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I disagree with the increase in competitiveness being a good thing. Excessive filtering at all levels has meant that eccentrics or absent minded professor types

I disagree with the increase in competitiveness being a good thing. Excessive filtering at all levels has meant that eccentrics or absent minded professor types are not making it into research roles, and creatives or mad geniuses are filtered out before they have the chance to make an impact. There are a lot of people who are extremely bright and creative, but just don't have it all together the whole time from ages 14-25, and these days they have no chance of making it into research positions. The system is rewarding conscientiousness and consistency over creativity.

alephnerd 4mo ago
> The system is rewarding conscientiousness and consistency over creativity This assumes that you can get to the top via rote skills alone. Rote learning only gets you so far and most of those kinds flame out. It's hard to describe, but once you meet actually talented people what you end up seeing is that they're just extremely diligent and deeply passionate about a topic and will continuously execute. For example, when I was in HS I wrestled. Yes there were physical differences that could impact a sparring round, but technique and preparation was almost always able to outcompete base innate talent. Later, I ended up learning ballet the Russian style and it was the same - the truly creative types who were at Vaganova or Paris had already built strong fundamental and technical skills which allowed them to mix and match and create. You cannot be creative without also being diligent and understanding fundamentals. The "eccentrics" and "mad geniuses" are few and far between, and to find people with talent, you do need to use exclusionary tactics like scores and interview performance.
porridgeraisin 4mo ago
Not really. Outliers of that sort get dealt with as an exceptional case and it works. I've seen amazingly bright batchmates get into all sorts of programs without most of the qualifications, because they were a genuine math wizard (the kind that submitted errata to a standard textbook on some weird number theory stuff at age 15), but they didn't always score the best on many exams, especially when aggregated across subjects. IIRC he's a researcher now. All trends point to him being an eccentric old hag at age 50 ;) The filtering system is meant for the majority case and there it works. The outliers get dealt with as outliers, which also works. In this case, he later asked the author of that textbook who he emailed with the errata, to connect him with the group he wanted to work in. Needless to say it was a very strong referral.
cyberax 4mo ago
The US education has always been competitive. In sports. Its school system has always been a state-sponsored daycare. SAT/ACT tests reflect this. I can get a perfect score in SAT math easily. And I likely could do that as a kid (I never took standardized tests at school). I wouldn't have been able to get the perfect scores in the Chinese gaokao or Korean/Japanese tests. > There are a lot of people who are extremely bright and creative, but just don't have it all together the whole time from ages 14-25, and these days they have no chance of making it into research positions. This is just nonsense. Are you saying that we should kick out smart kids with high test scores to let in absent-minded students who care about only getting drunk so that they _might_ become great researchers in their 30-s? To the topic at hand: it's way too easy to fluff your resume with nonsense like "Coordinated a responsible team for an implementation of cross-cutting concerns improving customer retention change by 12.23% across the organization". Test scores provide at least some objective measurement.
- annzabelle 4mo ago
  I'm not opposed to the use of test scores, it's more the requirement that kids have the whole package of grades+activities+honors societies+test scores consistently through a phase of life that is widely understood as tumultuous for many. We're selecting for robots. There's a reason the west was so productive in terms of new scientific and technological discoveries in the twentieth century, and it's not that our scientists were the most consistent conscientious students who prepared extensively for exams and padded their resumes in just the right way.
  - alephnerd 4mo ago
    > There's a reason the west was so productive in terms of new scientific and technological discoveries in the twentieth century > it's not that our scientists were the most consistent conscientious students who prepared extensively for exams and padded their resumes in just the right way. Instead, a large portion were immigrants or the children of immigrants who arrived in the US as part of trans-national brain drain from countries with strict education systems (eg. Hungarian Jewish Americans in WW2, Eastern Europeans in the 1980s to present, Asian Americans today). There's a reason Asian Americans, Eastern European Americans, and immigrant African Americans are overrepresented in leadership and white collar industries despite the very real handicap of having extended periods time without US citizenship or a greencard. Instead of optimizing for feel-happy edge cases, we should be optimizing for building the best talent where possible, and that requires being competitive. > We're selecting for robots. Frankly, this is insulting as well. Yes there are some late bloomers, but they are outliers. If they can truly succeed they would stil find a non-beaten path to succeed in a competitive ecosystem. > consistently through a phase of life that is widely understood as tumultuous for many Only to y'all "heritage" Americans. For those of us who are kids of immigrants, we learnt that life is a race, either you compete or you fall to the wayside.

alephnerd 4mo ago

> The system is rewarding conscientiousness and consistency over creativity This assumes that you can get to the top via rote skills alone. Rote learning only gets you so far and most of those kinds flame out. It's hard to describe, but once you meet actually talented people what you end up seeing is that they're just extremely diligent and deeply passionate about a topic and will continuously execute. For example, when I was in HS I wrestled. Yes there were physical differences that could impact a sparring round, but technique and preparation was almost always able to outcompete base innate talent. Later, I ended up learning ballet the Russian style and it was the same - the truly creative types who were at Vaganova or Paris had already built strong fundamental and technical skills which allowed them to mix and match and create. You cannot be creative without also being diligent and understanding fundamentals. The "eccentrics" and "mad geniuses" are few and far between, and to find people with talent, you do need to use exclusionary tactics like scores and interview performance.

porridgeraisin 4mo ago

Not really. Outliers of that sort get dealt with as an exceptional case and it works. I've seen amazingly bright batchmates get into all sorts of programs without most of the qualifications, because they were a genuine math wizard (the kind that submitted errata to a standard textbook on some weird number theory stuff at age 15), but they didn't always score the best on many exams, especially when aggregated across subjects. IIRC he's a researcher now. All trends point to him being an eccentric old hag at age 50 ;) The filtering system is meant for the majority case and there it works. The outliers get dealt with as outliers, which also works. In this case, he later asked the author of that textbook who he emailed with the errata, to connect him with the group he wanted to work in. Needless to say it was a very strong referral.

cyberax 4mo ago

The US education has always been competitive. In sports. Its school system has always been a state-sponsored daycare. SAT/ACT tests reflect this. I can get a perfect score in SAT math easily. And I likely could do that as a kid (I never took standardized tests at school). I wouldn't have been able to get the perfect scores in the Chinese gaokao or Korean/Japanese tests. > There are a lot of people who are extremely bright and creative, but just don't have it all together the whole time from ages 14-25, and these days they have no chance of making it into research positions. This is just nonsense. Are you saying that we should kick out smart kids with high test scores to let in absent-minded students who care about only getting drunk so that they _might_ become great researchers in their 30-s? To the topic at hand: it's way too easy to fluff your resume with nonsense like "Coordinated a responsible team for an implementation of cross-cutting concerns improving customer retention change by 12.23% across the organization". Test scores provide at least some objective measurement.

annzabelle 4mo ago
I'm not opposed to the use of test scores, it's more the requirement that kids have the whole package of grades+activities+honors societies+test scores consistently through a phase of life that is widely understood as tumultuous for many. We're selecting for robots. There's a reason the west was so productive in terms of new scientific and technological discoveries in the twentieth century, and it's not that our scientists were the most consistent conscientious students who prepared extensively for exams and padded their resumes in just the right way.
- alephnerd 4mo ago
  > There's a reason the west was so productive in terms of new scientific and technological discoveries in the twentieth century > it's not that our scientists were the most consistent conscientious students who prepared extensively for exams and padded their resumes in just the right way. Instead, a large portion were immigrants or the children of immigrants who arrived in the US as part of trans-national brain drain from countries with strict education systems (eg. Hungarian Jewish Americans in WW2, Eastern Europeans in the 1980s to present, Asian Americans today). There's a reason Asian Americans, Eastern European Americans, and immigrant African Americans are overrepresented in leadership and white collar industries despite the very real handicap of having extended periods time without US citizenship or a greencard. Instead of optimizing for feel-happy edge cases, we should be optimizing for building the best talent where possible, and that requires being competitive. > We're selecting for robots. Frankly, this is insulting as well. Yes there are some late bloomers, but they are outliers. If they can truly succeed they would stil find a non-beaten path to succeed in a competitive ecosystem. > consistently through a phase of life that is widely understood as tumultuous for many Only to y'all "heritage" Americans. For those of us who are kids of immigrants, we learnt that life is a race, either you compete or you fall to the wayside.