is very excited to see when crazy ideas meet the real world. Follow him on Twitter at @krishnanrohit.

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