California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones

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.

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.

In other words:

Your team only moves as fast as its slowest member.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

How does removing gifted and talented programs support "those from low-opportunity backgrounds"?

"persecuting genius" is literally what is happening.

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.

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?

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.

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.

> 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.

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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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.

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?

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://gwern.net/doc/iq/high/munich/2005-heller.pdf

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.

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?

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.

I'm not talking about this lol, of course removing gifted programs is a stupid idea. I'm talking about your position.

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.

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.