[samhw]

> there probably was a kid who had no help from their parents, who hacked together a 'are the lights on' circuit, using hand-me-down tech components, who's getting no notice.

I'd have struggled to articulate what annoys me about stories like this, but this absolutely hits the nail on the head. I went to a school in the City of London with very elite investment-banker-parents demographics, and I can't tell you the number of stories like this. One comes to mind where one kid won a contest for designing a stockpicking algorithm, and it turned out - of course - that his mum was a fund manager at Goldman, specialising in that exact same area. I don't know what the point of it is. Is there not more to life than gaming university applications?

[dekhn]

What bothers me the most is there was another kid who didn't win, who did real scientific work, and will go on to be a great scientist, but will never get the attention, credit, or funding that the first kid did.

[Mezzie]

I cannot over-emphasize how utterly demoralizing things like this are to those children. The kids who are smart enough to do real work are also smart enough to figure out that nobody will care.

I was so discouraged by finding out the other children who liked web development and coding had outside help, and I had a really hard time understanding why things like Synapse could get a PC Mag review, but I'd be accused of being a liar if I talked about my own projects, because that's what happens when you're a kid working without an adult. Without an appropriately credentialed adult vouching for you, people accuse you of stealing your work, lying, being an arrogant snob, etc.

ESPECIALLY if you're self-taught or were taught by adults society doesn't think much of. It's believable that the Pages taught Larry to code when he was wee, but obviously I couldn't have learned anything from my parents since one was a high school dropout and the other was the son of a factory worker. How could THEY have known anything?

[dekhn]

Note that Larry Page's parents did more than just to code. They embedded him from birth in the academic system so that he was prepared, at Stanford, to recognize the importance of, and capitalize upon the organic value of web content. He was also exposed to the Grateful Dead, which probably helped build a healthy dose of capitalism and libertarianism.

Similarly, I was raised in an academic environment exposed early to computers (4th grade) in a gifted and talented program that many other students didn't have access to. That same program was literally "grad school prep in elementary school" which meant that when I got to grad school, it wasn't like I was in some sort of foreign country; I was home. And when I finally got to google, eveyrthing there felt normal and natural since it was just an extension of grad school, but with more money and better sysadmins.

That said, I guess if you don't get a leg up as a kid and go on to be successful through grit you can always appreciate that your hard work and determination paid off?

[Mezzie]

I used Larry as an example because we're from the same city, ironically. My grandparents (the ones I knew anyway) are from the class that repaired electronics; we're the mechanics to their automotive engineers. My grandfather (born in 1919) was obsessed with televisions and repaired them as a side business, so the tools were all around for my dad when he started buying broken microcomputers and fixing them so he could play games. Which in turn taught him enough of the basics (ha) of BASIC and meant that when I was a kid and had basic coding questions he could help. But since we all learned on our own over 3 generations, our facility with tech doesn't 'count'.

I can't claim to be completely without privilege: I'm about as well-off as you can get and still be considered from a disadvantaged background: My mother dropped out of high school and ran away at 15 (ironically her family included engineers and at least one MSU professor), so while I never had the money, my socio never really matched my economic, class wise. It's more that if you were any lower on the ladder than I was, you just didn't have a computer or MAYBE you might have something like the 5 free hours of AOL in the late 90s. A computer with hours of internet access in 93 required some privilege.

There were a couple of G+T things I did, but I got the money we did scrounge for those from my dad, and once he married my stepmom that stopped because she believed very strongly in gender roles (she wanted me to like clothes shopping and makeup like my sisters and her female relatives) and she also wanted to live in the middle of nowhere.

> That said, I guess if you don't get a leg up as a kid and go on to be successful through grit you can always appreciate that your hard work and determination paid off?

Eh, I'm not going to be successful, because doing so would require neglecting either my own health or that of my family. I have MS, and that just explodes the ability to do any kind of career planning.

That has its own silver lining, though, because I can say whatever the hell I want. Which is its own kind of freedom: I have a 'get out of hustle free' card. It's almost like skipping from being 25 to 65: I had to do a lot of reckoning with my own mortality, what I was worth if I wasn't able to have a high powered career, what did I actually want out of life, etc.

[samhw]

Precisely. You can definitely see the downstream effects of this, too, with lots of academics who see great success by publishing total tripe in well-packaged books (see: Malcolm Gladwell, the entire field of social psychology, etc).

[908B64B197]

> Is there not more to life than gaming university applications?

No.

A lot of parents are getting their kids phony medical diagnostics just so they can get extra time on exams. [0]

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2019/03/16/fake-lea...

[TuringNYC]

University applications have such a compounding effect on things the rest of your life that paid-gaming of university admissions might well be the highest ROI investment for many wealthy.

[drekipus]

> University applications have such a compounding effect on things the rest of your life

does it? I'm not in the US, so I wouldn't know.

[lowbloodsugar]

But also please be aware that some of them aren't phony.

[flir]

That kid a few years back who fed buckets of soil bacteria on plastic waste and selected for the buckets that ate the waste best was pretty cool. I really hope that wasn't fake.

[908B64B197]

Most of them aren’t.

And a lot go undiagnosed as well because the parents don’t care/are ashamed/don’t know how to navigate the system.

[TuringNYC]

Dig deeper into some of these stories and you realize they also knew someone at the newspaper. Or a very expensive college applications specialist (i.e., $20k+) orchestrated the entire thing from concept to connections to media feeding, etc. Throw in a back-story professionally written and you've got top college acceptances!

Obviously, also throw in hand-selected medical specialists who diagnose you and prescribe extra time on the exams, great photos of your child at the local soup kitchen, a clutch summer internship with the local congressperson's office.

The entire college game is comprehensively stacked against the poor. Throw in the abandoning of test-based systems towards "leadership evaluation" acceptance methods and you get even more invested into gaming this process by the wealthy.