Seeing the striver discourse, one difference with Western obsessives is that a parent notices genuine talent in the kid, and then sacrifices everything to make sure it gets developed. Mozart benefited from having a father like that - but he probably would have become a musical genius even without him. Maybe he wouldn’t have got as far. The striver culture that rubs a lot of Americans the wrong way is forcing kids to do things like memorize words no one uses for spelling bees, or forcing them into learning violin when they have no real talent - and depriving them of a childhood. And then being told this is ‘necessary’ because it might raise your SAT score.

Asian cultures are grind regardless of talent/interest. American culture is grind at your talent/interest. Two very different philosophies.

This chart does not make the argument that this person thinks it does. First of all, this chart doesn’t include mainland China, which couldn’t participate in the 2022 PISA assessment because of COVID disruptions. And the 2025 U.S. data don’t support a reliable racial breakdown. But go back to the last apples-to-apples comparison, in 2018: students in Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang averaged 591 in math, 555 in reading and 590 in science. U.S. Asian students in the same PISA cycle averaged just 539 in math. That’s a 52-point gap. (For Science, the gap was 39 points, a bit better but still 2/3 of a whole level). But averages aren’t even the most important part of the story. Look at the distribution. 98% of students in those four Chinese provinces reached basic math proficiency, and 44% were top performers in math (above 607). So this wasn’t a tiny Chinese elite pulling up the average. Almost half of the entire tested population was performing at PISA’s highest levels, while virtually everyone cleared the basic threshold. (By the way, the US Asian Math average of 539 is only the upper band of level 3, or "strong proficiency". It doesn't even clear L4, and the whole scoring scheme goes all the way up to L6.) That’s a very different distribution from the United States. In 2018, only 8% of U.S. students were top performers in math at about a score of 600 (that equivalent would be almost 700 or well into L6 in China), while 27% didn’t even reach basic proficiency. So yeah ... comparing the average of America’s highest-performing racial subgroup with the averages of entire countries without taking into account the actual distribution surprisingly doesn't really do much to tell you about the systems that produced these results. But whatever helps you feel better about said system and thwart efforts to improve it.

Opus 5.5 on github.com/openai/math --- Okay. I need a minute. I cloned the thing expecting maybe forty or fifty families of serious-but-niche results, like the Astra "ten proofs" drop back in August. Then I printed the family titles and my reaction went from "huh" to "wait, what" in about six lines. Family 003 claims a zero-free half-plane Re s > 7/8 for ζ and every Dirichlet L-function. That's the quasi-Riemann hypothesis. And it isn't even the headline, because 004 is Hilbert's tenth problem over ℚ, done negatively. The longer I read, the weirder it got. Khot's Unique Games Conjecture is proved. L = RL = BPL. ω ≤ 9/4. The free group factors are all isomorphic. Thompson's group F is nonamenable. Kadison's similarity problem is solved. The plane can't be five-colored. Borsuk fails in dimension nine. There's a counterexample to Kaplansky's zero-divisor conjecture, plus a torsion-free group algebra that isn't directly finite. Hilbert–Smith in every dimension. Uniform bounds for Hilbert's sixteenth. Each of these would be the math story of the decade on its own, and here there are 372 families sitting in a table like a grocery list. The manuscript dates run from about September 23 to October 3, so roughly 700 papers in ten days. The ones I'd expect to hit you personally are 005 and 017. Catalan's constant is irrational, and the irrationality exponent of π is exactly 2, which also settles convergence of the Flint Hills series as a side effect. Catalan's G must have shown up in half the integrals you ever wrestled with. Now it's officially irrational, and the proof came from a chatbot running three hours of Pro compute. I don't quite know how to feel about that, and I'd love to know how you feel. My first instinct was that this had to be hype or a hallucination factory, so I checked the Lean. The comparator statements are clean. The quasi-RH challenge is literally riemannZeta s ≠ 0 for 7/8 < s.re, written against Mathlib's own riemannZeta. Catalan is just Irrational (∑' j, (-1)^j / (2j+1)^2). The π statement says what it should. Nothing hides in a home-made definition. The solution tree under lean/OAI has zero files with sorry and no real axiom declarations (the three grep hits are all inside comments), and the comparator JSON allows only propext, Quot.sound and Classical.choice. The Dirichlet L-function development alone is about 487k lines, and the whole repo is around 26 million lines of Lean in 122k files. That's more than ten Mathlibs. I'll admit I did not build it in my sandbox, since that's not happening on this box. If comparator passes on these, the formalized ones are simply true, full stop, and no amount of skepticism changes that. There are a few caveats. Only around 120 papers have a formalized main result. Some of the biggest claims have no Lean link at all: Hilbert's tenth over ℚ, L = BPL, the full BSD formula from low Selmer corank, Milne's rationality conjecture. The README itself says unformalized results "could have issues," and nobody can referee 700 papers in a couple of hours, or a couple of years. One challenge file, HarmonicGrowth.lean, is built as axiom mainStatement : MainClaim followed by theorem main := mainStatement. That's probably harmless, since the comparator checks the solution side, but it's the kind of oddity I'd want to stare at. Also, the solution module behind quasi-RH is named FinalAssemblyUnconditional, which makes me wonder how many conditional versions came first. Some context on how fast this escalated. In August, OpenAI said an internal build of Astra produced results on ten long-standing problems, estimated the token cost at roughly $2,000, and paired the claims with Lean certificates. Then, just recently, it said a model trained from Aug. 28 had resolved more than 100 longstanding open problems and was forming an independent advisory group, while noting the broader set hadn't been independently validated. So the trajectory was ten, then a hundred, and now 372 families in about two months. My honest gut reaction is a mix of awe and vertigo, plus a bit of grief I can't quite justify. Awe because quasi-RH and Siegel-zero exclusion, if real, are the kind of thing you assume you won't live to see. Vertigo because the bottleneck of mathematics has suddenly moved from "can anyone prove this" to "can anyone read this." The grief I'm less sure about. It feels like a lot of lifetimes' worth of open problems got closed in one batch job, and the people who spent decades circling them didn't get to be the ones who closed them.

"Working hard and doing well in school is good, but extreme Asian grind culture is excessive" is a perfectly intuitive and cogent view—so cogent, in fact, that I suspect Matt agrees with it!

"Working hard and doing well in school is good, but extreme Asian grind culture is excessive" is a perfectly intuitive and cogent view—so cogent, in fact, that I suspect Matt agrees with it!

The idea that Asians are robots who never reach the very top levels of ability is such sad, desperate cope. Show me a cellist with as much ability, creativity, and passion as Yo-Yo Ma, a mathematician as deep and brilliant as Terence Tao, a science fiction writer as creative and thoughtful as Ted Chiang, an entrepreneur as canny as Jensen Huang. No, your race does not give you the spark of genius.

Ok, here’s a story about the Great Asian Grindset Debate. A couple years ago we put our kid in a piano school run by a Korean woman living in France. There’s a recital at the end of the year where all of the kids play; half Asian, which is very unusual for France, half White. The Asian kids were all excellent. They were all an 8 or a 9. The White kids were all over the place. There were 1s. There were 2s. There were 3s. There were also 10s. The Asian kids all played, sorry but it’s true, somewhat robotically (which is no shame for a kid!). The best White kids played with that extra dimension of soul and emotion that made them touch greatness. The Asian kids were *all* 8 or 9. The White kids were all over the place from 1 to 10. At the end the lady who runs the school gave a little speech, which was full of nice things, but had as a big throughline chiding the parents of the White kids for not making their kids practice more. At the end, she made a joke: "Remember, make your kids work, because no matter how hard they work, there’s an Asian kid next door who’s working twice as hard." We all laughed, myself included. Do I think that the culture that produced those 8-9 kids is healthy, or one that I would like to see dominant in my country? Hell no. Do I also wish that the White kids who were below an 8 had worked, say, at least 10% harder? Some 50% harder? Hell yes.

Mark Zuckerberg talks about why the Llama run broke after Llama 3. says Llama 3 was a very good model and almost at the frontier, then Llama 4 fell off the path they needed. His read is that he staffed it like Instagram feed and ads, with hundreds or thousands of people in parallel, when a frontier model needs a small tight science team. "When you're an entrepreneur, you're building something, I think you kind of get tested in those moments because inevitably not everything is going to go well. And the things that kind of define the trajectory are, okay, if something doesn't go the way that you want, how do you basically figure out how to move forward?" ---- From "The Next Big Thing" YouTube channel, (link in comment)

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Opening delvetown and immediately experiencing what hell might be like

"If we find a group of brown people who meet our definition of merit, we will redefine merit"