I mean, they all do in hindsight, but in the moment of decision, Dolmetsch was a teenager during a surge of Colombian refugees and his only qualification was being admitted to a U.S. college. I picked him because he was topical, but I could just as easily have googled "scientists with blue-collar immigrant parents" like I did just now, and used someone like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_M._Hern%C3%A1ndez who was a Mexican migrant laborer before developing an innovative mammography tool and then going into space.
...it's not cherry-picking when the conversation is about outliers, it's an existence proof. You're here from an ACX comment thread about a specific negative outlier picked for its outlier qualities.
I wasn't doubting the existence of people like Hernandez, just pointing out that if that if they're not naturally appearing in your blogpost then maybe they're not as salient, and your case not as strong, as presented.
While we're on the topic of negative outliers, that young Austrian moving to Germany was a bit of a doozy.
My post contains one (1) example of an immigrant who has made a recent positive contribution in the U.S. Since I foolishly picked one who does not have all possible immigrant backstories in quantum superposition, you can point to any number of categories of people who do not appear in the post.
You also mentioned "talented researcher Kseniia Petrova" and "Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, who founded the Manhattan Project. The project recruited all the best theoretical physicists from across America, who met in Los Alamos and realized they all knew each other from high school in Budapest."
"To admit him, we needed to admit all of them too."
I don't know, all your positive examples look more like those fair "Martians" than not.
I mean, they all do in hindsight, but in the moment of decision, Dolmetsch was a teenager during a surge of Colombian refugees and his only qualification was being admitted to a U.S. college. I picked him because he was topical, but I could just as easily have googled "scientists with blue-collar immigrant parents" like I did just now, and used someone like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_M._Hern%C3%A1ndez who was a Mexican migrant laborer before developing an innovative mammography tool and then going into space.
Yes, you could cherry-pick your examples to avoid uncomfortable conclusions that one might get from using topical examples.
...it's not cherry-picking when the conversation is about outliers, it's an existence proof. You're here from an ACX comment thread about a specific negative outlier picked for its outlier qualities.
I wasn't doubting the existence of people like Hernandez, just pointing out that if that if they're not naturally appearing in your blogpost then maybe they're not as salient, and your case not as strong, as presented.
While we're on the topic of negative outliers, that young Austrian moving to Germany was a bit of a doozy.
My post contains one (1) example of an immigrant who has made a recent positive contribution in the U.S. Since I foolishly picked one who does not have all possible immigrant backstories in quantum superposition, you can point to any number of categories of people who do not appear in the post.
You also mentioned "talented researcher Kseniia Petrova" and "Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, who founded the Manhattan Project. The project recruited all the best theoretical physicists from across America, who met in Los Alamos and realized they all knew each other from high school in Budapest."
Love this one so much. So beautiful.
Yes to all of this, yes. I am a bit to verklempt from reading it to write more, but thank you.