Except for ‘genius’. A PhD meant you will likely be extremely well ‘informed’ about a specific topic in a very narrow field. So well informed that you will be able to come up with ‘something’ worth saying even to others that are well informed in that same field. It’s a pretty low bar with an extremely high motivation/focus/effort requirement.

I think it’s similar to a job we were hiring for that was essentially cold calling companies too sell licenses for Microsoft. To apply you were required to have a BA. A BA in what, you might ask? Well that didn’t even make it onto the form we used. It was just a checkbox. It was literally a gauge to see if you’d been able to stick through a program like that.