Infinitely many stages of grief

Where do all the smart, curious, earnest kids go these days?

One of my friends asked me this recently, and I wasn’t sure what to say. In the last ten years, something has changed.

If I had to summarize my concerns in one sentence, I would say this: kids these days no longer feel they’re allowed to work on what they’re interested in or excited about. Instead, they feel obligated to work on whatever happens to be considered the most “important” (or “prestigious”) thing possible.¹

But let me do a bit of story-telling.

Hobbies

When I was kid, math contests were seen as a hobby, or sport, or game. Those were the good old days.

Today, that’s no longer true.

For example, at the end of MOP since 2011, we run a selection test called the TSTST, which chooses the finalists for the subsequent year’s IMO team. When I took the TSTST as kid, the feeling in the air was “it’s game day, GLHF!”. I didn’t solve any problems at all my first year, and I still had a blast.

Whereas in 2023, I remember visiting the testing room on the first day of TSTST to help with setting up folders and whatnot, and feeling like I was at a funeral.

The situation has gotten so bad that many students and staff have suggested that we should remove the TSTST altogether from camp. There are some operational reasons for why I don’t think this is feasible, but something about the whole story bothers me:

Honestly, I also find it disappointing that we are trying to run a summer camp for math Olympiad, and apparently are unable to run a math Olympiad during this camp, because the students’ egos are too fragile.

The idea that we should cancel TSTST seems like putting a Band-Aid to treat the symptoms of a much larger underlying issue. Something is really wrong if our top students are unable to handle taking a contest that barely counts.

Induction

It’s easy to point at the contests and say, “haha, see, contests are toxic!”. But when you drill further, I think something much deeper and scarier is going on, and the contests are just one link in a long chain.

For example, one of the reactions to people taking competition results too seriously was extensive propaganda about the uselessness of contests. Everyone is always saying, contest scores are noisy and everyone has bad days. Math contests are cringe and not real math. Competitions are one-dimensional. Contest problems are super uncreative and just solved by a bunch of tricks. There’s more to life than academics. Yada yada yada. The world gives reason after reason² why test scores aren’t a good ruler.

In an ideal world, you would hope the outcome of this messaging would be to transform the contests back into a sport again that people stop treating like their lives depend on it, because it’s just a game, holy crap.

Do you know what happened instead?

It’s like trying to comfort an anorexic by saying their bathroom scale is an inaccurate mechanical scale.³ This works up until they buy a digital scale and spend every morning calibrating it, and now you’re worse off than you started.

Eight years ago, when I wrote the sentence

Changing the Golden Metric from olympiads to research seems to just make the world more egotistic than it already is.

it was still a hypothetical.⁴ Now it’s reality, and it’s not stopping there.