[honkycat]

I am not skeptical of the kid being able to do this. Good for them! I'm sure they will grow up to be an inquisitive and brilliant member of society.

However, like many, I feel like this article could be papering over... something.

OK I'll just say it: Privilege.

And hey! Not every kid with privilege ends up being brilliant! And he may not be privileged! But it is a lot easier to succeed when you have it.

And my problem with this article is this: We are constantly papering over how much of a difference a good education can make, and how little opportunity to get that quality of education there is in the United States.

You often see people bemoaning their lot in life: "Ugh. When Mark Zuckerburg/Bill Gates/insert CEO was my age, they already started Microsoft!"

And my reply to this sentiment is this: How many hundreds of thousands of dollars did your parents spend on your pre-university education? I'm willing to bet it wasn't in the hundreds of thousands.

I see this kid is from LA. Sometimes all it takes is being in the right zip code to have access to... science fairs? My school didn't even have AP classes! I thought science fairs were something that only happened on TV.

I realize this is a bit petty, and it 100% comes from my childhood where I went to a poor rural school where I was a poor student, and so-fucking-desperately wanted more, and then moved to the city, and succeeded, flourished once I got access to a better quality of education. But pretending it isn't there feels dishonest.

It feels like an onion article headline: "Kid with everything going for him, despite all odds, tremendously succeeds"

[lern_too_spel]

I say good on the parents for putting their resources to good use. A lot of them squander it away on spoiled kids, waiting for the kids to show interest in anything useful. Yes, it would be great for society if all kids have these benefits, but we will only get there when people understand that this is something worthwhile.

[honkycat]

I agree! No smoke between me and people who are well off!

Much better use of money than a super-car or many other options. Not that I have any right to say what people can do with their money.

[inglor_cz]

"I realize this is a bit petty"

It is, and very American-centric. Plenty of innovative people are born in poorer countries with much less resources at their disposal. Indeed quite a lot of American top scientists are immigrants from not exactly rich places.

Of course, even they are sort-of privileged by the fact that they weren't born blind, on in a period of outright war, or didn't get cancer at the age of three. But this is already stretching the meaning of "privilege".

Katalin Karikó, one of the main brains behind mRNA, grew up in shabby Communist Hungary and her lab equipment at her home university was likely worse than what a median high school in the U.S. has at its disposal. (There wasn't much convertible currency east of the Iron Curtain to buy top stuff, and not enough capacity to manufacture it locally.)

[honkycat]

Sure, there are geniuses that can spawn out of anywhere that occasionally rise out of bad situations. They are notable because they are EXCEPTIONS to the rule.

But there is massive inequality and poverty in the United States. Here is an example: In my home town, the poverty rate is 12%-13%. In the US state of Georgia it is 17%. In the Czech Republic, which has about the same population as Georgia, it is 10%.

So your assertion that "her lab equipment at her home university was likely worse than what a median high school in the U.S." is questionable. There are plenty of people living in horrible conditions in the US. Our scores in mathematics are 30th amongst developed nations.

Our cities are full-to-the-brim with a homeless population that we have abandoned to the streets that our cities and citizens do not have the wealth to address due to all of the money going to 1% of the population. In fact, our homeless population is almost to 0.2% of the total population, coming in at around 500k people.

Also, the assertion "other people have it worse" is not useful. I can be critical of our current society and also realize I have a privilege living where I do. I can see the impoverished system I grew up in, compare it to the opportunities afforded other people, and say: "Hmm. Maybe we can improve society somewhat."

[inglor_cz]

I am from the Czech Republic. Our inequality is better than American, for sure, but we seem to be on the same track. Especially the gypsy ghettos are fairly bad. Not as bad as the worst places in the U.S., but shockingly bad for the middle of the EU. In neighboring Slovakia, some of the mud hut villages look like a mixture of the Middle Ages with rural Nepal. So I am not really sure if the better numbers aren't result of some creative statistics.

I still believe that Karikó's equipment was fairly bad, because I was alive in the 1980s and I remember the shortages of everything. Late stage Communism was all about stuff shortage. Either something was really plentiful (but usually of questionable quality), or very hard to acquire. This included school equipment. The first home computers spread some 10 years later than in the West and we regarded them almost as godly objects.