IMO David Hahn's reactor is still more impressive. Kids these days can't even make a DIY superfund site properly...
https://harpers.org/archive/1998/11/the-radioactive-boy-scou...
Up until around 2010, you'd be shouted down as a troll for taking down this kid's achievements.
The focus should be on all of the effort that the kid put forth which many other equally privileged or lucky kids would have squandered.
I don't really agree on this reading for this case, but this _definitely_ applies for basically every 30 under 30 list and lots of stuff in VC-land (Theranos etc). Some people get a silver spoon of a situation and get lauded for basically showing up.
More kids may have similar achievements but their parents never sought publicity photo shoots for them. Exposing kids to this kind of publicity may be bad for them down the line. May make them feel like a failure if they aren't able to pull another newsworthy stunt in the future.
Why should it be rude?
[0] This is something Daniel Markovits talks about: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/meritoc...
So I would say, yes it is a flaw of meritocracy, but meritocracy is not flawed.
In a meritocracy, a person should become powerful/rich according to their merit—education, skill, diligence, etc. However, what then happens is elites start religiously investing all they can (and they can invest a lot) into ensuring their own offspring has even more of that merit than others.
As an exaggerated example, you can’t buy your kid a Pfeiffer turbopump to experiment with if you are choosing between bread and soap when you’re going to the store.
What we get as a result is the same ever-growing gap between the already-rich and the rest. Meritocracy turns into plutocracy as merit becomes more or less a proxy for wealth.
Breaking that trend would involve actions that go beyond meritocracy, and arguably are un-meritocratic: instead of just rewarding by merit, it’s about helping more people have that merit regardless of their or their parents’ wealth.
Merit is due to many things, and mentorship, experimentation, and preparation are all parts of it. Medical training is also very expensive and part of medical merit, but also clearly entangled in discussions of money, opportunity, and growing inequity.
If you have hidden biological talent but never trained as a doctor due to wealth, should we trust you now to perform medicine? Not before that expensive prep; it’s part of merit.
Exactly, and if one has a lot of hard-earned wealth thanks to their own smarts and merit and drive to work hard they’ll of course happily spend it on all the right things to make sure their kids have even more of that than their parents. With private education and all that blocks opportunities for kids in lower income families and increase inequality; merit becomes a proxy for wealth and as meritocracy matures it becomes more and more a rule of the rich. (Being “a proxy for” is not the same as “being confused with”, it’s just that one would more or less follow the other.)
The question is, how possible is it to level up. At least in Europe not so difficult, and in the US the Asian immigrants also show it is possible (if you think in terms of 2 generations).
Kid got a full scholarship to Duke University. And I’ve seen this in other Asian immigrants as well, a cab driver in NYC whose daughter was at Cornell Medical School.
Tooling is $1k for clippers and scissors and razors. Not sure about chairs, but probably another $1k.
Suppose you charge $20 a cut, typical cut takes ~15-20 minutes and you're open 360 days a year.
10 cuts/day => $72k/yr. 2-3 hours of work a day.
20 cuts/day => $144k/yr. 4-5 hours of work a day.
Find reasonable rent and you're netting a pretty good profit. And yes it's an easy space to enter, but generally, once men find "their barber", they're locked in for pretty much the rest of their life and become a regular customer every 2-3 weeks.
I’m curious whether it’s really specific to male population, and if so why…
That aside, and I can’t believe that this is where the thread took us, I empathise so much with this. Even in countries where I can converse easily with anybody it’s a struggle for me to trust someone with my hair, despite me presumably not really caring about it. Now living in countries where I don’t speak local languages and locals predominantly don’t speak any of mine (or do so with much difficulty) I haven’t gone to a barber in years—I pretty much gave up and just live with terrible hair. I guess if I ever find “my barber” I may be willing to travel far to get my haircut.
Most likely this means a location that already has a high throughput of potential customers and that also most likely means a place that has high rents.
Sure, if you already have a place, like an extra room in your house, and you manage to establish yourself on the area. But even then you might find out that your first client wants to come in at 7 or 8 am, to get ready for whatever work thing they have that day, and the last client wants to come in at 8 pm, because they can’t earlier.
(And if someone wants to come in at strange hours for important work appearances, I’m sure they won’t mind being charged double the price either!)
I'm not sure what actions you expect society to make to address this.
Should smart people deliberately not be good parents so that social justice can prevail in a world full of not-so-smart people?
Should not-so-smart people just not have children so society can be smarter as a whole?
> Should not-so-smart people just not have children so society can be smarter as a whole?
Perhaps smart people could spend some of their hard-earned money and prestige to ensure the whole society, not just their offspring, has more opportunities and access to good education? However, as you can see, that does not align with meritocratic ideals as they are currently being applied.
Interesting how the rich were blamed for being fat cats and not are blamed for overworking so much they win the race.
It seems some people are genuinely surprised there's more to money and status than just having the newest phone.
I believe the article suggests things such as (but not only) changing education to be more accessible and inclusive, and making work done by employees without expensive education more valuable across industries.
> are blamed for overworking so much they win the race.
The point here is also that, while “winning the race” thanks to their hard work and abilities, under meritocracy as it is elites also produce more and more inequality in longer term, raising the bar and blocking middle and lower classes from opportunities.
(I would tentatively posit that the existence of a race to be won is the problem here.)
"Meritocratic equality" is an oxymoron. You can only attain it if what you are measuring applies to everybody, like, say, having a pulse.
The world is hyper-competitive. I don't believe the US will fare well with this excellent strategy.
First, let’s agree on whether we both believe the problem with meritocracy, as it works currently, is real. If you don’t believe so, then there’s no sense in continuing.
Second, if the only solution you see is communism, don’t attribute the same outlook to me.
As far as I’m aware, if communist regimes so far are any indication, communism could only make the situation worse with blatant nepotism if nothing else.
What if, if a solution you can think of off the top of your head is horrible, all it means is that the problem is just not that easy to solve?
But saying that capable people must bend the knee so somebody less capable also gets a turn at 1st prize makes we wonder want kind of morality asks that, accepts that and takes pride in finally winning that way.
You mean funded. That Pfeiffer Turbopump is several hundred bucks used.
When I was 13 years old, I would have killed someone to own just that analog scope.
I resorted to building one off an used ATX computer power supply, but voltages fluctuated a lot and also it was pretty high and non-regulable in current output. That was a recipe for troubles. Indeed, when one of the first boards I was learning on caught fire (mis-configured potentiometer + non-limited current dwaw) I didn't feel safe anymore to continue and basically stopped doing that kind of stuff.
So yeah, extremely impressive achievement for a 13 years old student, not downplaying his achievement, but it's wrong to understate the role that his parents and their funding had.
Sorry, this gave me a chuckle as it effectively encapsulates engineers.
The "Light Emitting Resistor" is a rite of passage. It's when you finally understand that it's called "Ohm's Law" for a reason.
While the kid building his reactor is almost certainly intelligent and driven, he was also lucky enough to be born into a family in the upper 1% income bracket, because most people would have neither the space nor the funds to set up such a laboratory.
It's kind of the same with child prodigy musicians. Unless the parents have a piano at home, they'll most likely not notice their kids talent early enough. And most middle-income families these days don't own a house and won't have a piano around for decorative purposes.
BTW, that harpers link is an amazing story :)
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vvhy141WU14&ab_channel=Afrin... (Fox affiliate if that bothers you)
Plenty of kids with pianos and parents musicians grow up not being child prodigies. But, pretty much no child prodigies grew up in environment where people don't listen music much, without access to piano, teacher (official or unofficial) and so on.
Unless the parents lie and literally manufactured it all, both components needs to be present. For most 13-15 years old, just focusing on one big project and keep interest is quite unusual. So is willingness to build one thing for so long.