[LarsDu88]

Not only that, but high performers are incentivised to move to worse schools.

It may actually improve mean outcomes, but harm societal outcomes, as the scientific impact of educated individuals may tend to be power law distributed (e.g. the most important breakthroughs come from a small sector of the population with wildly disproportionate impact)

[SoylentGreenGPT]

What breakthroughs are coming from high school students?

[LarsDu88]

Example: A high school student, Noam Shazeer placed Silver in the international math olympiad. Went on to build the foundations of LLMs in multiple papers including the transformer paper. Founded Character.AI...

Forget the fact that he's now a 50 year old dude, this kind of stuff started in high school

There are multiple examples of highly citied ML papers coming from essentially people in the middle of undergrad, meaning they essentially learned all their shit in high school. The first protein diffusion paper, the single cell autoencoder paper, diffusion autoencoder paper... these were all from essentially high school prodigies publishing in undergrad or first year of graduate school.

[gizmo686]

The bottleneck on research is funding. We have a glut of students wanting to go into research who don't because of how competitive the field is. We then have researchers constantly leaving the field for the same reason.

[kelipso]

The thing is the people who do get the funding should be the smartest of the smartest. That funnel needs to be there and this nonsense is destroying it.