You may not like the admission bias in the Ivies (I do not, either - the discrimination against Asians is of course especially damning, since Asians do not even share the putative "White man's burden" of their ancestors having wronged minority ethnicities in the past, that's often invoked - however dubiously - as a moral justification for "affirmative action"), but the amount of "Yacouba Aboubacar's" being admitted in any given year is so low in practice that this does not measurably affect the arms race we're talking about here. Even doubling or trebling the number of admission spots at each Ivy would not change things much!
Exactly, you gotta differentiate. How hard is it really to build a fusor like the Taylor Wilson kid the article references did as a teen?
Just have a hook, make the news, and you'll be golden. You can't just be a smarty pants, you have to be a smarty pants and an 'oh isn't that interesting'.
When you're in a terrible game with a perverse incentive structure...either play to win or don't play. If his blog took anonymous comments, I'd suggest starting an 'Irvington community college' with the kids who didn't want to go to low prestige schools, passing the...