Oh yeah for sure, but I think that's the case "in spite of" the trajectory of the educational system.

From my personal experience, people who are successful usually come from highly educated and/or wealthy families. I don't think school plays that much of a role in the grand scheme of things compared to family influences. There's a lot of inertia to society in general.

However, what we lost is that modern educational systems are really bad at identifying and "pulling up" talented kids from poor / under-educated families, because the standards and expectations are so low that you can't differentiate them from their peers.

Anecdata, but in my honors / AP courses in High School, I was one of two students, our of ~30, whose parents did not have a college degree. Like 20 of the student's parents worked at the local Lockheed Martin. I don't think this was entirely genetics, as much as culture, since I knew plenty of people in my life who were quite smart but lacked academic discipline.

I'm more in your camp of "it's culture" but I think it's a lot to do with the amount of attention a parent can pay to their kids education. Some of that is cultural but sometimes it's just a time constraint. Either due to financial constraints (and time spent working), single parents or whatever.

Kids obviously vary in aptitude but the ones that actually get the chance to excel are usually the ones that are getting an extra push at home. Some kids you just can't stop though and excel regardless.

The issue is not what happens in high school.

The issue is that when all of these AP/Honors Calc people get to college they don't even make it to Simpson's rule before they're weeded out. That's the problem that most college professors are talking about. How are we creating more and more and more AP/Honors/"Gifted" kids every year, yet the performance of all of these kids when they enter university is abysmal? How is first semester calculus a "weed-out" course when so many of these kids enter with transcripts indicating they've already taken calculus?

I mean, I can totally see where the professors are coming from. We send every state flagship university what all of these very good high schools claim are the cream of the crop, and many of the students sent are just not up to the task. It has to be the school system at some point?

> How is first semester calculus a "weed-out" course when so many of these kids enter with transcripts indicating they've already taken calculus?

German universities have a simple solution: students who believe that they have already "learned" calculus in school (in a sense every pupil with an Abitur school diploma (the kind of school diploma that you need in Germany to study at a university) had to learn) should hold to this belief at their own peril. :-)

Hint: After one week, these kids will hopefully have realized that the level of calculus that they learned in school was very shallow. :-)

I took a calculus course in high school. There were maybe six of us. Everyone elss took stats. The teacher was fine, if if a bit. Most of us used the class as a goof off segment. I often snuck out to go work on freelancing projects I was doing at the time. We found we could mostly pass the course work could be plugging in to online solvers. The tests were heavily curved.

Frankly if you threw a simple derivative or integration at me these days I'd be staring at you like and idiot.

I remember snidely telling people I didnt care because it didnt need calculus to develop software. I do regret it.

Exactly. The US tech hubs draw heavily from the subset of very talented Americans who aren't seeing the typical dumbed-down part of the education system, and from immigrants, who are over-represented. If anything, they're constantly complaining that they can't find enough talent domestically -- which, yes, is partly "we don't want to pay them enough", but when you consider the costs to sponsor an immigrant, can't entirely be about that.

The small rural high school I attended in the early 80s was unable to find a math teacher able to teach calculus for my junior/senior year, which significantly reduced my college options.

>From my personal experience, people who are successful usually come from highly educated and/or wealthy families .. [from overseas]. FTFY

As someone acquainted with the insides of AI labs, and who has worked with NIWs in the past, I can tell you the extent to which our advances are dependent on migrant brainpower long ago crossed the "we're able to deny it" threshold.

Most people think of skilled immigration as H1Bs. It's not. H1B is to NIW as TF/PyTorch monkey is to real AI expert. They're just not, at all, the same thing.

There are plenty of H1Bs who are similarly smart but don't want to build weapons though. At the places I worked these folks would always be paid the same as the locals - they really were hired for talent and not to cut costs. Contributors to Linux, GCC, and the like, not your typical software simian. I guess these days one can get an NIW and not work for the Department of Energy?

NIW doesnt mean you have to build weapons.

Simple cybersecurity (offensive or defensive) qualifies for NIW, as well as other fields

> There are plenty of H1Bs who are similarly smart but don't want to build weapons though

Which companies are employing H-1B labor to work on presumably ITAR/EAR-regulated articles?

Plenty of technological innovation came from the Soviet Union. NASA was created as a direct consequence of Sputnik. America knew they were falling behind in space technology and needed an internal jolt to catch up

I wonder if general wider availability of computers means there were more chances a bright kid would be able to get a start in the field regardless of overall education systems.

I think you mean it was the Soviet Union. Either you scored excellently and were sent to university or at least into engineering, to end up well-paid and comfortable in military research or you scored less than and worked on the fields ... Or were sent into war as cannon fodder.

Or to put it more generally: motivation.

I was thinking years ago a western kid in a school that didn't ask much of them still had more chance of getting access to a computer and teaching themselves. But yes, the incentive for Russia kids to study is much more stark.

>But also, look at where almost all technological innovation has happened in the last 50 years

Free market, capital, open borders etc.

During soviet times you research whatever party sees interesting (an exaggeration here) and produce whatever and however Gosplan dictates.

If you don't have to pay for your oil, for example, there is no need to innovate in motors and if all stores are state owned - there is no need in better management, digital goods or networks.

Nobody is fighting for their customers - people just stand in line and at the end of the month you send your books to Gosplan, Statistics etc.

Then 90s. People leaving. Then Putin and Co. People living and while there is a market now - they've managed to recreate old problems still.

The Soviet Union hasn't even existed for 35 of the last 50 years.

Lagging indicator. Also private schools

That might have to do with financial climate (also the reason why there is more innovation in US compared to Europe, at least from the public's perspective).

There’s certainly cultural reasons. If investors could make a buck off Pierre Zuckerbeurg, they certainly would.

Yes, and one can add political power, which also brings with it industrial/manufacturing power.

Does this say something about innovation requiring only very few innovators (and a lot of more ordinary "sweat workers"? Meaning, so long as the US can pick out, or grow a few innovators, that's fine. It's enough. No need to elevate the mass? A sort of innovators take on Great Man theory? Sincere question/point incase anyone was wondering.

It's plausibly the other way around. Have the best educational system in the world and you can't get anywhere when your economic system is based on politburos and cronyism.

Also notice that the educational system getting dumbed down operates on a generational timescale. If you screw it up for the 10 year olds, it'll still be decades before they're the ones in charge.

that's a bit too delulu... That's just your sampling bias. Of course a media predominantly feature contents in US English gives you impression that most things are happening in the US.

There are innovations and discoveries made and exploited everywhere. How much things seem to be going on relative to your cognitive capacity has not much to do with the reality.

> look at where almost all technological innovation has happened in the last 50 years

I take this to mean:

  1) Communism obliterated the Soviet Union's ability to fund science (or anything else for that matter)

  2) The people driving science forward in the West are educated some other way than strictly according to a "Common Core" quality curriculum

your first point is (very) historically inaccurate, on the contrary the Soviet Union heavily funded science and research, which led them to a whole bunch of scientific breakthroughs

Over the past 50 years though (1976 onward)?

Soviets ruled only until 91. So those 50 years speak more about the collapse thereafter. And the cream of their mathematicians emigrating to Israel.

The poster above that mentioned commercialization has it right - while the soviet science was often top-notch, the skills in commercialization and getting the finances to get things done were simply not there, severely eroded by the decades of Soviet time.

The Soviet Union existed for less than half of that time period, and a lot of talented researchers moved to the West after it collapsed. (I know because I've worked with a lot of them). So that's kind of a weird time period to sample. It's like saying if Einstein was so smart, how come he hasn't published anything recently?

Considering 35 of these 50 years is quite literally not the Soviet Union, that list is still long: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Russian_innovation

> The people driving science forward in the West are educated some other way than strictly according to a "Common Core"

And they always have been, in addition to just being more intelligent, curious, and motivated than average.

> ability to fund science

More like "commercialize" rather then fund.

Technological innovation on both sides of the iron curtain happened due to public investment. If you doubt the US role in this, I'll remind that silicon valley and many of its key accomplishments are outgrowths of military spending.

No government spending, no nice things.

I think you're agreeing with my first point but I can't tell.

China?

And who made those innovations? Not a lot of Western born and raised people, I'm guessing.

Almost none. I went to engineering school at a major state college in the US, and it was nice to find even an immigrant who had been mostly raised here in the same program.

American elites abandoned Americans after the Soviet Union fell. Only useful as a servant class. They also encouraged parents to abandon their children. Immigrant parents come here and work like mules, spoil and dominate their children, and would never imagine that kicking them to the wolves was a virtue. In the US (and in the West in general), we teach working people to have contempt for their own offspring; it's counter-evolutionary. Meanwhile Western elites spare nothing for their dimwitted failchildren.

The default I expect from any intellectual or technical achievement is a truly challenging last name.