Maybe I’m cynical, but whenever I read about a high school kid making a science breakthrough I assume this is what happened (based partially on personal experience):
- the lab PI has a friend who’s kid needs to put together a college application
- PI asks their postdoctoral to tee up a project for the kid.
- kid does the last 2% of the project but gets all the credit while being unaware of how much background legwork was needed to get them there. Postdoc gets nothing.
My assumption is always, a bright high school student has an impressive science fair project, but science reporting is terrible and misinterprets it as something more than it is.
(Also: "Kid outsmarts stuffy professionals" is an evergreen journalistic subject, and don't dismiss the political angle of sowing distrust in "establishment" scientists in favor of a younger person using AI)
Not that young people can't do big things but it's probably got less rigor than a graduate-level project.
Don't get me wrong, this is a really cool idea and it sounds like he did a great job. I don't want to be unjustly dismissive. These stories come up all the time and they usually don't amount to a whole lot- like most research.
yeah, the hard part about this issue is that the kids that do the project are generally super smart. this situation ends up hurting three groups:
- postdocs that are in a precarious career position are being forced to give up a bunch of work "for free" that they cant put on their CV
- the bright kid is often given a skewed perception about what working in science is like and they will be disillusioned when the handholding stops and they have super-high expectations placed on them
- depending on the how the press frames it, the public either gets a story that's anti-intellectual "never trust the experts" OR some feel-good fluff about some savior-savant on the horizon. neither is useful science reporting but good for clicks.
Or, he goes to the polytechnic high school that’s right next to Caltech (half a block from the astronomy building no less) and getting research experience there is much easier than a regular high school.
Looks like he went to Pasadena High School though. When I did a bit of aerospace research at Caltech in high school all I did was cold email professors so any kid around here with some initiative and smarts can get connected.
And indeed, that's exactly what happened [0]: the kid in the OP was in a rigorous research program for high schoolers, which connected their talents to PIs who could nurture and support them. GP shouldn't reactively tear down the success of exceptionally talented kids because of their own unfortunate n=1 life experience.
The criticism is of the spin in these articles. The experience these kids get is great, it should happen more. The articles always spin to get your attention, and the subject matter is fascinating, but it can be presented with less spin.
And frankly any kid deserves praise for doing the unglamorous work that this takes. Very few can be arsed to put up with the extra work that it takes to do anything worthwhile, we are a nation getting lazier every day.
This study uses regression-discontinuity around exam cutoffs at Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, and Stuyvesant. It finds increased rigor of coursework but little impact on SAT scores, college enrollment, or college graduation, which are key predictors of lifetime earnings (and typically closely linked to earnings outcomes).
Not all high school educations are created equal - See Carmel High School (Carmel, IN), New Trier High School (Winnetka, IL), or any other High School in a densely high wealth area.
Pasadena school district spends $28K / student for their total $390M expenditures across ~14k students in 2023-2024 school year. I would bet dollars to doughnuts it's $30k+ per high school student since they are more expensive.
Mentorships are simply how most junior scientists get started. Even in grad school, most students initially take on projects their advisors have pre-qualified as interesting.
To make high school-level competitions more fair, we should likely prioritize access to researchers for all smart, hard-working high schoolers rather than only those who are nearby a university or have wealthy parents.
Whenever I see any front page OP I assume HN comments will dump on it, even one about a high schooler winning a science prize with a genuine scientific discovery. I hope you don't treat your own and your loved ones' news and accomplishments the same way.
Congratulations Matteo Paz. You not only won the science prize, you got the Hacker News front page treatment.
Regardless of whether there is something rotten here, I think they should in fact focus on the science and not the person behind the science. And that gives the young person some cover too.
The article says that The Astronomical Journal did just that: talked about the discovery without focusing on the age of the author. I think I prefer that.
This is true of a lot of experiences in life though and isn't necessarily bad.
e.g. let's take a corporate example:
- New software is written to solve a problem
- It kind of works. At least, well enough that it's less of a problem
- An intern comes along and is told to make it better. They have nothing else to do so they give it their full attention for two months.
- Software runs 5x faster. Intern gets hired for doing such great work
Who should the credit for this? The person who originally solved the problem? or the intern who made it 5x faster?
At some point, does it matter? The original writer probably got credit for solving the problem and the intern got hired. Basically, everyone got some kind of benefit.
(This being HN, I am SURE there is going to be a debate about the above...)
this example isn't a great example for the academic situation given the way "getting credit" works and how important it is in academia. getting credit for your work in academia isn't just about ego, it's the currency you use to get and keep your job.
imagine if in software land you had to periodically assemble a list of your lifetime accomplishments and you were getting stack-ranked against every other dev in existence. if your list is found lacking, you have to leave software engineering for a different career.
when work gets moved from a postdoc or gradstudent to serve as a vanity project for a connected high-schooler (i'm not saying that that's what happened in this case, but it is something that happens), you're hurting an early-career scientist that is actively contributing to the field in order to support a kid that "maybe someday" will start to contribute to the field.
Admissions manipulation games are very common. Another tactic is for high school students to have their startup company “acquired” by their parents’ friends company, where the acquisition price is some token amount in exchange for hiring the kid for an internship.
It can be really hard to judge these situations without getting the person in a 1:1 interview. Some times you meet someone with an extraordinary high school claim who can talk your ear off with impressive detail and deep understanding. Other times you start talking to someone and realize they don’t even understand their own topic beyond surface level understanding necessary for talking to a newspaper journalist.
With a claim like this, I’d be looking for interviews or online discussions. Usually the young people who are actually accomplishing amazing things are super excited to talk to the world about it. If anyone can find this person engaging in online forums or posting about progress on the build up, that lend a lot of weight to the claim.
it went far beyond those 'research paper because I have a good dad' or 'I had a few startups and some even got acquired thanks to my dad's friend'. The math competitions hosted by MAA, the CS Olympiads called usaco,etc are all full of cheating these days for a better college application. People will do whatever it takes to cut in line now.
They're not. For some odd reason, the comments on this post are full of bitter people who cannot possibly fathom that brilliant young people not only exist, but also achieve amazing things on their own merits.
> For some odd reason, the comments on this post are full of bitter people who cannot possibly fathom that brilliant young people not only exist, but also achieve amazing things on their own merits.
As opposed to you, who's up and down the thread making unsubstantiated claims and engaging in emotional manipulation to try to discredit (without evidence, I might add) the idea that there's any cheating or subversion going on whatsoever.
The people you're responding to are making far better points than you are.
just google for 'maa math cheating', 'usaco cheating',etc.
there are official statements somewhere that you can probably dig out too.
people were selling the answers before the test for $5 on discord.
my kids are taking these exams, and it saddens/discourages them so much as their classmates are bragging about those $5 answers and got super high scores.
it's a public scandal, just that the media paid no attentions, so far.
This isn’t evidence but this was a well known issue even in the 90s and 00s. If you were a judge at high school science fair competitions (or a parent kid for that matter) you could easily tell which projects were actually done by adults. The complexity of the project, the equipment it would need, and the displays would give it away.
"I would like to acknowledge and thank deeply my mentor Davy (Dr. J. Davy Kirkpatrick) for introducing me to astronomy at IPAC and providing guidance throughout this project, aiding in data analysis and the collection of known objects for the test set."
I would certainly believe this could be the case for this or the kind of science work that would be good for an application. Including this field.
There are of course probably fields where there is ~no grant money, thus barely any research. Einstein noted we only know .001% of what there is to note of the universe, and even then he was probably embellishing in the favor of knowledge.
I would also expect by the time you are a postdoc you are totally indoctrinated in your field in a way a high school student would not be. Standing on the shoulder of giants might not always be an advantage, if the giants have been whispering in your ear what to look at, whispering in your ear what they think is true, whispering in your ear what they think reality is, and all your fellows have been listening to whispers from similar giants.
Several of the candidate variable objects are characterized in the results section of the paper. The model is also tested for effectiveness against synthetic data. It appears to be a useful method and the paper describes a plausible path for it to aid future discovery.
From the paper [0]: "The computer used for this paper contains an NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 with 22 GB of VRAM, 200 GB of RAM, and a 32-core Xeon CPU, courtesy of Caltech."
That GPU was first released in 2018, and can be had for ~$1500 today. The computer as a whole sounds exactly in-line with what a lab would have as an old spare machine. The student is lucky for sure to have access to such an institution, but it's not like he had rich parents who casually handed him $10-$20k. Much more likely he got access to Caltech resources because his exceptional talent caused a professor to take interest in him:
"I would like to acknowledge and thank deeply my mentor Davy (Dr. J. Davy Kirkpatrick) for introducing me to astronomy at IPAC and providing guidance throughout this project, aiding in data analysis and the collection of known objects for the test set."
The post you were replying to is about privilege, then you defend with:
"but it's not like he had rich parents who casually handed him $10-$20k. Much more likely he got access to Caltech resources because his exceptional talent caused a professor to take interest in him:"
Nobody denies that someone like Matteo is extremely privileged to have been born in the wealthiest country in the world, attend one of the best public schools in that country, and therefore be exposed to a research program that connected him to the Caltech professor that made his work possible.
That privilege may well be a necessary condition towards being able to publish a paper that shows extreme computational sophistication for a high schooler (and indeed, IMO would be a middle-of-the-road graduate-level paper). But it's certainly not a sufficient condition, as you seem to be implying when you say that blindly giving a kid $10-$20k is "effectively the same" as having Matteo's background. If you just handed $20k worth of GPUs to a rich dilettante child, they would not be able to achieve anything close to what Matteo accomplished.
Being handed things because your parents have money VS being handed things because you've prepared yourself for the opportunity couldn't be more different.
Because that's the hard part. Any asshole can discover something new, that alone doesn't mean much. Rosalind Franklin discovered the structure of DNA, but that was the easy part and didn't even barely merit her being credited-- the hard part is being proximal or in the nexus of power and being able to get the views and looks onward to the world.
There are a gazillions of children capable of discovering things. What's important is to be the child with the social proof to get it published or actually keep the credit. That's highly valuable because having powerful friends/family is what helps fund, support, and continue research. A nobody can safely be discarded, rob the credit, then use the powerful to keep funding your friends -- in fact this might be even better for "science."
The whole point of getting a PhD is to rub robes with the upper crust, get the contacts, perform the slave labor for the powerful, and become enrobed with the social proofs. If you just want to discover things, you don't need academic credentials, but you can sleep soundly knowing the information will get out there you just have to give it to someone credentialed to take the credit.
Rosalind Franklins contrabutions are vastly overestimated in an effort to “correct the record”. Her data was very valuable, but she didnt make the insights.
Learn to be a roofer, make bank (I paid my ~"uneducated" roofer like $5k for labor alone for ~48 hours of labor), buy rural Indiana land, build your own private observatory, enjoy doing your own research without the crushing burden of the academic grinder.
Astronomy is one of those fields where amateurs make new discoveries quite frequently.
If you want to believe those things are unattainable, you can, but just remember that Steve Jobs got an internship at HP at the age of 12 by calling the founder on the telephone. Literally anyone could have done that.
This completely ignores reality. Jobs was a one-in-a-billion. To pretend privilege doesn't exist by invoking near mythological probabilities perpetuates it.
> The post you were replying to is about privilege
The comment explicitly made a claim of $10K to $20K in GPU costs, which was unfounded and false.
I’m tired of the hand-wringing over privilege any time someone young does something impressive. Access to a strong GPU wasn’t the deciding factor that made this kid able to do this work. It could have been done on an average GPU at slower throughput.
Your discomfort doesn't make privilege go away. The fact that he even could afford a GPU seems to go over your head.
EDIT: Ok, so he didn't own a GPU and borrowed a PC from CalTec. That does not change the argument. On the one hand, I'm glad there is so much alignment on this issue, on the other hand its sad how hard people fight against privilege. I get it, for a long time I thought privilege was some whiny liberal thing. Through my decades I've seen over and over again the patterns of who wins and who loses, and privilege appears the same way bent spacetime makes gravity appear. People like the old me want to fight about how privilege/gravity is a myth. I'm terrible at arguing this, but I hope those of you fighting this concept acquire empathy and realize that not everyone has your advantages (and you may still be struggling too, that does not go away or get diminished, btw), and that the majority of that disadvantage is systemic, and intentional.
This thread had me a bit confused, then I realised the discrepancy. Your objective isn't to label the high school kid as privileged to remove respect for his work. It is to highlight the privilege to others that don't have the same privilege, who may see this as what success looks like, so the discouragement of not being able to do it (no access to GPUs) isn't attributed to a lack of their own ability or intelligence but something outside their control (privilege).
You triggered an old memory of mine in high school of when I ran for class president in senior year and campaign spending was capped at $100 dollars and someone else flagrantly violated campaign finance rules and spent at least a thousand dollars primarily distributing pencils that would go on to litter the campus’ every corner.
Yes. It was a close friend who told me he wasn’t running prior to the nomination deadline. I had done some strong analytics and figured I had great odds. Then I learned, from the dean, that he was running. He split my vote. I learned a lot about life from that experience lol.
- the lab PI has a friend who’s kid needs to put together a college application
- PI asks their postdoctoral to tee up a project for the kid.
- kid does the last 2% of the project but gets all the credit while being unaware of how much background legwork was needed to get them there. Postdoc gets nothing.
(Also: "Kid outsmarts stuffy professionals" is an evergreen journalistic subject, and don't dismiss the political angle of sowing distrust in "establishment" scientists in favor of a younger person using AI)
Not that young people can't do big things but it's probably got less rigor than a graduate-level project.
Don't get me wrong, this is a really cool idea and it sounds like he did a great job. I don't want to be unjustly dismissive. These stories come up all the time and they usually don't amount to a whole lot- like most research.
- postdocs that are in a precarious career position are being forced to give up a bunch of work "for free" that they cant put on their CV
- the bright kid is often given a skewed perception about what working in science is like and they will be disillusioned when the handholding stops and they have super-high expectations placed on them
- depending on the how the press frames it, the public either gets a story that's anti-intellectual "never trust the experts" OR some feel-good fluff about some savior-savant on the horizon. neither is useful science reporting but good for clicks.
Looks like he went to Pasadena High School though. When I did a bit of aerospace research at Caltech in high school all I did was cold email professors so any kid around here with some initiative and smarts can get connected.
[0] https://www.justinmath.com/math-academys-eurisko-sequence-5-...
And frankly any kid deserves praise for doing the unglamorous work that this takes. Very few can be arsed to put up with the extra work that it takes to do anything worthwhile, we are a nation getting lazier every day.
Will Dobbie & Roland Fryer (NBER)
This study uses regression-discontinuity around exam cutoffs at Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, and Stuyvesant. It finds increased rigor of coursework but little impact on SAT scores, college enrollment, or college graduation, which are key predictors of lifetime earnings (and typically closely linked to earnings outcomes).
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w17286/w172...
To make high school-level competitions more fair, we should likely prioritize access to researchers for all smart, hard-working high schoolers rather than only those who are nearby a university or have wealthy parents.
Congratulations Matteo Paz. You not only won the science prize, you got the Hacker News front page treatment.
Regardless of whether there is something rotten here, I think they should in fact focus on the science and not the person behind the science. And that gives the young person some cover too.
The article says that The Astronomical Journal did just that: talked about the discovery without focusing on the age of the author. I think I prefer that.
e.g. let's take a corporate example:
- New software is written to solve a problem
- It kind of works. At least, well enough that it's less of a problem
- An intern comes along and is told to make it better. They have nothing else to do so they give it their full attention for two months.
- Software runs 5x faster. Intern gets hired for doing such great work
Who should the credit for this? The person who originally solved the problem? or the intern who made it 5x faster?
At some point, does it matter? The original writer probably got credit for solving the problem and the intern got hired. Basically, everyone got some kind of benefit.
(This being HN, I am SURE there is going to be a debate about the above...)
this example isn't a great example for the academic situation given the way "getting credit" works and how important it is in academia. getting credit for your work in academia isn't just about ego, it's the currency you use to get and keep your job.
imagine if in software land you had to periodically assemble a list of your lifetime accomplishments and you were getting stack-ranked against every other dev in existence. if your list is found lacking, you have to leave software engineering for a different career.
when work gets moved from a postdoc or gradstudent to serve as a vanity project for a connected high-schooler (i'm not saying that that's what happened in this case, but it is something that happens), you're hurting an early-career scientist that is actively contributing to the field in order to support a kid that "maybe someday" will start to contribute to the field.
It can be really hard to judge these situations without getting the person in a 1:1 interview. Some times you meet someone with an extraordinary high school claim who can talk your ear off with impressive detail and deep understanding. Other times you start talking to someone and realize they don’t even understand their own topic beyond surface level understanding necessary for talking to a newspaper journalist.
With a claim like this, I’d be looking for interviews or online discussions. Usually the young people who are actually accomplishing amazing things are super excited to talk to the world about it. If anyone can find this person engaging in online forums or posting about progress on the build up, that lend a lot of weight to the claim.
Evidence for this claim?
> For some odd reason, the comments on this post are full of bitter people who cannot possibly fathom that brilliant young people not only exist, but also achieve amazing things on their own merits.
As opposed to you, who's up and down the thread making unsubstantiated claims and engaging in emotional manipulation to try to discredit (without evidence, I might add) the idea that there's any cheating or subversion going on whatsoever.
The people you're responding to are making far better points than you are.
This is the standard for getting into an elite school. Just getting good grades and generic "activities" hasn't cut it for twenty years or more.
They live in a completely different world from the rest of us and they hate us for it.
"I would like to acknowledge and thank deeply my mentor Davy (Dr. J. Davy Kirkpatrick) for introducing me to astronomy at IPAC and providing guidance throughout this project, aiding in data analysis and the collection of known objects for the test set."
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ad7fe6
There are of course probably fields where there is ~no grant money, thus barely any research. Einstein noted we only know .001% of what there is to note of the universe, and even then he was probably embellishing in the favor of knowledge.
I would also expect by the time you are a postdoc you are totally indoctrinated in your field in a way a high school student would not be. Standing on the shoulder of giants might not always be an advantage, if the giants have been whispering in your ear what to look at, whispering in your ear what they think is true, whispering in your ear what they think reality is, and all your fellows have been listening to whispers from similar giants.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ad7fe6
The interview is funny: when the winner was asked how he did it: I took that NASA database, and made the computer think...
No more concrete. Oh yes they said AI and infrared, he even used infrared.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=JustinSkycak
Here's a blog post of his talking about Matteo among other things:
* https://www.justinmath.com/math-academys-eurisko-sequence-5-...
As in, not validated?
How do we know this algorithm is any good?
That GPU was first released in 2018, and can be had for ~$1500 today. The computer as a whole sounds exactly in-line with what a lab would have as an old spare machine. The student is lucky for sure to have access to such an institution, but it's not like he had rich parents who casually handed him $10-$20k. Much more likely he got access to Caltech resources because his exceptional talent caused a professor to take interest in him:
"I would like to acknowledge and thank deeply my mentor Davy (Dr. J. Davy Kirkpatrick) for introducing me to astronomy at IPAC and providing guidance throughout this project, aiding in data analysis and the collection of known objects for the test set."
[0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ad7fe6
"but it's not like he had rich parents who casually handed him $10-$20k. Much more likely he got access to Caltech resources because his exceptional talent caused a professor to take interest in him:"
These two things are effectively the same.
That privilege may well be a necessary condition towards being able to publish a paper that shows extreme computational sophistication for a high schooler (and indeed, IMO would be a middle-of-the-road graduate-level paper). But it's certainly not a sufficient condition, as you seem to be implying when you say that blindly giving a kid $10-$20k is "effectively the same" as having Matteo's background. If you just handed $20k worth of GPUs to a rich dilettante child, they would not be able to achieve anything close to what Matteo accomplished.
There are a gazillions of children capable of discovering things. What's important is to be the child with the social proof to get it published or actually keep the credit. That's highly valuable because having powerful friends/family is what helps fund, support, and continue research. A nobody can safely be discarded, rob the credit, then use the powerful to keep funding your friends -- in fact this might be even better for "science."
The whole point of getting a PhD is to rub robes with the upper crust, get the contacts, perform the slave labor for the powerful, and become enrobed with the social proofs. If you just want to discover things, you don't need academic credentials, but you can sleep soundly knowing the information will get out there you just have to give it to someone credentialed to take the credit.
Hmm, so, there's a teenager that loves astronomy and is very clever but he lives in rural Indiana with some parents who neglect him.
(Or any third-world country around the world; or even worse, a war ridden place).
How do you suggest he should prepare for this kind of opportunity?
I'm not detracting from his merit, but 99% of this outcome is due to being next door to Caltech and sympathetic to its faculty.
You don’t choose what you want, you choose what you can have.
Astronomy is one of those fields where amateurs make new discoveries quite frequently.
These opportunities come to those who seek them.
The comment explicitly made a claim of $10K to $20K in GPU costs, which was unfounded and false.
I’m tired of the hand-wringing over privilege any time someone young does something impressive. Access to a strong GPU wasn’t the deciding factor that made this kid able to do this work. It could have been done on an average GPU at slower throughput.
Your discomfort doesn't make privilege go away. The fact that he even could afford a GPU seems to go over your head.
EDIT: Ok, so he didn't own a GPU and borrowed a PC from CalTec. That does not change the argument. On the one hand, I'm glad there is so much alignment on this issue, on the other hand its sad how hard people fight against privilege. I get it, for a long time I thought privilege was some whiny liberal thing. Through my decades I've seen over and over again the patterns of who wins and who loses, and privilege appears the same way bent spacetime makes gravity appear. People like the old me want to fight about how privilege/gravity is a myth. I'm terrible at arguing this, but I hope those of you fighting this concept acquire empathy and realize that not everyone has your advantages (and you may still be struggling too, that does not go away or get diminished, btw), and that the majority of that disadvantage is systemic, and intentional.