Comment by cogman10
5 months ago
> Taking resources away from those who move society forward and spending them on those who are unlikely to "pay it back" is a way your culture dies.
What does this even mean?
To me, the measure of a healthy society is how that society treats those that are "unlikely to pay it back". The most unhealthy societies treat unwanted humans as disposable refuse. For example, I don't think we'd call the culture/society of the 1900s US particularly healthy. Yet that was probably the peak of the US keeping resources in the hands of "those who move society forward" the robber barons and monopolists. We didn't think anything of working to death unwanted 5 year olds that were unlikely to make a positive impact on society.
As for "dying culture" that to me is a very different thing from society. Societies can have multiple cultures present and healthy societies tolerate multiple cultures.
> Conquerers in the past used this strategy to win massive empires for themselves.
Which conquerers? I can think of no historical example where a conquerer somehow convinced a target to take care of their needy so they could conquer.
> This is perhaps the sole political topic I will die on a hill for.
I'm really interested in the foundation of these beliefs. What are the specific historical examples you are thinking of when you make these statements? Or is it mostly current events that you consider?
>To me, the measure of a healthy society is how that society treats those that are "unlikely to pay it back". The most unhealthy societies treat unwanted humans as disposable refuse.
Sure, but don't try to get people who can't hack college into college at the expense of those who can.
When I was growing up decades ago, we had a gifted program and a special education program. The gifted program was an attempt to expose gifted students to more complex thinking, while the special education program was an attempt to give student who struggle with normal education special attention to allow them to learn as best they can. It worked well.
In the 80's, the education system was the product of 200+ years of figuring out how to do it. For some reason, we decided it was wrong and introduce new methods of education that don't seem to be doing as well.
>The most unhealthy societies treat unwanted humans as disposable refuse.
This seems like hyperbole. I don't think the US treats any children as disposable refuse, no matter how dissatisfied you are with the current system, I'm certain that isn't the intent.
> This seems like hyperbole.
It's not, there are multiple historical examples of societies, including the US, that place a low value on human life.
Heck, you'll even find comments in this thread talking about how important it is to cut funding to the useless eaters... errr undeserving masses.
Current US society isn't that bad, however, there is a significant population of people that see no problems with things like child labor and completely privatizing education (and everything else for that matter).
> I don't think the US treats any children as disposable refuse, no matter how dissatisfied you are with the current system, I'm certain that isn't the intent.
I never said the current US policies treat kids that way. I do, however, see some disturbing rhetoric throughout this thread about how we spend to much time/money/effort on individuals the commenters deem as worthless.
> > Conquerers in the past used this strategy to win massive empires for themselves.
> Which conquerers? I can think of no historical example where a conquerer somehow convinced a target to take care of their needy so they could conquer.
I think the idea is that conqourers force their conquest economies to fit their needs, which is often not good for the conqoured. E.g. they might try to shutdown industries which build local wealth over ones that are more extractive.
Not exactly the same, but Basil II of eastern Rome had his enemy soldiers blinded after a decisive victory and sent back to Bulgaria to be a burden.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kleidion
You can't imagine interpreting the parent comment for its clear face value -- that supporting outlier high achievers helps everyone in society?
The inventor of a vaccine or a microchip or a sculpture doesn't hoard the invention for themself.
Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China, that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their previously great societies.
Even at the most blood-thirsty periods USSR had programs for gifted youth, math clubs at school, and even dedicated highly selective schools. They also had cheap entertaining pop-sci books. The schools would fail the students who don't pass the tests.
However, the scientists and engineers had a rather low salary, often lower than blue-collar workers'.
The equality of outcome can take many forms.
Calling pre-revolution Russian society "great" sounds like a bit of a stretch, mostly due to quality (and freedom) of life for biggest group of it - farmers.
You are equating "persecuting genius" with "supporting those from low-opportunity backgrounds". Classic mistake, especially considering that those kids could become """geniuses""" too if they had a chance to even try. Giving a decent shot at those from disadvantaged households will ironically probably do more towards improving the number of high achievers than allocating too many resources to the children of the rich, which is what we're doing now.
How does removing gifted and talented programs support "those from low-opportunity backgrounds"?
"persecuting genius" is literally what is happening.
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In other words:
Your team only moves as fast as its slowest member.
Russia was a backward, underdeveloped nation that couldn’t even beat Germany’s B team, and then collapsed into civil war. 25 years later, the USSR beat Germany’s A team and effectively conquered half of Europe, holding it for nearly half a century.
China before the Communists got pillaged by a succession of outside powers, culminating in basically a failed state that barely had a national government. China after the Communists became prosperous and strong, with the world’s second largest economy and no prospect of being invaded.
I’m no fan of Communism and I think a better system of government could have taken these countries farther, but “collapsed their previously great societies” makes no sense.
No, I cannot because that is fundamentally not what the parent comment said or the framing that they used.
> Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China, that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their previously great societies.
I'm sorry, but that is not how either the USSR or China have operated. If anything, they hyper applied the notion cultivating geniuses. Education in both China and formerly the USSR is hyper competitive with multiple levels of weeding out the less desirables to try and cultivate the genius class.
The problem with both is that your level of academic achievement dictated what jobs you were suited for with little wiggle room.
Now, that isn't to say, particularly under Mao, that there wasn't a purging of intellectuals. It is to say that later forms of the USSR and China have the education systems that prioritize funding genius.
It seems like you're choosing to selectively interpret things to fit your own argument.
> Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China, that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their previously great societies.
They did indeed kill off most of their intelligentsia in the last century. This is clearly what the OP is referencing and is a historical fact. I'm not sure why you decided to take it in a different direction.
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The cultural revolution began by lynching all the teachers and kicking the bureaucrats out of the cities. Stalin did much of the same. It was a horrible strategy which is why they came up with the new ones.
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> Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China, that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their previously great societies.
China is doing fine. In fact they're probably going to eclipse the US soon in terms of scientific output.
USSR fell for the trap of trusting the West and consequently they suffered a lot in the 90s.
Mao's policies including the persecution of intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution killed millions and set China back by decades.
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> The inventor of a vaccine or a microchip or a sculpture doesn't hoard the invention for themself
The built-in assumption is that those outlier high achievers & inventors were gifted students. Is there any evidence for this prior?
As a devil's advocate, my counterpoint is that "grit" was more important than raw intelligence, if so, should society then prioritize grittiness over giftedness?
A few months ago, there was a rebroadcast of an interview about the physician who developed roughly half the vaccines given to children in the US to this day. He seemed to be an unremarkable student, and persistence seems to have been the key quality that led to his successes, not a sequence of brilliant revelations.
Yes, there is a high correlation between intelligence (no matter how you measure it throughout childhood) and achievement in adulthood. A huge, massive difference. Obviously there are exceptions. Somebody seeming like a bad student is not one. Do you really need a citation for that?
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Grit is not more important than raw intelligence for making world changing discoveries, that’s nonsense on its face. It’s a necessary but not sufficient condition, it takes BOTH incredible intelligence and extreme grit combined to make world changing discoveries. An average IQ person could never accomplish what Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Paul Dirac, Richard Feynman, or Leonard Susskind did with grit alone and our modern world would not exist without them. With a few notable exceptions the giants of history mostly had great financial and social privilege as well, allowing them the time to apply their grit and intelligence to problems that didn’t have any immediate economic payoff.
I will say that math and hard sciences are unnecessarily difficult for outsiders to approach due to overly confusing terminology and not enough thought toward pedagogy. Great contemporaries like Sean Carroll and Leonard Susskind are demonstrating how to make the sciences much more accessible to people like me. But no matter how much more accessible you make it it’s inconceivable that average IQ people will ever contribute to the frontiers of it.
These inventions are inevitable and don’t take talented and gifted people to do. It takes people undistracted by poverty and suffering.
Completely incorrect.
We have made incredible improvements in alleviating poverty and suffering over the past 50 years and yet innovation across almost all fields has slowed to a crawl.
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@WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW
You are correct but I think it has mostly to do with the way academia is organized. Scientific study is only really funded or respected if it quotes enough other works. However this is a dead-end way of working, bad research that quotes bad research will become the norm. Real talent feels this, leaves academia, the problem gets worse.
What is good for a society and what feels just are often disparate things.
But it is not unjust on a human scale that some people are born with lower potential than others. It’s just an unfortunate fact of life.
What is just then?
To whom is it just to invest 2x the resources into a person that will never likely tinder a significant benefit to society?
To whom is it just to -not- invest in people who are particularly likely to bring benefits to society?
We know that the vast majority of significant advances in engineering and science are brought to life by people that are significantly above average capability in their fundamental capabilities, gifts that were evident even before they entered school.
We know that significant advances are unlikely to be contributed by people for whom day to day life is a significant cognitive challenge.
This comes down to the harm / benefit of investing 2x the effort into one person.
The best likely case scenario for the bright student is that they go on to create something remarkable and useful. Advancements in technology and science are responsible for millions of lives saved every year, and billions of lives saving trillions of man hours they would have spent in tedious, exhausting work. This then translates into higher investment in children, creating a virtuous cycle of benefit.
The best likely case for the dim bulb is not so different than the no-intervention path, but with a slightly better quality of life. The best argument is probably that it might make a difference in how he approaches parental responsibilities, since his social crowd is likely to be of slightly better character.
I would say it is unjust to the many to focus your resources on the least productive in society, unless the reason for their lower potentiality is something that is inherently fixable (IE lack of education). If the problem is endemic to the individual themselves, it makes little difference or sense to invest a disproportionate effort in their education.
OTOH if you have a student that can absorb information at double or triple the normal rate, it makes sense to fast track them to a level of education that they can produce benefits to their society. To let them languish in a classroom developing a disdain for their teachers, whom the often know more than, only creates habits and preconceptions that guide them into dubious but interesting activities and away from the paths that might lead them to greatly benefit society at large.
Either way it’s kind of a shit sandwich though, so who knows.
Anecdotally for me, G/T was great for my eventual development, and probably moved me farther away from a life of high achieving white collar crime, which seemed like a worthwhile goal when I was 9.
Showing me that other people understood and valued my intellect was a huge factor in deciding to try to do something admirable with my life.
It also was largely a waste of money paying for me to launch mice to half a mile in spectacularly unsafe sounding rockets from the school track. The astronaut survival rate was not great.
> invest 2x the resources into a person that will never likely tinder a significant benefit to society?
So you would rather have the cleaning lady, the garbage collector, the truck driver,... not got proper read/write/calculate/economics... education and increase their chances of ending on the side where they fall for addiction instead?
I don't think that's what they're saying.
Anacostia High School in Washington DC has zero percent of students meeting expectations in Math, yet its funding per student is twice that of nearby districts that perform much better. Lebron James' I Promise Academy is similarly very well-funded both for in-classroom and wraparound services, and it's one of the worst schools in the state of Ohio. It is increasingly evident that we cannot improve student outcomes in failing schools simply by funneling more resources to those schools. Students who come from households who do not value education not only will not learn, but will also likely sabotage the education of the others in their schools. It is probably more effective to give direct cash payments to struggling families than to struggling schools.
https://profiles.dcps.dc.gov/Anacostia+High+School
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I think it's pretty clear to everyone that teaching basic literacy - reading, writing, practical maths etc - is a huge societal benefit. Nobody is advocating for not doing that.
What is maybe less clear is the benefit of extending formal academic education to 18 and beyond for everyone. If someone is not academically gifted, why make them waste years of their life struggling through an academic education. What's the point?
The relationship between education and achievement for a given person probably follows an S curve. More education has an impact in the steep part of the slope, but eventually the limiting factor is natural ability, and achievement flatlines. The problem with education today is that people looked at that curve when it was in the steep part, thought "more education means better outcomes" and just kept blindly throwing education at people.
Most people would be far better served by vocational learning after a certain point. Effectively every career is a form of vocational learning, we've just delayed it further and further in the name of academic education which has limited benefit.
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I expect better from someone whose user name is nuancebydefault
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