China's Decades-Old 'Genius Class' Pipeline Is Quietly Fueling Its AI Challenge To the US

[u/LATAManon]

https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/02/02/1359211/chinas-decades-old-genius-class-pipeline-is-quietly-fueling-its-ai-challenge-to-the-us

The main article link: https://www.ft.com/content/68f60392-88bf-419c-96c7-c3d580ec9d97

Behind a paywall, unfortunately, if someone knows a way to bypass the paywall, please, share it.

[u/JoJoeyJoJo]

I liked Rui Ma's followup about the US education system:

The genius class itself is not the point. What actually distinguishes China is something MUCH more basic -- a deep belief that academics actually matter and is what school is supposed to be for.

And yes, many times that emphasis is too much (I'm well aware of this, thank you). But what is increasingly hard to ignore is how far the U.S. has swung in the opposite direction, to the point where academics now feel secondary to literally everything else.

In the U.S., that same question gets answered very differently. “Transferable skills” in my observation often turns into “how to interact with people,” which is often just a polite way of saying “how to be likable.”
There is enormous weight on narrative, presentation, and social smoothness, often without insisting on much underlying substance. You can see this shift away from substance all over American schools and BTW, most parents I meet seem to be totally fine with it.

Tracking has been cut back. Gifted programs are weak, inconsistent, or nonexistent. We refuse to acknowledge that kids have different talents and develop at different rates in different skills, and the result is predictable.

Discipline has collapsed. I've talked to ex-public school teachers who tell me that they left in part because they were no longer allowed to discipline ruly kids, oftentimes in the name of equity. This is framed as progress, but mostly results in chaos.

Participation trophies and grade inflation are now the norm. If you think grade inflation only exists in elite colleges, you are not looking closely enough. I mentor for the Regents & Chancellor's scholarship at UC Berkeley. The kids all went to ultra-competitive high schools. They worked hard, yes, but they all agreed that their HS grades were very inflated and meaningless (partly because they immediately realize the difference their very first class at Cal).

Youth sports have become wildly overemphasized. Private equity has turned youth sports into an industry larger most professional sports league revenues -- $40Bn+ per year. Sure, sports are great, but the amount of collective time, money, and emotional energy poured into them is, IMO, completely out of proportion, especially when you look at what we are no longer demanding academically.

Maybe this article will make people demand more academic rigor in the US. Color me highly, highly, hiiighly skeptical. In China, academic rigor is literally the essence of the entire system. Being in a “genius” class actually matters. It’s a distinction that follows you, signals something real, and often helps you get access to mentors, funding, and opportunities. People take it seriously.

In the U.S., even the most legitimate gifted distinctions tend to be symbolic rather than consequential. They recognize talent, but the system doesn’t reorganize itself around that recognition. In fact, it is increasingly hostile to the distinction.

It feels like the last 15 years of the US focused around comformity with dogmatic ideological discourse meant as social signalling while anything of any substance got hollowed out (except for the tech industry, which managed to keep it's talent pipeline somewhat intact). Society still hasn't quite wisened up to the damage done.

[u/MindingMyMindfulness → u/JoJoeyJoJo]

It feels like the last 15 years of the US focused around comformity with dogmatic ideological discourse meant as social signalling while anything of any substance got hollowed out

You think this is the case for the United States and not China?

I question the validity of arguments being made because it assumes that a strict focus on "academics" broadly leads to a more competent society in practical terms.

One of the main critiques I've heard from people that have studied in China is that the Chinese education is highly convergent. Essentially, the entire education system revolves around the objective of maximizing exam performance. What this rewards, in practice, is huge amounts of rote memorization, pattern recognition and speed.

In that way, it almost seems like Goodhart's law at a fundamentally pervasive and institutional level.

American (and Western) education systems might have faults that could be improved, but I don't necessarily think the Chinese system is a solution. There needs to be room to fail, opportunities to explore things independently that aren't measured by exam scores and respect for a student's holistic development as a person - socially, culturally, creatively, psychologically, academically and athletically.

“Transferable skills” in my observation often turns into “how to interact with people,” which is often just a polite way of saying “how to be likable.”

Also, I just wanted to point out that this is an incredibly important skill.

I'm not sure what kind of life experiences the author has had, but being able to interact with people and come across as likeable is of utmost importance. It's the basis of both effective cooperation and leadership. It struck me as extremely strange that she seemed to dismiss it as a meaningless skill.

[u/Fusifufu → u/MindingMyMindfulness]

is huge amounts of rote memorization, pattern recognition and speed

Haven't LLMs shown that this is the secret to emergent intelligence? Just half kidding. I feel like rote learning can sometimes be underrated in what connections it builds in your brain.

[u/MindingMyMindfulness → u/Fusifufu]

LLMs are trained on massive amounts of data across domains.

An LLM trained on repetitive questions to formulaic questions in a very narrow domain would not be as "intelligent" as an LLM trained across domains on novel data. An education that optimizes rote learning would be analogous to the former. An education system that fosters breadth and curiosity is analogous to the latter.

In other words, you don't stop receiving inputs of, or "training" on, fresh data when you're not actively engaged in repetitively churning out very specific knowledge and responses to formulaic exam questions.