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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
> 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.
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:"
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.
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.justinmath.com/math-academys-eurisko-sequence-5-...
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.
$50,000 a year high school tuition can make anyone exceptionally talented
The data says this is not true. Quality of education has almost no effect on lifetime income outcomes when you control for initial test scores.
Pasadena High School, where Matteo went to school, is public.
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.
While Pasadena is a relatively wealthy city, historically there has been significant avoidance of its public schools by affluent residents: https://southerneducation.org/in-the-news/new-polling-data-f...
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.
Sadly, I thought the same… Pasadena? Hmmm…
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.
Better than the postdoc I knew who was driving his PI's kids to football practice every day.
This is spot on! Mostly, kids do less than nothing, their parents do the rest!
Yeah, it seems like so:
"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
Sounds like Dr. Kirkpatrick should have been a coauthor.
Do you have any evidence to back this up? I'm asking out of genuine curiosity
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.
How are the Olympiads full of cheating? I only participated in one but there wasn’t any room for cheating.
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.
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.
> They're not.
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.
Other than personal experience of having my PI tell me to hand over my own almost-done experiments to his friends kids?
This is how it works 99% of the time
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.
Totally agree. Most careers in Science are nepo since day zero.
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.
> potential
As in, not validated?
How do we know this algorithm is any good?
Here is the paper
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ad7fe6
The article didn't say how accurate the predictions were. Too bad, that's the important part.
Because there is no admitting what was found were predictions. Millions of entities, that will take years to verify the data.
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.
The second paragraph of the article contains a link straight to the paper, which is open access.
More behind-the-scenes info could be provided by HN's @JustinSkycak:
* 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-...
Is this important? I see we have a model which has not found anything officially, has been validated by no one nor has the science reproduced.
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.
$10,000 to $20,000 in GPU costs over a couple months. I had $20 per week in highschool. Benefit of being rich is you are awarded opportunities.
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."
[0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ad7fe6
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:"
These two things are effectively the same.
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.
Being adjacent to wealth is a privilege. Zip code is a better predictor of a child's success than any other metric.
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.
>because you've prepared yourself for the opportunity
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.
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.
These opportunities come to those who seek them.
This completely ignores reality. Jobs was a one-in-a-billion. To pretend privilege doesn't exist by invoking near mythological probabilities perpetuates it.
Are they the same as receiving $20,000 in AWS credits?
> 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.
>> I’m tired of the hand-wringing over privilege
Your discomfort doesn't make privilege go away. The fact that he even could afford a GPU seems to go over your head.
He used a Caltech computer.
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
The high school he goes to has a $50,000 yearly tuition.
Please stop repeating this lie. He went to the public Pasadena High School.
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.
Did they win the election?
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.
why would one throw away pencils?
Why would any one dump a load of tea in the bay?
Where is this number from?
I thought for a second the title was new Epstein files...