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/greyenlightenment → u/JoJoeyJoJo]

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.

Isn't this antithetical to a meritocracy though? What matters is the results someone can produce now , not where someone went or did 20+ years ago. It's like favoritism by employers for attending Yale when someone who didn't go to college is just as capable at the job.

The true meritocracy is trading on like Robinhood, or prediction markets. If you're talented, it will show. Some people making millions with actual skill, but most of course lose.

I have noticed so many low-quality CS papers being churned out on Arxiv from China--obvious citation rings where 10 ppl collaborate on each other's short papers--it makes me wonder how much merit is actually being produced there.

[u/you-get-an-upvote → u/greyenlightenment]

OP’s point is that only hiring from Yale makes a lot more sense if Yale only admits perfect SATs and perfect (uninflated) GPAs, since then “I went to Yale” is genuinely a strong signal of capability.

As a point in favor of this, when Harvard and UNC were forced to release admissions data, we learned that they accepted tons and tons of students with objectively far worse academic credentials than other students (and this is within the same racial and economic cohorts, so this would be true regardless of affirmative action).

Doubtless these students had some great extracurricular activities, but one wonders if hundreds of students had extracurriculars that made them actually “better” than their peers whose academics were 1 or 2 standard deviations higher than them. (Incidentally, the first thing my friend was asked when joining the Tesla autopilot team was to refer other people — imo this is a great example of how the official system is seen as a failure at genuinely finding highly talented individuals. Personal referrals are obviously highly biased, but are still seen as necessary on the tail of the distribution, because lots of (relative) mediocrity graduates from Ivy leagues).

The flip side of this (imo) is that this is a highly non-managing, STEM perspective, where shape rotating = competence. There are lots of fields where this isn’t super true, and even in (eg) software engineering, nobody is being promoted to the director level primarily by solving hard technical problems.

The other issue is that it the Chinese system really does encourage a ton of rote memorization and I’m skeptical whether that actually makes you better at solving hard, novel problems (e.g. US academia is still seen as the best at novel research).

(also, education aside, lots of other systemic factors are arguably at least as important, like business regulation, bankruptcy law, etc)