"I was an art student and, like all art students, I was encouraged to believe that there were a few great figures like Picasso and Kandinsky, Rembrandt and Giotto and so on who sort-of appeared out of nowhere and produced artistic revolution.
As I looked at art more and more, I discovered that that wasn’t really a true picture.
What really happened was that there was sometimes very fertile scenes involving lots and lots of people – some of them artists, some of them collectors, some of them curators, thinkers, theorists, people who were fashionable and knew what the hip things were – all sorts of people who created a kind of ecology of talent. And out of that ecology arose some wonderful work.
The period that I was particularly interested in, ’round about the Russian revolution, shows this extremely well. So I thought that originally those few individuals who’d survived in history – in the sort-of “Great Man” theory of history – they were called “geniuses”. But what I thought was interesting was the fact that they all came out of a scene that was very fertile and very intelligent.
So I came up with this word “scenius” – and scenius is the intelligence of a whole... operation or group of people. And I think that’s a more useful way to think about culture, actually. I think that – let’s forget the idea of “genius” for a little while, let’s think about the whole ecology of ideas that give rise to good new thoughts and good new work."
Trying to find and fund "high potential people" falls in line with Silicon Valley's narrative of the genius founder, lone brilliant hacker, etc. Perhaps not too surprising, as many behind such initiatives would likely consider themselves to be such "high potential people", and thus have some interest in perpetuating that narrative.
If the goal is truly "to put more science and less happenstance into the process of talent discovery", then perhaps investing in the "scene" would be more apt, rather than trying to target some "high potential individuals" based on vague, often highly subjective metrics that often end up being "does this teenager remind me of myself/people I like" (typically, the approach described in the article - a tournament based on voting - essentially sounds like a popularity contest).
I've also taught a lot (many thousands) of teenagers over the past decade. I've witnessed plenty of "high potential people" - those who taught themselves CAD, electrical engineering, organic chemistry, etc. and who weren't afraid to email Stanford professors out of the blue. Those usually do fine, especially because there are so many programs targeted to students like them. They also tend to have one thing in common - a very supportive, stable home environment. The problem that's more interesting, and much tougher, to solve is the long tail. The students who have to pick up their siblings after school and cook for them because they have one parent working several jobs to pay the bills, etc.
When you start to peel those layers, you realize that really, most if not all students are "high potential" in one way or another. A problem is that "high potential" in this context really means "high potential of giving a good return on investment to the venture capitalists/companies/investors seeking them out".