Feels like the real clash happening here is that the reality is suggesting that the values of mean educational level of the bottom 99% of workforce outweighs that of the top 1%, and that being uncomfortable to some so much so that there has to be something else. But isn't that just it?

There's a story in one of Feynman's memoir where he figures out that pausing the live system and debugging its physical RAM stack is turning out to be more time consuming than simply scheduling a new corrected task, on some particular 1940s mechanical supercomputer he was assigned to as a tech. It might not have taken Feynman to notice that, but you can assign Feynman for that, and it worked for the Manhattan project.

The parent comment isn't (just) reiterating the tired tropes, but pointing out that East Asia has an "educational base" similar to industrial base that supports its high tech. I don't think that much is so strange way of thinking. The state of ME countries(maybe except Iran) soft proves it - they don't believe in such a thing. And they don't have a semiconductor industry. Pure coincidence? I doubt it.

(And on "This isn't about Asian superiority — it's actually pointing out something bad about Asia." from jdw64, yuuup 100% it is quad plus bad - IMO a thing about East Asia is that there's zero inter-national mobility due to the notoriously high language barrier, so competitions are closed to within borders, and the bar just drift skywards indefinitely because of that. There was a massive domestic hiring freeze in Japan during the 90s that made "janitors with a PhD" actually not so rare, but none of them hit the global labor market or started companies - the Japanese bar for janitors just went up to PhDs. It is said that success of Japanese 7-11 was partially attributable to that event, that, when you happen to have all the cashiers manned 24/7 with top scientists, you can just throw million different tasks and they can handle it perfectly, put aside whether they're happily doing it)