You can't imagine interpreting the parent comment for its clear face value -- that supporting outlier high achievers helps everyone in society?

The inventor of a vaccine or a microchip or a sculpture doesn't hoard the invention for themself.

Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China, that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their previously great societies.

Even at the most blood-thirsty periods USSR had programs for gifted youth, math clubs at school, and even dedicated highly selective schools. They also had cheap entertaining pop-sci books. The schools would fail the students who don't pass the tests.

However, the scientists and engineers had a rather low salary, often lower than blue-collar workers'.

The equality of outcome can take many forms.

Calling pre-revolution Russian society "great" sounds like a bit of a stretch, mostly due to quality (and freedom) of life for biggest group of it - farmers.

Russia was a backward, underdeveloped nation that couldn’t even beat Germany’s B team, and then collapsed into civil war. 25 years later, the USSR beat Germany’s A team and effectively conquered half of Europe, holding it for nearly half a century.

China before the Communists got pillaged by a succession of outside powers, culminating in basically a failed state that barely had a national government. China after the Communists became prosperous and strong, with the world’s second largest economy and no prospect of being invaded.

I’m no fan of Communism and I think a better system of government could have taken these countries farther, but “collapsed their previously great societies” makes no sense.

No, I cannot because that is fundamentally not what the parent comment said or the framing that they used.

> Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China, that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their previously great societies.

I'm sorry, but that is not how either the USSR or China have operated. If anything, they hyper applied the notion cultivating geniuses. Education in both China and formerly the USSR is hyper competitive with multiple levels of weeding out the less desirables to try and cultivate the genius class.

The problem with both is that your level of academic achievement dictated what jobs you were suited for with little wiggle room.

Now, that isn't to say, particularly under Mao, that there wasn't a purging of intellectuals. It is to say that later forms of the USSR and China have the education systems that prioritize funding genius.

> Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China, that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their previously great societies.

China is doing fine. In fact they're probably going to eclipse the US soon in terms of scientific output.

USSR fell for the trap of trusting the West and consequently they suffered a lot in the 90s.

You are equating "persecuting genius" with "supporting those from low-opportunity backgrounds". Classic mistake, especially considering that those kids could become """geniuses""" too if they had a chance to even try. Giving a decent shot at those from disadvantaged households will ironically probably do more towards improving the number of high achievers than allocating too many resources to the children of the rich, which is what we're doing now.

These inventions are inevitable and don’t take talented and gifted people to do. It takes people undistracted by poverty and suffering.

> The inventor of a vaccine or a microchip or a sculpture doesn't hoard the invention for themself

The built-in assumption is that those outlier high achievers & inventors were gifted students. Is there any evidence for this prior?

As a devil's advocate, my counterpoint is that "grit" was more important than raw intelligence, if so, should society then prioritize grittiness over giftedness?

A few months ago, there was a rebroadcast of an interview about the physician who developed roughly half the vaccines given to children in the US to this day. He seemed to be an unremarkable student, and persistence seems to have been the key quality that led to his successes, not a sequence of brilliant revelations.