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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

>>This ultimately inspired him to attempt to build a reactor himself, but Jackson clarified that he was the only person to have any involvement in its design or production.

What a crock of shit. I understand the whole worship of individualism, but this is just taking it absurdly far. Look at Schwarzenegger, and how frequently he keeps saying that he only got to where he is because of help from other people - nothing that you do is ever only your own accomplishment. And then on the other side you have a 13 year old kid who says he was the only one involved in design and production(!!!) of this device - give me a break. He might be super bright, but somehow this kind of article grinds my gears like nothing else.

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> What a crock of shit. I understand the whole worship of individualism, but this is just taking it absurdly far.

You are missing his age. He is not a grown up who could graps the whole complexity of the task. He can see what he have done, but he is unable to grasp what others did to make his achievement possible. Such an inability would be worrying for me, if he was older -- 20 years old, or even 16-18 years old. But for 13 yo kid it is absolutely normal. Cognitive limitations he shows are only to be expected. There is no reason to grumble about society degrading to a hell.

When someone accomplish something like this, a Guiness Record after all, it's only natural to feel a bit proud. Of course the idea wasn't original and he had help. But taken in context, the boy says he did it himself in that room. It'd be something else if he had onsite assistance. This is probably part of the Record as well.

We should be bigger than this.

On top of that, he's largely (only?) able to do this because his parents have the resources and disposable income to drop $10,000[1] on their son's project and awareness/ability to consult with experts[2]. That's not to say that his interest in hacking on nuclear fusion wasn't also a factor here -- obviously it was, but if that's all he had he wouldn't have gotten very far.

One wonders how many kids swallowed up by poor, resource-starved neighborhoods would have been able to achieve similar feats given more access and resources. Kids generally have nothing but time -- so yeah, if you finance their projects and give them your support and an environment conducive to focusing on hacking on fusion reactors, or becoming chess or math or music prodigies, or whatever, they'll tend to do that. And likewise if you give them an environment conducive to trauma, financial stress, and poverty, well, that's what they'll tend towards.

There are exceptions in both cases -- I'm sure many of us can think of people who came from wealth and ultimately didn't amount to much, and some of the most brilliant and accomplished people I know came from abject poverty. My point is that wealth and resources makes stuff easier -- or even possible in the first place.

[1]

> Building the nuclear fusion reactor was no game for Jackson. He converted an old playroom in his Memphis home into a functioning lab. With the financial support of his parents – he spent between $8,000 and $10,000 over the course of a year collecting the parts he needed to build his nuclear fusion reactor – that was apparently the easy part.

[2]

> Jackson’s father, Chris Oswalt, had no real understanding of what his son was working on. To make sure Jackson was safe he had experts speak to him about the dangers involved with working on a potentially deadly fusion reactor, like being exposed to high levels of radiation or being electrocuted by the 50,000 volts of electricity he uses to warm the fusion reactor’s plasma core.

https://www.foxnews.com/science/teen-builds-working-nuclear-...

> One wonders how many kids swallowed up by poor, resource-starved neighborhoods would have been able to achieve similar feats given more access and resources

I live in Austria. In the 70, 80ies it is save to say it was a socialist country. Universities were free, school education was free. There were no private universities and practically no private schools. The idea was that everyone should have equal possibilities for a start.

It was a time of great social cohesion and peace. Maybe we went to far with Theatherism and privatizations.

I would also point out that even with access to the parts, getting into the guiness world records book is expensive (one of the main reason speedruns rarely make it there). So it's likely 10k$ for parts and labor plus 10k$ to get their judges to come and verify the record.

It seems this young man will do well in middle management ;)

What a weird and frankly pissy response. I think all that means is that he didn't get a near-complete design from some other source and stick it in a shiny box and put a sticker on it calling it the Jacksotron so something and declare that he "built it".

It's quite the Festival of Debunking a 12 Year Old Kid going here on Hacker News, and it's embarrassingly transparent. Yes, you're all very smart too.

(oops "so something" -> "or something")

I wonder if his parents or someone else told him to say that, or he is actually just that arrogant.

This simply means he didn't have any help on-site (parents, teachers).

I took it in the context that it is a necessary condition for the Guinness Book of World Records that he did it by himself, since the next sentence is about Guinness. If he says he got helped from other people that would invalidate the Guinness record.

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