[csdvrx]

Does it matter? Watching everything through the myopic lens of "privilege" is wrong.

A kid can have an idea and parents can help. For now, the set of {kids, parents} that can do that is limited. But technology changes and becomes more accessible. What matters is the new things that become not just possible but easy and cheap.

For a previously "costly" problem that in 2012 would involve a 5 MP digital pictures + geotagging + OCR then sending the raws for GPU processing, any random smartphone from 2022 will do.

In 2012 you could have screamed "privilege!". Not in 2022.

As a kid, I'd have loved to try to hack together a app that recognizes mushrooms (or flowers, or fruits which I all found so super interesting, especially bugs and OMG they fly if I blew on them!!)

It would have been hard. I would have benefited from some help. But I would have had a lot of fun, after which I would have used the app to fill in the name for my leaf-book collection effort (I wanted to have a specimen of EVERYTHING from the garden, then from the street, then...)

I only had books and some websites and a bad camera. So I drew :) A kid now could have picture search engines like yandex to do better with a much better camera too (MACRO MODE!) and some generic photo processing software. A rich kid then could have had something similar, with an expansive Nikon camera, and photoshop (crop, filter...) and maybe some parental connections to biologists and botanists.

Is it privilege if they did? Yes. And it's wonderful because every kid has this privilege now! And they can have more fun!

[colechristensen]

Pause a second and look at what you wrote and what you're responding to. You're arguing very passionately against a straw man, nobody mentioned privilege until you did.

[cinntaile]

It does when the title says "13yo kid builds e-nose". It's not about privilege, it's about being honest. Maybe the title is honest and the kid is just very bright, that's cool too!

[csdvrx]

Yet most people seem to be jumping to the conclusion, making assumptions, and letting their views taint their judgment, without even knowing all the facts (see a comment below asking if the parents were already working in the field)

[orf]

You wrote a 300 word response full of jumped-to conclusions, assumptions etc to someone just asking what his parents did.

[csdvrx]

Read the other comments and see the implications from that seemingly innocent question.

[gedy]

I didn't take OP as a commentary on privilege, more if the parents were already working in this field/area, vs the "boy genius" narrative

[kartben_]

spoiler alert: none of them work in this field/area.

[the-dude]

Thank you.

[cruano]

> A kid can have an idea and parents can help.

Or... the other way around

[honkycat]

> Does it matter? Watching everything through the myopic lens of "privilege" is wrong.

May I ask why?

You see it all the time, unironically: "How a 23 year old couple bought their dream home!" and it ends up in the article their parents literally paid for it.

Or Bill Gates. There is the classic: "How to become as rich as Bill Gates: Choose your grandparents carefully."

I see it elsewhere in this thread: "Ugh. And MY 13 year old just wants to play video games!" And that is unfair to themselves, and unfair to their kids.

You see it everywhere. So many musicians, artists, writers, PEOPLE succeed in part because they just don't need to make money. Because they already have it.

And then they act like it was all done themselves and while they are not bad people for having money, and they are sincerely talented, that isn't the whole story. The whole story is that they didn't ever really even need to succeed to live a comfortable life, and that is a HUGE advantage over other people.

---------

Allow me to tie this to my own experience:

First, I want to acknowledge that I am extremely privileged in my own ways. I grew up in a wonderful home with a great family. We were educated, and kind, and loved reading and were encouraging. The rural place I grew up in wasn't a fancy high-tech metropolis, but I did not experience any violence in my community which counts for a lot.

I went to a private university on a big scholarship. It was cheaper than any state school I could have gone to. My first two years where I was in the dorms and was paying with student loans, I was very active in the student volunteer community, and the computer science club.

But once I left the dorms, that was IT. I needed to 100% support myself, rent/food/etc. I spent my days working manual QA for a software company, 40/hr week, while attending school at night.

And my life changed. I didn't make any new friends and lost the ones I had. I was never around for the "college stuff." Every waking moment became toil, either through work or through school.

While my peers were doing research studies for natural language processing, or participating in CS contests, or building relationships, or falling in love, or actually doing well on homework and tests, or any number of productive things, I was plugging 3g WIFI dongles into and out of laptops for $15/hr. I was running test cases for 8 hours a day, then going to class from 6-9, then doing homework until I went to sleep, then getting up in the morning and doing it again.

And the deficit I had in my education followed me for a LONG time. Still follows me today.

So yes, I do think we should interrogate situation people were in when they achieved something. Because sometimes people don't really achieve anything other than spending their parent's money.

And there are circumstances where something that seems like a big achievement was really just an inevitability.