> 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.
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.
I'm not talking about this lol, of course removing gifted programs is a stupid idea. I'm talking about your position.
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.
Because for neither China nor the USSR was that the main contributor to their national problems. Further, the education system of both are definitely implementations of "let's spend the most money on the smartest people".
In a discussion about the collapse of societies, it doesn't apply. In a discussion about education reform, it does not apply. It is also not an example of the original commentors statement that conquerors have used social spending to collapse their targets.
I would further point out in both the case of the USSR and China's purge of the intelligentsia; it was FAR more about consolidating power in a dictator and far less about trying to set good national policy. In Mao's case in particular, he was frankly just a bit insane.
There’s a selection bias in that the USSR and China both actually turned into barely functioning societies afterwards, often because they implemented their ideals in inconsistent or hypocritical ways. If you take the same ideology and actually apply it consistently you’re the Khmer Rouge.
Sounds similar to religions. If a religious group sticks strongly to its religion's founding principles and teachings, it's "fundamentalist" and is basically a cult or something like The Handmaid's Tale. The groups that water everything down and are hypocritical and inconsistent are much more successful long-term, with far more members and lots of money.
The main difference is that unlike Marxism, most traditional religions can be the basis of a long-term successful society even if you apply their ideas consistently.
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.
I can think of many nasty things that Stalin did, but I don't recall anything even remotely similar to "lynching all the teachers and kicking the bureaucrats out of the cities". In fact, teacher was probably one of the most respected occupations throughout the Soviet period.
The Katyń forest massacres (to the extent that about a third of the victims were targeted for being members of the intelligentsia) come to mind as a reasonably similar instance of the kind of "lynching" you're referring to. Within the USSR itself we have the purges of leading intellectuals in Ukraine -- the number of victims is more difficult to quantify, but was likely far beyond the few hundred known by name:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executed_Renaissance
The June 1941 (and later) deportations in the Baltics (involving inevitably a very high mortality rate) seem to have at least partially targeted the intelligentsia as such in those Republics (in addition to the other usual suspects).
Right, but that's just the classic occupier tactic - target the (usually independent-minded) intelligentsia of conquered territories to suppress any budding national liberation movements. But OP was talking about Maoist purges of their own intelligentsia. Bolsheviks indiscriminately purged the nobility, which certainly did disproportionally affect intelligentsia, but they weren't ideologically anti-intellectual the way some Maoist strains or Khmer Rouge were.
Yeah, I was being charitable to Stalin, and considering the population those Republics as "his" people (which of course they never were). But I do see the distinction you are making here.
> 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.
Yes, that happened. It's also undeniable that since then, they've massively improved the lifestyle of 1.4B people.
I'm not sure if they get to where they are today - without going through the Maoist stage.
> they've massively improved the lifestyle of 1.4B people.
Because they gave up on the command economy idea and embraced markets and education. When they persecuted the geniuses everything went to shit and when they stopped things quickly improved. Really makes you think.
> 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.
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.
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?
My question was specifically about the outliers: has any research been done if outlying achievements go hand in hand with outlier IQs? Without any research or evidence, it's an area prone to a Just World fallacy where extraordinary achievements "ought" to be achieved by extraordinary talent.
Rephrasing my doubts in perhaps an oversimplified manner: given the correlation you mentioned: is it reasonable to expect the top 100 wealthiest individuals (outliers) to also be 100 most intelligent people on earth?
When you’re talking about outliers, it’s not an even-or situation. It’s not that being diligent is more valuable than being smart. Lots of people are smart, but the ones who are exceptionally smart and exceptionally diligent—outliers on two dimensions—are usually the most successful.
It’s also worth pointing out that people who e.g. study algebra in eighth grade and calculus in high school aren’t actually outliers; they’re maybe the top 1/3 or so of the class in terms of mathematics ability.
Newton, Euler, Darwin, Einstein, Paul Dirac, Richard Feynman… Our modern world wouldn’t exist without them. Look up estimates of their IQ. Read some of their work and try to imagine having the same level of insight and producing similar volumes of it if you devoted every waking hour to the task.
Then read up on the ancient Greeks. Even after 12 years of education most modern people wouldn't be able to measure the circumference of the Earth like Eratosthenes did hundreds of years before Christ. The ancient Greeks were pretty darn smart.
So, the closest that I am aware of is the multi-decade study conducted by, the psychologist and intelligence researcher, Lewis Terman. The study was originally called, "Genetic Studies of Genius."
You can read about it here:
https://gwern.net/doc/iq/high/2018-kell.pdf
This one is somewhat tangental, but I find, "The Munich Model of Giftedness Designed to Identify and Promote Gifted Students" to be an interesting read too.
It would probably be weird to build many conclusion off the Terman study at this point, right? I've been dunking lately on people citing '90s and 2000's era twin studies as calling back to the phlogiston era of quantitative psychology; I don't even know what you'd call the raw material Terman had to work with; alchemical?
No, not to a person. There can be some stupendously dumb billionaires, especially since inheritance is a thing. I would however expect the average intelligence however-measured of the 100 richest "self-made" (lets just say who didn't themself inherit a generational amount of wealth) individuals in the US to be higher than a 100-person random sample of the population.
Equating achievement to financial success is a big mistake, but a bigly American one. The great scientists, while often somewhat privileged, were rarely in the billionaire class or their time’s equivalent. The average brilliant scientist or mathematician nowadays is making a wage that doesn’t afford them any luxuries whatsoever.
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.
>We have made incredible improvements in alleviating poverty and suffering over the past 50 years
We have also made incredible strides at capturing the productivity and free time that would have fed innovation and effectively transferred it to the financial services industry.
Since schools in the US were desegregated for people of color and women, America embraced a radically neoliberal approach to education. Rather than funding higher education for every citizen who wanted to pursue it now that everyone could, those in power chose to systematically and cynically de-fund higher education and replace it with a degree-for-debt model.
State universities that used to provide low/free tuition to white men, now offer their services to all, for an ever-increasing price.
This has created a society where smart people get on the edu-debt treadmill in search of a better life, only to then be beholden to existing, stagnant profit-maximizing entities to try to pay that debt off for the rest of their lives. This is how innovation has stalled: a top-down systematic defunding that has ensured both gifted and special-needs kids have to fight over scraps.
That is not true either.
There is very little innovation happening in European countries where college is low/no-cost.
They have less innovation than the US does despite our terrible college debt.
It takes a certain kind of person to innovate and they make up a small % of the overall population.
Measures aimed at helping the general population are very unlikely to help them.
Which fields?
Air travel is much, much cheaper and orders of magnitude safer. Progress is crap if you focus on speed but there’s much more to it than that.
Space flight has become vastly cheaper, with it now being feasible to blanket the planet in low-latency high-bandwidth internet connectivity. (Compare with the travails of Iridium just 30 years ago.) Again, progress is crap if you focus on the flashy stuff like boots on the moon, but it’s been tremendous in other ways.
Cars are vastly safer, more reliable, and more efficient. Two entirely new kinds of drivetrain (hybrid and electric) have been developed and popularized.
Medicine has seen huge improvements in cancer treatments, imaging, various medical devices, and drugs of all kinds.
@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.
The reality, which politicians will never admit out loud, is there is a population of K-12 students who 1. will never become educated to any measurable standard, and 2. disrupt the education of everyone around them. You could give unlimited funding to a school, and these kids will not learn. You could assign a huge staff of dedicated top-educators to each class, and it won't make a difference. You could isolate them from everyone else, each individual into a dedicated classroom with that staff of education PhDs all to themselves, and they will not learn. They will either graduate high school not meeting the standard, or they will drop out before they graduate. You can't force education on someone whose parents, peers, and surrounding environment don't value it.
Yes, this has been my experience in my stint running an after school program. It’s an unfortunate reality that must be accepted in order to have sane policy.
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.
> What is maybe less clear is the benefit of extending formal academic education to 18 and beyond for everyone.
For a democratic society, I think there's a pretty big benefit in making the general population fairly well educated beyond just what it takes to make them proficient at a job.
The point would be to make sure they could reasonably reason about the policies and politicians they are voting for or against.
Now, maybe that can all be covered in high school classes. However, I think a lot of humanity and philosophy classes just don't come in until college level classes.
Reasoning and rational consideration of things is not easily introduced after about age 7. People brought up in a reactive environment will struggle and rebel against logical analysis, preferring “common sense” or emotion based decision making.
Reactive thinking is often pretty accurate, and people used to reactive thought think that their conclusions are “obvious”, so the idea that they need to also stand up to a first principles analysis undermines a fundamental aspect of their worldview.
If they haven’t been taught to see themselves and their environment in the third person by the time they are in kindergarten, it’s basically too late. It can be fixed, but it won’t likely be in school.
I expect better from someone whose user name is nuancebydefault
You are right, thanks for pointing this out. My comment was not very nuanced. I feel polarization happens easily with some topics. Well the benefit is, I got replies that are food for thought.