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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 i

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.

TheOtherHobbes 10mo ago
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.