Math from Three to Seven
thepsmiths.com
thepsmiths.com
I'm unsure if it implies that "lame school exercises" are unnecessary or just not sufficient (I've recently read articles about how teaching "insight" without exercises is detrimental, though perhaps doing problems implies getting that repetition-work).
Does anyone have good experiences with keeping kids math-interested as they get into their teens? My kid used to enjoy math in school, and love talking about math problems ("can you help me set up that triangle pyramid thing with the sums again"), but now is seemingly disillusioned and finds the school exercises boring. Combine that with, well, teen-age, and I fear it's going to be hard to get back the spark. Not that it has to come back, but I'd hate for the interest to turn into dislike due to lack of opportunities.
1. I had some good teachers who showed (glimpses) of the how and why, not just the "what", so it helped math feel like it made sense, rather than being just facts and calculating algorithms to memorize. One demo that left a particular impression on me was the teacher asking us to go around the unit circle in increments of 10 degrees and plot the ratio of the opposite side and hypotenuse of the inscribed right triangle. Watching the sine function -- until then some mysterious thing that just existed with no explanation or context -- materialize in front of me on graph paper was magical.
2. I was shown that math is useful. In another great high school demo, the teacher assigned every student a length, width, and height, to be cut from construction paper and taped together in a box. After we were done, we laid out all the boxes together and computed their volumes. Then the teacher worked through the calculus on the board to figure out the dimensions of the box with the highest possible volume, given that fixed amount of construction paper. That was a really big moment for me, because until then I "hated" math, being a silly waste of time messing around with numbers and shapes just for the sake of doing it.
I think the problem is that schools here (and I think most countries have similar problems) is that they focus on grades rather than keeping kids interested. Too much pressure takes away the fun. The article has some other clues to things that can go wrong with bad teachers: for example
> "Worst of all, the teacher docks points when the kids use techniques that they “aren’t supposed to know yet.”"
That is really terrible (and not typical, I hope - would not have happened in my school, I think) but it does happen.
I think there maybe a problem with insight without repetition, but it is definitely possible to keep kids interested while doing repetition as long as they feel they are getting better. My kids did do a lot of practice with minimal supervision.
I also think you absolutely have to provide enough interesting stuff to make kids feel the subject is interesting, even if there is some grind. Having a parent who is interested and will do things like answer questions is a huge help.
I was bored with math up until 8th grade (age 13-14) but didn't realize why until that year. Up until that point I got straight As pretty effortlessly, but due to an administrative error I skipped a year of math. I was supposed to have a year of pre-algebra, but got placed into algebra instead. Luckily that teacher decided to do a month of review before starting new topics, which effectively meant I was taking a year long class in just a month. I actually had to put in effort for once and averaged a C.
It was during that year when the pace slowed back down that I realized I did like math in general, it was how slow classes had to go to accommodate all the students that I didn't care for.
This is a huge problem across all classes, not just math. It's not as bad if the lowest portion of the bell curve is shuffled off to remedial learning classes, but really you need 3 tracks or more to keep the highest performing students challenged enough.
Not a parent, but what kept me engaged at that time was programming simple games or interesting visualizations and animations. I "discovered" quite a bit of useful trigonometry, linear algebra and statistics by just fooling around and following my curiosity. And the intuition I gained definitely helped later on with university math
The first step would be to get them into a math circle. There are 100s of them https://mathcircles.org/map/. I run a math circle as well, and work with a bunch of teens/preteens. I've had a lot of success with them. AMA.
For example UCLA math circle is very exclusive and there’s effectively no admission in elementary school if you miss enrollment or don’t do well on their kindergarten test.
Is there any alternative?
Totally agree with you. That was the case in my area in the midwest as well. That's why I started my own mathcircle. Its not as hard as you might think - you just need a few interested students, a few textbooks, and plenty of time.
We focus entirely on competition math - so mathcounts, amc 8/10/12, aime/jmo/imo. The material gets real hard real fast, so kids will drop, new kids will join etc. The ones who stick around benefit immensely. I've had 11-12 year olds in my group qualify both for the AIME (one of 6000 kids in the usa) as well as mathcount nationals (one of 200 kids in the usa).
As a point of reference, reading curriculum is very easy to teach because there are scripts to follow in the lesson plans.
The big challenge in teaching is not to make the exercises seem lame.
If some of the kids go on to study CS, they can then think about the similarities and difference between decimal, hex and binary addition, how half and full and ripple-carry adders work, and how you add bigints. At that point you need both a conceptual and a procedural understanding of digit-wise addition.
If you want to do say 67 + 24, perhaps even in your head, there are more efficient ways to add than the standard algorithm, and I think that's what new math was trying to get at. But at some point you might want to add 25137 + 1486 and then your neat tricks no longer work and you need something that scales.
But someone who sees that as ‘add fifteen hundred and take away fourteen’ is much closer to understanding what that expression actually represents, as well as being able to produce 26623 almost immediately without writing anything down.
It’s not about ‘neat tricks’, it’s about numbers having shape and feel and flavor.
This is precisely the dichotomy that is bogus according to the article.
25137 = 20000 + 5000 + 100 + 30 + 7 and 1486 = 1000 + 400 + 80 + 6, then you add (7 + 6) + (30 + 80) + (100 + 400) + (5000 + 1000) + (20000 + 0) to get the result. The fact that we can do that and combine it all tightly into columns is IMO a very deep insight into what a "number" really is, while also providing a general pen-and-paper algorithm for adding any two numbers. The insight provides an algorithm, and the algorithm leads us to an insight.
Discovering that 1486 = 1500 - 14 isn't a particularly deep insight into numbers either. It's a useful technique and I think it's fine that we teach it, but I don't think it has any particular conceptual merit that the standard algorithm lacks. I certainly don't see how it puts a child any closer to understanding what addition really means.
Seven plus six is thirteen carry the one leaves three, four plus eight is twelve carry the one leaves two, two plus four is six, five plus one is six, two six six two three…
Seeing that as a decomposition of multiples of powers of ten and how that makes ‘carrying’ happen is exactly a result of having a deeper understanding of the way the numbers work.
For the student who doesn't understand, one rote algorithm is as boring and stupid as any other. That student is plugging and chugging all the same, whether or not they have heard of a "tens place".
For the student who does understand, the "new" algorithm at least is elucidating and actually makes sense as a direct application of the basic principles of our number system. The "tens place" is in fact a real thing, regardless of what you call it.
This very book argues against teaching these tricks without allowing the student to discover it themselves.
Why is 4 + 7 = 7 + 4? Is it a general phenomenon?
There might be math-oriented stuff online (3Blue1Brown is one off the top of my head) that keeps them wanting to understand more. That might anchor their school work a bit, or give them something extra to try. Books can help too.
90% of success in primary and secondary schooling is just showing up; as long as you keep your grades up, they won't demand mental attendance, only the physical.
denn meine Gedanken zerreißen die Schranken
und Mauern entzwei: die Gedanken sind frei.One thing I haven’t seen brought up in this discussion yet: technology. Seriously, what hope does a teacher have for getting students to engage when they’re competing against all the might of Silicon Valley? The industry is spending billions every year to discover and implement the best techniques for stealing teenagers’ attention and focus away from everything else in their lives.
There’s a growing chorus of people who want to get phones out of classrooms. That’s a strong first step but students’ struggles don’t end when they go home for the night. I volunteer as a tutor with high school students at an after-school homework club. We aren’t allowed to take their phones away! You can imagine how much of a Herculean struggle it is for these kids to put away their phone and actually get some work done.
> "Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by fighting back" —PH
Parsing also interested me around ~12 (text games this time), but while I made some mechanical attempts, the theory never clicked until much later.
Sometime around that time I learned about recursion by reverse-engineering the display code for a tile based first-person maze crawler one of my father's colleagues had written. (yes, fib should've been simpler, but drawing those perspective walls was way more concrete)
[perspective was luckily something I'd been introduced to in second grade, so it was old hat at this point, and the scaling math was straightforward; the only jump I needed to make was grokking that having drawn the walls visible from this square, one could use the same routine, with fresh parameters, to draw the walls from all the still-visible neighbouring squares, etc. Unfortunately z-buffers make this entire approach obsolete; but maybe he'd take it as a challenge? this is trivial with z-buffering, but how might it even be possible without?]
Might Processing sketches (or whatever the new shiny might be) interest your kid?
Then later between my love of point and click adventure games and puzzles plus the fact that I had good foundations in maths, pure mathematics problems became increasingly fun.
Abstract math, or "math per se" was utterly uninteresting for me. My drive was to solve actual problems I had or wanted to solve. For example, making something out of wood with complex shapes, or drawing with the computer. I would say you have to find an area of interest with which the kids get passionate, and needs math to solve the problems.
This got my upvote!
One place it is offered in-person is the St. Louis area where I grew up: https://megsss.org/about-us/
It is run by a team with deep expertise in mathematics education, including the founding head of King's Maths School, a state school that is one of the top performing sixth forms in the country.
There is also https://parallel.org.uk/ by Simon Singh, but this is aimed at ages ~10+.
The book by Rozhkovskaya has some really nice activities in it. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1470416956
The book by Zvonkin described in the article is a very good motivator, particularly for the honest descriptions of lessons gone badly wrong, and staying up late cutting out pieces of cardboard! But it's quite difficult to use as a teaching resource.
One of the joys of high school was discussing these with a friend (after submission---but one could forego the contest and just do the circle thing with them for fun).
The NRICH material is really good: https://nrich.maths.org/teachers/early-years
There's some NRICH funded research that showed that exposure to symmetry and reasoning at this level was much more predictive of future abilities than numbers and counting. I think when parents try and help at the early stages, they often try to e.g. get their kids to count to 100, which is conceptually identical to counting to 10.
For number fluency there is the free White Rose '1 minute maths' app, which does a very nice job of gamifying subitising & etc. A lot of primary schools in London seem to have adopted the White Rose teaching resources. https://whiteroseeducation.com/1-minute-maths
In France, the top thing to do is go to Polytechnique, which is an engineer school created by Napoleon. So culturally French people push their kids towards learning maths.
(if your kid has neither aptitude nor taste for maths, what do you do? push them towards ENA?)
Usually business school, HEC is the second highest viewed thing. ENA is something you may do later, either after political science studies, or after polytechnique, or business school.
It's like trying to teach someone to swim by just throwing them in the water over and over and expecting them to eventually figure it out.
As a result, the primary emotion students learn to associate with math problems is fear. Instead of the sense of confidence that comes with having a plan, each problem feels like "will things work out or will I get lost and waste hours without actually ever finding a solution".
That said, do keep in mind that despite being from 3 to 7, his son is actually 3 years old and 10 months when he started (and I think the same for the daughter, I forgot). Personally, I've noticed that my just turned 3 years old son is not developmentally ready for a lot of the activities yet (but he's been surprisingly good at other activities), so I do think that you need to adapt depending on the children you try this on.
They just focused much higher percentage of GDP on military and space stuff. Meanwhile, life in Russia was miserable. They got tanks, nuclear weapons and rockets. No companies that made people's life better.
This is what kept the cold war going.
Until it didn't.
If you are wrong the basic assumptions, you can look for clues anywhere, it does not matter.
Agreed, it's bizarre to assume the Soviet version of anything is better than the what the US or other western nations are doing.
This book and the culture it come from are so influential, that many people who did "enrichment" have already been exposed to many of the activities in the book. Most famous may be the Scratch JR / code.org introductory computer programming, but with pencil and paper.
Math from Three to Seven: The Story of a Mathematical Circle for Preschoolers [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17018583 - May 2018 (20 comments)
Math from Three to Seven: Chapters One and Three [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8811334 - Dec 2014 (21 comments)
* Lem (Cyberiad, etc.) was all I could get of theirs, on mine.
Meanwhile, for example in Spain in the same time period, there was a remarkably broad activation of the population in revolutionary activism and political engagement, which allegedly doubled productivity and dramatically increased agricultural yields, which to me indicates that the anarchists were basically everywhere (how else did they syndicalize such wide swaths of the economy?).
Similarly there's the whole French Revolution cafe / salon culture.
If by “intellectual” you mean learning, reading, thinking, then no.
(Starace, above, is already an obvious counterexample)
I blame Катя Кузнецова (1986); she wanted the red sports car with the radio and the little dog, after all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvdlAgreRug&t=4574s
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgdP5U28jHc
[I'm guessing unlikely, due to the censorship? Yes, Белое солнце пустыни (1970) actually has a villain and even an on-screen shootout, but the underlying vibes are still a far cry from Брат (1997)]
FWIW, Lavrov still seems to wax poetic from time to time (although I haven't read anything of his since «Нет, ничто в этом мире не ново...»).
Shnur obviously has something to say (although in the last few years* he seems to be saying it less clearly and more cryptically), but he's not any more the man in the street than Lavrov.
Also, I'm not sure (a) how serious you were about this thesis, nor (b) if the degradation to which you allude significantly overlaps with what I might assume to have been degradation...
* which produced their own emigration wave? looking at israel these days I wonder if much of that has become "out of the fire, into the frying pan"?
>In the second iteration of the circle, all of his notes are completely useless, and all of his initial attempts to teach anything fail, because these are different kids with different aptitudes and different interests. Zvonkin, raised in a communist society and a believer in the absolute malleability of human nature, is fairly bowled over by this, especially by how young all these differences are manifesting. Reading between the lines, it sounds like he got quite lucky with his first set of children, and that the second group were much more challenging to teach.8 The most eloquent testimony to this is that after about a year he gives up, and the journal ends abruptly.
this is exactly the math teacher my kids have. So frustrating.
They then force them to use each of the prescribed set of methods even when they are totally inappropriate for the task. Any deviation from the method they are told to use for that question is wrong. No creation of your own adapted methods is acceptable.
In other words, the teachers were taught that kids should use different methods, but seemingly weren't taught why.
"Yes!"
"You're all different!"
"We're all different!"
"..I'm not."
"Shh."
Rory Miller is unusual because most people who do applied violence ("corrections") don't also have the temperament to theorise about it, or if they do, little inclination to thereupon write it down.
> She gains the courage of the fatalist
Compare Epictetus, or even "Pluggers"?
EDIT: for that matter, Cassandra in particular, and the trojan women in general
> no comparative analysis of the Mongols and the Comanches
I did run across one of these a while back: a blog post, not a book, but still an analytic comparison nonetheless.
EDIT2: thinking of my locals: our origin stories are as a hill people (armor doesn't work well when it can't manoeuvre, in the XIII as in chechnya) but somehow we've picked up a hefty memeplex of conflict resolution skills on the way to the present?
[can we compare sarissa to Swiss pike]
And then there were the Habsburgs..
In your locality, are there no (nonplains-derived, eg not Monts+Caps of Ephesus) fairy tales of dynastic feuds? Valleys have always been fertile, livestock abundant ( so that driving term high enough to avert fratricide/eternal war with the eastern barbarians)? Northern thais didnt discover grazing/lactose until 1970s, and then ofc appalachia/scottish notterriblelands
[https://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/Badlands#Etymology]
Q: what shape are the castles in Castalia, if Castalia itself is in the form of a tower — ofc i will relate to the general structure of polynesia :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41725625
Slavic muxa <-> lowland austrian/schwabian mugge <-/-> (??) maggot
livestock raiding + pikes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_raiding#/media/File:Sch...
(local on local domestic* feuds are well attested, both in legend and in architecture, but very little gets built these days with defensibility as a prime consideration)
I'll have to reread, but (having just arisen this morning) even caucasians were known for their feuds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vainakh_tower_architecture
As a prediction before checking the etymology, I'll bet Муха/Mücke goes back all the way to PIE: one of the benefits of sitting around the campfire (attested!) for getting high (attested!) and gossiping about body counts (attested!) is that it tends to discourage insects (is this attested?)
RCH as a measurement unit seems to have been derived from a more humanistic tradition, however.
* international mixups ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eePHXDl0Pjc ) mostly ended when the poverty did, although I note that just this summer I saw a job posting for international development work that required either small arms certification or the equivalent army service. A colleague in KFOR tried to convince me, around the turn of the century, that vacationing where he'd served was great; I was almost ready to believe him until he started listing the "simple" rules for avoiding likely minefields.
Thx for the raiding article, all the forexes in one place :)
And dont forget the (old) florentine skyscrapers, derived from germanic feuds? (G+G)
incidentally, while looking for NdBdM's foxes and lions, I ran into something else:
when I'd bounced off of Moldbug, there was one thing that seemed to be an actual claim, and not just vibe: that neo-nazis don't ever go around saying that the historical Nazis had just implemented it wrong; they weren't doing true Nazism. At the time, I couldn't think of any counterexamples, but I've recently learned Leo Strauss is one:
https://balkin.blogspot.com/2006/07/letter_16.html#:~:text=t...
It was only 1933, and I only have it in translation, but still: he seems to me to be claiming to intend to argue that the historical Nazis were not behaving according to true "fascist, authoritarian, and imperial principles"?
Flies vs mosquitoes: flies are sometimes presented as a source of harmless comedy (maggots as medicine), but genocide (latinate vibes?) is acceptable for mosquitoes.
Come to think of it, Marinetti may not have reached the heights himself, but we should give him credit for the assist[0]: not only Mayakovsky, but also Gibson[1,2].
For that matter, does Marinetti's habit of prefixing with aero- and claiming everything goes better with aluminium presage recent years' habit of suffixing with -coin and claiming everything goes better with AI?
Mozzies bite, which regular flies don't. But was the blue tail fly another example of "let's you and him fight"? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCMCKhMsSjo
[0] funny that games like LoL give explicit credit for the assist but the popular view of mathematics ignores that factor? the link of a node, in graphspeak?
[1] even echoing down to Shnur & Glukoza: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuHbs3306RI&t=121s (russians love their chemistry references? is the city in the later flashback supposed to be marina bay Singapore?)
[2] and while Gibson concerns himself with "high tech low life" (a cyberpunk chengyu?), he explicitly leaves a place in his world which is the equivalent of Huxley's BNW islands; the rich kids are up in the orbital colonies: https://nss.org/wp-content/uploads/Bernal_Interior_AC76-0628...
EDIT: or a kid's book: https://www.amazon.com/Dubbie-Double-Headed-Eagle-Eduard-Hab...
(and there's kind of a horseshoe thing going on: the few high tend to be foxes, because keeping the many middle lions in check can't be done by force, but the even more numerous low have their own trickster gods [El-ahrairah, wily Odysseus, etc.] because the low of course never have force, but might've been naturally endowed with guile — the signifying monkey, lion, and elephant are simpler, with 3 actors, than the 4 actors of slave, master, blue tail fly, and horse)
[2] Elysium
prefix all with glass, append some with hole, claim nothing?
As for Elysium (2013), having watched the trailer and skimmed the synopsis and a review, it sounds exactly like the sort of movie a fox (or at least a maneless lion[3] who hires wolves assisted by vultures to do what his snake tells him to?) would want to show to all the rabbits (or hedgehogs or whatever creatures Machiavelli and Pareto think are below the foxes and lions): a hero's journey in which the One guy of Destiny getting in a physical fight saves everyone; if anyone in that world had been spending as much time knotting up nets as the characters in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_Margin#Plot seem to, it hadn't been obvious to the reviewer.
[0] are they chengyu? if not, they should be, like 高新低人(?).
[1] stepping back and preparing his nets speaks to a fox with lions on the payroll?
[2] Mencius (the original) had best watch out when accusing people of bird-speak; consider Qur'an 27:16, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conference_of_the_Birds#Sy...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood_(1973_film)#Voice_c...
EDIT: or maybe the flashback should've been https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=22.14364&mlon=113.56283&... ? I don't know my asian skylines well at all :(
Its standard mandarin, but spoken not by a mandarin (nonrhotic, but also not taiwanese/shanghainese elite, ie most likely nanban, exiled from the mainland south coast, macao is a good port of call)
id=41670593 <— alephnerd, you can imagine soviet folkways imported via the KR
Anime studio is in HK, but signage in the anime is inconsistent. ( there was one Taichung ad?))
p=… refers to Aaronson’s blog.
Beyond eyes/skin/apparel, there are tattoos for the louche, which parallel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wnQ3Ow02yQ ?
Dogs as in the Venetian canine of St. Mark's?
我有心采一朵戴,又 Один раз в год сады цветут
I see. Fox and lion signify opposing virtues for me, and vices for thee, therefore designori should be vicinal/virtuous (wrt Pareto optimality)
Scrap that, everything is soviet save the attire, the lone vixen+cub mere pirates serving the soviet navy (note that HQ may well be refurbished Hotel Class underwater, ideal for refining cocaine, antagonists referencing to the americanized black widows, K-19 “Hiroshima”
If we observe two different Aaronsons, there must be some phase interference; had you meant to refer to anything of the sort with intertidal angling? (as smugglers well know, high tide erases footprints left at low, so finding the source of any such would presumably be difficult...) On the other hand, there's also the post-Dead jam band, EDIT: ...as well as other (specific!) sources of irrationality.
Yes, fox and lion as vices fit for Cicero: he is a clueless[0] middle poster boy (and remained so for thousands of years); if M Antonius (whose mother's remarriage allowed him to see psychopaths at work among not only the low but also the high) had been the open-letter-writing type, his advice probably would have agreed with the Florentine that they were the cardinal (for flatlanders anyway; bear with me here on the dimensionality[2]) virtues.
Personally, I enjoy fraud and force when they're bookended by handshakes; if we think of society as an MMO, could there be any way to structure it so that Killers can enjoy pitting themselves against each other, but without impacting[1] involuntary third parties?
[0] although if I recall https://www.talmud.de/tlmd/tanach/megillat-ruth/#1_Kapitel , it shares Ciceronian concern both for foreigners and for seemly ways to express "uncovering feet".
[1] when Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar places his wife and daughters with the oratores, is he explicitly removing them from the bellatores Killer world and placing them in an Achiever enclave?
EDIT[2]: are designori k-vicinal for k = ⌊d⁄2⌋?
Let's see if there are any US Top 100's (1955-1992) in which lyrics are ambiguous between human and botanic...
1961 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT-tYh3OSUQ "san antonio rose"
1962 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdGphk-XTh8 "rambling rose"
1973 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9bJJNUdXEs "wildflower"
1980 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Het6ww147Es "the rose"
OK, that's more than I'd thought, but considering those 4 are out of ~3'300 titles, I'm pretty confident there'd be (relatively speaking? or even absolutely?) far more eastern entries, and maybe far more even if we limited them to the format of "${COLOR} ${FLOWER}".
*/Martianism aka Gyorgy-Marxism
This is the most important point from the article. My theory is that if you are not obsessed with something, you won’t be good enough with it, wether it’s a math, coding, business or something else… Thats how most of us got started in tech from the early ages.
While it is true that the current high demand on a job market allows many to have "good enough" skills for employment, I would argue that passion, curiosity, and obsession are the driving forces that lead to better outcomes both for individuals and the industry as a whole. These qualities inspire deeper engagement and lead to more quality work. For routine tasks, basic competence might suffice. However, for solving complex problems, it won't...
Passion/curiosity/obsession often leads to voluntary, extensive practice and learning. This typically results in faster skill acquisition and a deeper understanding of the subject matter. While becoming competent without any of these is possible, the path is often slower and limited.
Also, both the tech industry and the job market are evolving rapidly. Passionate/curious/obsessed developers are more likely to keep up with new technologies and methodologies, potentially leading to better long-term career prospects and adaptability. The pace of change in our industry demands a continuous hunger for knowledge and a relentless pursuit of excellence.
In the end, if you don't want to be a mediocre developer with a mediocre career, such stuff matters.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970_Soviet_census
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970_United_States_census
Is this statistic somehow not representative?
If so, what’s up with that?
If not, is the belief that the Soviet Union was smaller than the US population widespread and wrong? If it is widespread and wrong, where’s it come from? (Although, I must admit the possibility that it isn’t widespread, and was just unusually wrong. In which case the answer is just that I’m unusually bad at geopolitics, which would not be surprising at all).
Chances are he's only counting the population of Russia proper, which would be a bit like only counting the US East Coast population.
But in general, the education and health care systems were usually the 'flag ships' with easy and free access for the 'working class' (which also means extreme discimination against anybody else though).
> These days, the same scenes are dominated by Chinese and Indian kids. But China and India have large populations — the Russians were punching way about their weight, demographically speaking.
> Well, with the Soviets it all went in the opposite direction: they had a smaller population, a worse starting industrial base, a lower GDP, and a vastly less efficient economic system. How, then, did they maintain military and technological parity1 with the United States for so long?
There's are a persistent set of myths that both the Soviets and the western arms manufacturers like to perpetuate.
The t-34 tank was the greatest tank ever (sometimes had 10:1 losses offset by 14:1 manufacturing)
The ak-47 is the best due to is reliability (poor tolerances made it both reliable and astoundingly inaccurate)
Soviet/russian tanks have not come out on top in any conflict for the past 50 years. On the battlefields of Ukraine, the t72 has been infamous for its design flaws wherein even mild penetration to the gun autoloader housed in the turret ring often leads to catastrophic explosions instantly killing all the crew inside.
In Israel's fights against Syria, syrian Soviet tanks had a critical design flaw wherein they were not able to shoot downward at an angle, effectively making them sitting ducks.
The last time Soviet jets had parity with the west was when both sides were copying the same German jet fighter designs appropriated from Focke-wulf at the end of world War 2.
Repeatedly in actual combat situations, the soviet equipment fares poorly... In Israel, Iraq, and Ukraine. Perhaps the only conflicts Soviet equipment has been used effectively is when Iraq deployed its mostly Soviet weapons against Irans mostly American weapons and even that's arguable considering the United States backed Saddam (and later obliterated his army with more modern western technology)
But the Russian Empire in 19th century is not the Soviet empire in the 20th century. This topic is about Soviet math and engineering, not 19th century Russia
This isn't a complete explanation: we can see this by looking at other STEM fields. The early years of computer programming were dominated by women, yet nowadays, women are proportionally uninterested. You don't get such a dramatic demographic shift because of innate tendencies, but this was contemporaneous with a shift from programming being considered low-status to high-status work. Is this perhaps social, rather than directly economic?
To take an example from elsewhere in the thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41718072): I can see the “you must use this method” prescription hitting girls harder than boys, since girls tend to drift towards copying / collaborative play, and boys tend to drift towards competitive play. This prescription might make mathematics seem less like play, to girls – which would be ironic, since real mathematics is an incredibly collaborative endeavour.
(Which raises the question: do girls inherently prefer copying play, and boys inherently prefer competition play? Who knows? I suspect not, but I think it'll be a long time before we find out.)
We eliminated the job women were dominating (programmer) by combining it with the one men were dominating (analyst).
At the same time law and medicine were seeing huge increases in the proportion of women practitioners, so the status thing doesn’t make a ton of sense as an explanation. Besides, it was not high status in the 80s when this was going on (or the 90s… arguably it’s still not, just high pay)
Gender disparity is usually shown as a percentage, but years ago I ran across one for programmers that used absolute numbers and the pattern showed a different story than usual - which this reclassification could probably explain.
I don't remember what year exactly the flip was, but before the flip the number of men and women were increasing at around the same rate. After it, the number of men skyrocketed while the number of women kept increasing at the same rate as before. As a percentage this looks like women lost interest or got pushed out, but the absolute numbers look more like men flocked to it without pushing anyone out. Or, perhaps, got grouped into it.
Low-status tasks (e.g. vital, but "unpromotable" ones) are delegated to women, and tasks that are associated with femininity are considered low-status. This is a well-documented (https://noidea.dog/glue) and easily-measurable phenomenon. I expect there are many harder-to-measure instances of institutional sexism that might make classes of workplace unpalatable, even if there's no gender bias in desire to do the actual work.
If this (or a similar) effect has been going on for a while, I'd expect that to have significant knock-on effects.
It helps that she's very competent, but she didn't have to work extra to be noticed by the organisation.
If we're trading second-hand anecdotes, I've got a couple dozen of trans women programmers no longer receiving promotions despite flawless performance reviews, and half a dozen trans men programmers suddenly receiving credit for work they were previously ignored for. That's as close to a controlled test as I can think of – though, obviously, marred by the selection bias of anecdotes.
All this doesn't mean it's the same in mathematics – but I'm not sure how someone can deny that there's institutional sexism in the field of computer programming. It's well-documented. "One person at Google" doesn't refute that.
> Where Summers sees innate differences, Barres sees discrimination. As a young woman […] he said he was discouraged from setting his sights on MIT, where he ended up receiving his bachelor’s degree. Once there, he was told that a boyfriend must have solved a hard math problem that he had answered and that had stumped most men in the class. After he began living as a man in 1997, Barres overheard another scientist say, “Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but his work is much better than his sister’s work.”
To some extent, a similar social group is formed by robotics teams in my experience. A dedicated teacher/coach and a bunch of people who like electronics can really get amazing things done. Why is this the case?
Similarly, my experience attending a science & math magnet school in the 90s was that -- basically mirroring my later experience in college -- a subset of the kids taking advanced math classes in high school naturally tended toward hanging out & studying/practicing/researching together.
More formally, there are tons[1] of local, state, regional and national math competitions that target elementary, middle and high school students, and -- just like robotics -- it's up to volunteers (teachers, students, parents) at the school level to decide whether to invest time & resources to create a local team/club.
When I was in school, we had MathCounts teams at younger ages, and Math Olympiad (and Science Bowl & Science Olympiad -- my team made it to the national event in Science Bowl, actually) in high school. I'm under the impression that this is pretty common, at least in urban/suburban areas.
[1] https://artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php/List_of_Unite...
I feel like I'm supposed to impart some wisdom, so I guess I'd add.. once I got out of high school, none of it mattered. Don't let it get you down.
There are a great many historical reasons why this situation arose - aristocrats feared the rise of well-educated groups within the serf class that might challenge their power, and plantation owners famously forbid teaching their slaves how to read and write, and some of that thinking persists to this day.
Regardless, people who spend roughly equal time on developing both their mental and physical capabilities via deliberate (and time and energy consuming) practice are the ones that tend to turn out healthiest and happiest.
"Math as a profession" is a limited subset of "professions that rely heavily on math", despite what some mathematicians might say.
Everyone who could went to university, because why wouldn't you? This incentive pressure and selection bias we're probably insane.
Education was a more significant social elevator in the East than in the West, first and foremost because the ground level was much lower.
> All joking aside, we fledgling mathematicians understood that the single most important thing was not raw intelligence or knowledge (Americans tend to lag behind in the latter compared to all international students). What mattered was passion. The way to become successful in mathematics, like almost every endeavor, is to care about it, to love it, to obsess over it. And in this, Eastern Europeans had a clear superiority, a cultural advantage. They had been trained, from an early age, to love mathematics more intensely.
IMHO this is what drove American superiority in software engineering for several decades. The people who self selected into software engineering really loved the field.
I suspect we'll see a continuous slow decrease in all aspects of quality of software as those who have a genuine love and passion for the field are replaced by those in it just for the money.
Other examples I can think of (from my Gen Z experience, growing up in SoCal):
- Elementary school: Making custom action replay codes, hacking game saves with programs, CheatEngine/memory/hex editor and following YouTube tutorials, Javascript "document.contentEditable=true" hack and changing stuff on websites, pressing F12 and changing random javascript code until something interesting happens or breaks.
- Middle school: making sites on Weebly/freewebs, embedding chats and flash games on them, sharing them during computer class
- High school: Making PHP sites/vbulliten/Newgrounds/flash games, later iOS apps
I wasn't the only one doing these things. There were always like 3 other kids like me in any classroom that would do the same things.
Most of us ended up becoming passionate SWEs, besides one that became an accountant.
I’ve fallen in and out of enjoyment of engineering many times. But I still come back because I love making something that adds value.
There will always be space for the builders who give a shit.
(There are a lot of caveats. Someone might have always worked for jerks and has checked out, etc.)
(Generally, the companies that can afford to pay you well, are also those that can afford to treat you well.)
And that's exactly how progress looks like!
When you need to know 6502 assembly to make a game, only geniuses can make games. When you can click one together in Roblox, game development opens up to many more people.
So the average game developer won't be as smart. But that's not because the new tools make us stupid.
The same applies to any kind of software. (Or photography, or music, or movies, etc.)
The average quality might go down when the floodgates open, but with modern tools the geniuses can produce even better stuff than before.
People in the Soviet Union had much less access to computers than in the US. And the first years after the fall of the USSR were quite lean for the vast majority of the population. Only by the late 90-s people in the xUSSR started getting enough money to buy computers en-masse.
Well that, and computer continued getting ever cheaper.
Math is taught horrifyingly badly in Eastern Europe. It presented as something extremely overcomplicated and most teachers, having a laughably low salary they barely survive on, don't care teaching it in a way kids would understand.
Most people everywhere are bad at math. However, Eastern Europeans and Asians have a larger percentage of people who end up good at math compared to the US. And it's not even close, if you look at math competitions. Immigrants and children of immigrants are over-represented among the US team members.
My theory is that this is actually caused by sexism and gender discrimination. There are smart, intelligent women everywhere, but due to sexism many career options have been traditionally closed for women in these societies, while SWE (as a completely new field) isn't. Their high numbers can be explained by the lack of opportunities in other areas. If you're an intelligent woman in Pakistan, IT is one of the few ways to prosper, meanwhile a woman in the West has way more opportunities.
I think it used to be the same principle with science in EE. Like, you're a highly intelligent person, you strive for success and recognition. In US, the classic path is entrepreneurship, but that was pretty much closed / very difficult in the Soviet block. You could get into politics, but you have to bend the knee to the party line. Science is one of the few avenues where you can thrive intellectually, get recognition and keep yourself relatively unaffected by politics.
Usually the theory is that women everywhere hate engineering, but poor women may suck it up and go into engineering anyway because they need the money.
In fact, that was pointed out in this very thread a couple hours before your comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41716578
However, coming from (relatively poor, but relatively gender-egalitarian) Eastern Europe, female engineers aren't anywhere close to the amount in e.g. India and Pakistan, so I don't think it can explain the disparity completely.
Still survivorship bias. Immigrants from China and India are not selected randomly from the population, they're selected by their means and determination to emigrate. Furthermore, if you include the fact that the US caps the number of visas granted on a per-country-of-origin basis and the fact that China and India have the 2 largest populations in the world, the people who successfully obtain visas from these countries are the survivors of the most stringent selection process.
These are two different claims:
Eastern Europeans and Asians who are in the US have a larger percentage of people who end up good at math.*
Eastern Europeans and Asians who are in their respective countries have a larger percentage of people who end up good at math.*
If you are making the first claim, you're just restating the parent comment's survivorship bias claim. If you're making the second, then you are making a strong claim, but it would be interesting to see data behind it. (I don't have any insight one way or the other.)
That's exactly the bias. Immigrants are self-selected for higher risk tolerance, higher endurance, often wider or deeper knowledge, and readiness to think hard and work hard to achieve a better place in life.
Unsurprisingly, these same qualities help achieve results in studying and professional career.
Coming from a culture that respects abstracted knowledge (Chinese, Jewish, Russian, Indian, etc) helps additionally, but is by far not sufficient by itself.
This seems narrow minded. In the early days of software development, the barrier for entry was incredibly high. The possibility of people making high quality, unique software is greater than it ever has been.
It's also narrow minded to insist that only passion for engineering itself can produce high quality results. It's like claiming famously wealthy musicians can't and don't make remarkable, impactful music.
I think you're making a logical fallacy, or at least you seem to be implying that the set of "famously wealthy" people is disjoint with the set of people who are passionate.
Sure, famously wealthy musicians can make great music. So can poor ones. But I haven't seen a lot of lazy, uninspired musicians make great music.
that almost sounds like a joke setup. ;-)
Inspiration doesn’t require passion for the art to come first, or even at all. Look at Gene Simmons. He co-founded one of the most successful, influential rock bands ever, driven by the goal of becoming rich and running a successful business, not by an unadulterated love for music.
> Look at Gene Simmons. He co-founded one of the most successful, influential rock bands ever, driven by the goal of becoming rich and running a successful business, not by an unadulterated love for music.
This is a good example because while Kiss certainly has popularity, few of their songs are really loved for their musicality. Kiss' music is more about being a good time than good music per se.
Sort of like how Garfield is an effective comic product but not actually really funny in the way that other comics are.
In both of these cases, the creator is passionate about something and working hard at delivering it. They're passionate about providing a certain product experience, and less so about "art" (for however you want to define that).
But imagine a version of Gene Simmons that didn't have the passion to master playing the bass and also didn't have the passion to grind every day at making Kiss a world-known rock band. That person isn't someone you'll ever hear of.
Hmm, for some values of "incredibly".
John Carmack, a juvenile delinquent, dropped out of university and went on career programming, soon upending the game industry.
Linus Torvalds released Linux while being a university student, five years before obtaining a master's degree.
Vitalik Buterin dropped out of university and created Etherium, funded by a grant from Thiel foundation. Whatever you may say about cryptocurrencies, Etherium is a nontrivial piece of software, showing remarkable longevity in the fast-moving field.
None of them had a ton of formal qualifications. None of them had to obtain a license. They could just sit at a computer, write great software, and release it to the world, changing the world quite much.
What they all have is a passion for (and resulting deep knowledge of) computers, mathematics, logic, plus independent thinking, and, well, not asking for permission.
This is what a low barrier to entry plus universal availability of powerful tools (computers, compliers, etc), and books leads to.
(High barriers bring very different results: look now many small aircraft still fly with engines designed in 1950s, burning leaded avgas. A worthy challenger still fails to step over the sky-high barrier.)
As for Buterin, I have no idea who they are, so I can’t speak to them.
IMO it was funding that made the difference. People outside of USA did not have any less passion towards the field.
The only sense in which this is true is if choosing that field is a death sentence relative to other society outcomes due to lack of resources.
Nonsense, sounds like post-hoc rationalization. Maybe talk to some actual Slavic people. Sure the Russians had "math clubs" and "chess clubs" but it wasn't as if the US didn't have RadioShack and garage/ham culture. Talk to some of the older generations that still remember the Berlin Wall and you might also understand why so many women from the ex USSR states are in STEM while it's the opposite in the West. TL;dr: STEM was a quick way to prosperity, the eastern bloc countries were poor, and engineers are useful even in a communist regime. They studied math because there wasn't much else they couldn't have done.
I'm not joking.
But STEM was seen as far more prestigious than manual labor. This was very much a cultural thing, pushed by the government (engineers are useful!).
Another thing, there was a huge societal pressure to excel at school. It was common for parents to check their children's marks every day.
There's a very famous picture about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Marks_Again - a kid knows that his parents are going to check his marks and berate him.
And this attitude was everywhere. For example, getting low marks and then overcoming them was a theme for a lot of iconic Soviet cartoons and stories ("The country of undone homework", "Vovka in a Faraway Kingdom", etc.). I have not seen anything similar in the US.
But in the USSR, your ability to buy something was generally not limited by the amount of money you had. It was limited by whether you'd be allowed to buy the thing for other reasons.
> But STEM was seen as far more prestigious than manual labor.
Sounds like an engineer's money may have been worth much more than a laborer's?
Not in general. It heavily depended on individual circumstances.
For example, machinists could earn a bit more money by using factory tools (lathes, drills, etc.) to make replacement parts for cars. And a lot of workers were stealing some of the product their factory was making. There was a common attitude of "everything around is common, so everything's around is mine".
On the other hand, engineers had more career perspectives. They were more likely to be promoted to managerial positions.
But there was plenty of stuff you just buy, from air plane tickets to beer and meat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NlnJsCEzSM "The country of undone homework"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpygndkMSWA "Vovka in a Faraway Kingdom"
(I was already shocked that one of the leading roles in the romcom Три плюс два was a physicist, but then again Young Sheldon might provide evidence that pop culture in the Old Country is more STEM-accepting now than it had been in my day?)
EDIT: I love how the exclamation point cries out "Halt!" and the question mark demands "Where [do you think you're going]?" (and the doodle of Kyzya)
EDIT2: Vovka needs much more russian-specific cultural background than Homework. I recognise the golden fish (Только ты — рыба моей мечты), but not any of the other tales. I'll probably eventually run across filmstrips explaining each/each family of tales, but if anyone would care to give pointers to specific ones, I wouldn't mind any spoilers!
Is the "sam" of the samovar the same as the "sam" of "sdelai sam"?
Yes. It literally translates as "self" in "yourself/himself/myself", and in compound words it can be translated as "auto" (which also means "self" in Greek).
Do I understand https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvrS6z4tUtI correctly to mean that it wasn't possible to join a scouting troop without good marks?
Straight "A" students did get some additional rewards, such as trips to summer camps in Crimea.
Thanks for the correction!
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOnxu62nz9g
EDIT: wait a moment, now I'm confused: if her (Lena's?) marks weren't an issue for induction, why does it matter that her friend got jealous and ruined her test?
(or did I get this story right, but it wasn't necessarily a general all-Union thing, just that in this specific case a 2 would have been problematic for her troop/school/family?)
In communist state prestige is money.
My hot take is that lack of entertainment and the fact that education was one of the only free things available to them was a large contributing factor.
If every cultural group was equally interested in math, that would be shocking.
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was formally dissolved as a sovereign state and subject of international law on 26 December 1991 by Declaration № 142-Н of the Soviet of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union.
Maybe this article was written by a Russian troll farm, as it is essentially claiming Russian math supremacy.