In one interview Tyler Cowen said that "By far the most optimistic feature of today's world is that there is more mobilized talent than ever before, and by a long mile.". It's really cool feature but can we do better? What are the current social institutions which promote "low-profile" people? Other words, what are the contemporary social lifts which allow low-profile person become high-profile?
Bad lifts which means they are close and demand the existence some signals like high grades or degree or some achievements:
I. Top universities
Top universities have acceptance rate ~5-7% and we should consider that a lot of people just don't apply for it. Nevertheless, we observe the process of devaluation of high education which can lead to the fact that the greatest signal for hiring will be degree from top university (like almost everyone has a degree, so how to stand out from others? right: degree from cooler university or higher degree like MS or PhD). This situation excludes a lot of people from this signal, which obviously makes the system of high education broken because it seems not beneficial to go to non-top university and spend this time more valuable. So, we should rethink the system of signaling and recruitment of talent.
II. Jobs at corporations
The process of hiring at corporations seems crazy because of multi-stage funnel and their demand of big signals like degree + X year experience + skill of solving questions for the interview that makes impossible to go into system for some outsiders. It seems that we should ease hiring criteria to increase the variance but not vice versa.
III. Some kind of accelerators and talent supporting bodies
Accelerators should help people to boost their startup / research / some business despite the amount of existing signals. But the tricky question is a competition. I think that competition can be placed in 2 processes - selection and inside the "accelerator". The first thing is obvious - a lot of people apply for and compete with others. The second thing is relevant for new kind of accelerators like Pioneer that has competition inside the accelerator (with open entry). Both cases kill the outsiders actually: when popularity increases a lot of high-profile people start apply for and crowd out low-profile people because they have more powerful projects and track record by definition. This leads to the transformation of these institutions into closed signaling universities which I think YC or Thiel Fellowship have become (just see the amount of achievements which have the participants of YC or EF or TF). The same situation is applicable to talent supporting bodies like The MacArthur Fellowship (see comments here).
Good lifts which means they are open and everybody from scratch can be promoted by this kind of lift:
I. Blogging (youtube, tiktok, instagram, writing, etc.)
II. Cheap kind of sports (like gym, boxing)
III. Business (except of poor cultural background which Sam Altman proposed in his interview with Tyler Cowen)
IV. Show business
V. EdTech / Open Education online platforms like Coursera or Lambda School
VI. Jobs at SME
So, as we can see nowadays there are more open institutions (lifts) which were 100-200-500 years ago thanks in my opinion to the Internet. But isn't the Internet itself the biggest social lift in human history? It seems that it is. And that is why we need a kind of navigator for its tools, helping a newcomer to navigate and use the potential of the Internet by 100% for free or almost free. That really opens a lot of doors for a lot of people which is very unique for our history which is exciting!