谢力在《一流人才的悲催境地》中说：数学家哈尔莫斯在其书中《我要做数学家》说过：韦伊指出一个对数定律在起作用：一流人物吸引别的一流人物，但是二流人物往往聘用三流者，而三流人物聘用五流者。

这句话不错。不过，网上说叫韦伊学术雇佣定律（Andre Weil's law of academic hiring）：

French mathematician André Weil once mentioned an unconsciousformula that weaker academic departments used when hiring new faculty. Hetold a fellow mathematician, Paul Halmos, about it and Halmos included Weil'slaw in his autobiography. Here is what Halmos says:

"But what do you do when a department [in a university]  goes bad? André Weil suggested that there is a logarithmic  law at work: first-rate people attract other first-rate people,  but second-rate people tend to hire third-raters, and third-rate  people hire fifth-raters. If a dean or a president is genuinely  interested in building and maintaining a high-quality university  (and some of them are), then he must not grant complete self-determination  to a second-rate department; he must, instead, use his administrative  powers to intervene and set things right. That's one of the proper  functions of deans and presidents, and pity the poor university  in which a large proportion of both the faculty and the administration  are second-raters; it is doomed to diverge to minus infinity."  (p. 123)

From I Want to Be a Mathematician: An Automathography, by Paul Halmos,Springer-Verlag, New York, 1984.

我探讨一下为什么二、三流人才不聘用一流人才。原因可能如下：

1、二、三流人才怕聘用到一流人才后，一流人才不服，约束不了，怕一流人才夺了他的光辉或权力，或者嫉贤妒能，怕在学术上将他自己比下去，心理上不舒服，就如同中国话所说的“武大郞开店一样”，水平比我高的人我不用。

2、也可能是二、三流人才根本就识别不出什么是一流人才。以中国目前而论，很难看出谁是一流二流，主要看以前发表的文章，有高影响因子文章就算人才，影响因子越高人才级别就越高，但天知道是导师给写的，还是谁给写的呢？再说啦，原来发表过高影响因子文章，就能断定以后也能发表高影响因子文章？当然，中国招聘不重视导师推荐，只重视文章发表情况，这也是问题所在。

3、一流人才根本就不想到二三流人才占据要津的地方。