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Comment by MontyCarloHall | Hacker News Reader

From the paper [0]: "The computer used for this paper contains an NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 with 22 GB of VRAM, 200 GB of RAM, and a 32-core Xeon CPU, courtesy of Caltech."

That GPU was first released in 2018, and can be had for ~$1500 today. The computer as a whole sounds exactly in-line with what a lab would have as an old spare machine. The student is lucky for sure to have access to such an institution, but it's not like he had rich parents who casually handed him $10-$20k. Much more likely he got access to Caltech resources because his exceptional talent caused a professor to take interest in him:

"I would like to acknowledge and thank deeply my mentor Davy (Dr. J. Davy Kirkpatrick) for introducing me to astronomy at IPAC and providing guidance throughout this project, aiding in data analysis and the collection of known objects for the test set."

[0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ad7fe6

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The post you were replying to is about privilege, then you defend with:

"but it's not like he had rich parents who casually handed him $10-$20k. Much more likely he got access to Caltech resources because his exceptional talent caused a professor to take interest in him:"

These two things are effectively the same.

> The post you were replying to is about privilege

The comment explicitly made a claim of $10K to $20K in GPU costs, which was unfounded and false.

I’m tired of the hand-wringing over privilege any time someone young does something impressive. Access to a strong GPU wasn’t the deciding factor that made this kid able to do this work. It could have been done on an average GPU at slower throughput.

>> I’m tired of the hand-wringing over privilege

Your discomfort doesn't make privilege go away. The fact that he even could afford a GPU seems to go over your head.

EDIT: Ok, so he didn't own a GPU and borrowed a PC from CalTec. That does not change the argument. On the one hand, I'm glad there is so much alignment on this issue, on the other hand its sad how hard people fight against privilege. I get it, for a long time I thought privilege was some whiny liberal thing. Through my decades I've seen over and over again the patterns of who wins and who loses, and privilege appears the same way bent spacetime makes gravity appear. People like the old me want to fight about how privilege/gravity is a myth. I'm terrible at arguing this, but I hope those of you fighting this concept acquire empathy and realize that not everyone has your advantages (and you may still be struggling too, that does not go away or get diminished, btw), and that the majority of that disadvantage is systemic, and intentional.

He used a Caltech computer.

OK, so wealth adjacency. My oversight doesn't change the argument.

This thread had me a bit confused, then I realised the discrepancy. Your objective isn't to label the high school kid as privileged to remove respect for his work. It is to highlight the privilege to others that don't have the same privilege, who may see this as what success looks like, so the discouragement of not being able to do it (no access to GPUs) isn't attributed to a lack of their own ability or intelligence but something outside their control (privilege).

Precisely!!!!

The kid in the article had a big brain to begin with, and there were ample buffs at his disposal, so he got to speed run his interest because he was lucky enough to be born in the right zip code. It doesn't diminish his work at all. (And it is also true that there are plenty of rich failsons and faildaughters who get slotted into birthright CEO positions without ever knowing adversity.)

I like Finland's approach: they have no private schools [1], which means rich kids go to the same public schools as poor kids (or their parents fly their kids out of the country). This means there is a much greater likelihood of advanced resources for smarter kids. But Finland also doesn't have the radical wealth disparity that we have in the US.

[1] https://inews.co.uk/news/world/finland-no-fee-paying-schools...

The computer used for this paper contains an NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 with 22 GB of VRAM, 200 GB of RAM, and a 32-core Xeon CPU, courtesy of Caltech

OK, so wealth adjacency. My oversight doesn't change the argument.

If you want to believe those things are unattainable, you can, but just remember that Steve Jobs got an internship at HP at the age of 12 by calling the founder on the telephone. Literally anyone could have done that.

These opportunities come to those who seek them.

This completely ignores reality. Jobs was a one-in-a-billion. To pretend privilege doesn't exist by invoking near mythological probabilities perpetuates it.

His phone call could have been placed by anyone. The question is, was his success mythological, or was it because he was the sort of a man who was willing and motivated to place such phone calls?

To get the internship Jobs had to know about HP, and to live close enough to HP - in a relatively privileged part of the country - to make it a possibility.

Compared to Rest of US, never mind Rest of World, only a tiny percentage of twelve year olds had those two opportunities.

Opportunity is everywhere.

Steve Jobs' adoptive father was acquaintances with HP employees. That's how he got the founder's phone number.

I read it was in the phone book. If you’re too young to have experienced this, it may surprise you that phone numbers were typically publicly listed in books that were mailed out annually, in those times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_directory

Being handed things because your parents have money VS being handed things because you've prepared yourself for the opportunity couldn't be more different.

>because you've prepared yourself for the opportunity

Hmm, so, there's a teenager that loves astronomy and is very clever but he lives in rural Indiana with some parents who neglect him.

(Or any third-world country around the world; or even worse, a war ridden place).

How do you suggest he should prepare for this kind of opportunity?

I'm not detracting from his merit, but 99% of this outcome is due to being next door to Caltech and sympathetic to its faculty.

You don’t choose what you want, you choose what you can have.

Learn to be a roofer, make bank (I paid my ~"uneducated" roofer like $5k for labor alone for ~48 hours of labor), buy rural Indiana land, build your own private observatory, enjoy doing your own research without the crushing burden of the academic grinder.

Astronomy is one of those fields where amateurs make new discoveries quite frequently.

You can't do private research because most astronomy is really data- and compute-heavy astrophysics. Optical searches are fun and everyone loves new comets, but comet hunting isn't academic science.

Interestingly, when hunting on a computer or some new celestial object gets "hunted" by university astronomers, they call it "research" and don't smugly dismiss it as just some fun that can safely be gatekept from being called astronomy.

As always, when working outside the system, it should be expected that semantics will be used against you, but if it's your interest, it needn't stop you nor need care about such unpersuasive arguments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Cook#Early_life_and_educat...

Being adjacent to wealth is a privilege. Zip code is a better predictor of a child's success than any other metric.

Because that's the hard part. Any asshole can discover something new, that alone doesn't mean much. Rosalind Franklin discovered the structure of DNA, but that was the easy part and didn't even barely merit her being credited-- the hard part is being proximal or in the nexus of power and being able to get the views and looks onward to the world.

There are a gazillions of children capable of discovering things. What's important is to be the child with the social proof to get it published or actually keep the credit. That's highly valuable because having powerful friends/family is what helps fund, support, and continue research. A nobody can safely be discarded, rob the credit, then use the powerful to keep funding your friends -- in fact this might be even better for "science."

The whole point of getting a PhD is to rub robes with the upper crust, get the contacts, perform the slave labor for the powerful, and become enrobed with the social proofs. If you just want to discover things, you don't need academic credentials, but you can sleep soundly knowing the information will get out there you just have to give it to someone credentialed to take the credit.

Rosalind Franklins contrabutions are vastly overestimated in an effort to “correct the record”. Her data was very valuable, but she didnt make the insights.

Are they the same as receiving $20,000 in AWS credits?

Nobody denies that someone like Matteo is extremely privileged to have been born in the wealthiest country in the world, attend one of the best public schools in that country, and therefore be exposed to a research program that connected him to the Caltech professor that made his work possible.

That privilege may well be a necessary condition towards being able to publish a paper that shows extreme computational sophistication for a high schooler (and indeed, IMO would be a middle-of-the-road graduate-level paper). But it's certainly not a sufficient condition, as you seem to be implying when you say that blindly giving a kid $10-$20k is "effectively the same" as having Matteo's background. If you just handed $20k worth of GPUs to a rich dilettante child, they would not be able to achieve anything close to what Matteo accomplished.

This isn't about individuals, it's about policy.

The default narrative is "hard work and talent should be rewarded", but the reality is "hard work and talent are only rewarded in very unusual and strictly rationed circumstances, and most potential is wasted."

The waste is caused by unexamined political friction. There has to be a hierarchy of opportunity, because some kinds of people have to an easier time of it than other kinds of people.

American capitalism makes a lot of noise about social mobility but does almost everything it can to prevent it in practice.

Occasionally people still make it against the odds, but the point is the odds are there for most of the population. People who beat them rarely get the kind of media support this story offers.

The high school he goes to has a $50,000 yearly tuition.

Please stop repeating this lie. He went to the public Pasadena High School.

,-!--

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