Why Romania excels in international Olympiads | Hacker News Reader

Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

palladiummag.com

234 pointscollate242 comments

As a Romanian who has been very involved in Olympiads as a kid, I can tell that most of this is accurate. I’ve also lived in Denmark at university for several years and can contrast educational systems from first hand experience.

The sorting the author describes absolutely DOES happen in Romania. Exactly as he describes it, “getting into a good school” is incredibly important for students and parents here.

I’d also like to add the high school curriculum is very dense. The kind of math we did in 10th grade (there are 12 grades in Romania) was math people were only introduced to in their first year of university in Denmark.

There’re also a significant amount of optional after-school programs for contests, and I’ve only encountered students from good schools in them (as far as I can remember).

Yes, Romania is much better at filtering and at training people who are predisposed to intelectual work from a young age. Yes, Romania is bad at educating the masses.

However, I disagree with his conclusion and value judgement. I’d much rather see Romania adapt a system which educates everyone, rather than the world be better at filtering.

The practical issue which so many people don't seem to want to acknowledge is that students are different. I have taught and there are some students that simply lack either the intelligence, discipline, interest, or some other aspect that makes it literally impossible for them to ever receive anything beyond a basic education. You could give them 10 on 1 specialized instruction from the the most competent/interesting/engaging teachers and tutors imaginable, and they're still just not going to excel.

And then on the other end of the spectrum there are kids who will proactively read, on their own, through e.g. their math textbook, understand everything with no difficulty, and basically get nothing academic out of their education (beyond that which they'd get from simply having the books) unless one engages in extreme 'differentiation' which is an educational buzzword that is basically just glorified in-class 'filtering' that imposes a massive workload on teachers, creates inequity within the classroom itself, and is really just quite dysfunctional.

And so the typical results of trying to give an advanced education to everyone is that you end up pulling the top down, rather than lifting the bottom up. This is even more true because the bottom is also often disproportionately filled with students who have extreme behavioral problems often alongside families who just don't particularly care about their education, while the top is rarely disruptive except for the smart-ass type who's generally just trying to get some giggles rather than being actively hostile.

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I think seeing things as a teacher makes you view things radically different than you do as a student. You're probably one of those overachiever types given your comment, and perhaps you feel that you worked a bit harder, maybe were a bit interested in the material then your peers or whatever. But I can assure you - that's generally not it. There are kids that try hard, even some that get things like multiple in-home tutors, and they still just can't excel no matter how hard their parents, or they, try.

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Edit: Just found this [1] interesting Wiki page. You can see the list of countries, by gold medals in the last 10 Olympiads. In order of medals: USA, South Korea, Thailand, Russia, Vietnam, UK, Iran, Canada, Singapore, China.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_medal_cou...

People talk about intelligence a lot, but the sheer difference in interest is just as big, if not a bigger factor.

In an average class, you get most kids - who are mostly content to be there. And then you get the outliers. There's that one kid who appears to be suffering something just short of physical pain whenever he's in class learning something. Then there's the kid who has already read all his textbooks in the first week, for fun, and even retained a lot of it, because he was engaged with the material.

They may have the same exact intelligence, but the outcomes could not be more different.

I would be willing to bet intelligence is a much larger deciding factor in grades than interest is. Most people I know who got top grades had barely any interest in many of the subjects

Interest and motivation comes largely from success. You try something, it works, it feels good so you continue doing that. The school's role is to enable this "easy success" early on so kids will continue.

I find this point of view somewhat difficult to support. It was the whole motivation behind the cultural shift towards 'everybody's a winner' - participation trophies, expanding honor roll with 'merit roll', character awards, personal achievement awards, and so on. But far from driving excellence across the rather vast number of fields where it was trialed, it only seems to correlate with the period of overall decline in educational performance.

And from a practical point of view, let's consider this. The mindset one is indulging with this is that it's okay to quit if something is hard. But how does indulging that mindset, change it? What happens when the easy successes end and things not only get hard, but very hard? Are you not simply creating false expectations?

People do quit when it's hard so instead of overriding the very human nature why not work with it?

We all saw the "draw the owl" picture. Step 1 is easy step 2 is easy but then the rest appears impossible. Why not make a series of small, doable steps that lead to the result? The "hardness" of many things is not exponential, it's linear or even less dramatic.

People are different but the demands of 99% of actual jobs are far below that those natural differences won't matter as opposed to standardized training.

And it's a good thing that it's like that, because we don't want our society to be reliant on a few Rockstars. As Napoleon stated, an individual Mamluk far exceeded an individual Frenchman, but 1000 Frenchman could always defeat 1000 Mamluks.

That's because your premise is contingent on a pragmatic framing, whereas these issues depend on science. If the science says intellectual aptitude is a function of nature and nurture then we as society ought to find ways to help our next generations flourish. That does not mean allocating 10 teachers to one child as you had so strongly put it.

I have mixed feelings. "Educating the masses" is important, at least to a certain baseline, otherwise we get failing democracies due to manipulation of uneducated voters.

But it's important to still have a separate track for the best students. Those will grow up to do the important work and move the society forward. If you put them into a mediocre class it will waste their potential.

I can only agree. Higher education for the mass is dangerous, especially when there are not enough jobs for them and they have to take a heavy loan to finance their education.

Peter Turchin has developed a mathematical model to predict the collapse of a society and one of the main factors is an over-supply of graduates (or elites). Adding to it the dynamics of AI and smart robots, the effect of over-supply can be only exacerbated further.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/us-societa...

Oversupply ov elites has been a major factor of political and social progress so far.

I am extremely skeptical of this mathematical model to predict history thing. There's just not enough history to do it and you bake in your biases when you go through the qualitative historical record and try to assign it to quantities. A lot of people analyze history and claim they figured it out and they've come to different conclusions and none of them have made reliable, specific conditions. If you say something bad will happen at some point in the future you'll probably be right but it's not enough to call it science.

Nevermind the lack of data - what even would be the limits of knowledge in such a model? If it was widely believed that society will collapse at some point in the next 30 years, how would human behavior change in response? How would that affect the original prediction?

If only someone would devise a Foundation to look into this

Elite overproduction is an interesting topic and putting aside any suggestion that it's a precise mathematical predictor, it obviously creates societal problems.

That is - you've created a large class of intelligent achievers with nothing for them to do. Arguably that just naturally produces increasing societal upheaval. Whether that means revolution or just chaotic increasingly populist elections is a matter of degrees.

There is always something for a large class of intelligent achievers to do. The failure to put them to work is more of a societal failure than it is an indictment of the education system. (Maybe AI will change this, but only in the same way that it changes every part of our societal model.)

AI seems poised to create more underemployment rather than fix the existing level of it…

> There is always something for a large class of intelligent achievers to do. The failure to put them to work is more of a societal failure than it is an indictment of the education system.

This doesn’t quite resonate with me, because I’ve lived through it and seen it happen over and over again even in the most functional of societies.

Oversimplifying a bit, let’s call intelligent achievers elites. There is often a mismatch between elite supply and elite slots, and by definition elite slots are scarce — no matter how well your society is functioning.

Elite slots scale with the maturity and breadth of the economy. The U.S., with its size and diversity, has a much larger pool of elite slots than most countries. That’s one reason I moved here.

By contrast, in Canada (a country I love deeply), most Ph.D.s end up underemployed or they leave, because their skills simply aren’t needed at the level of specialization they were trained for. Some jobs only make sense when you have enough scale to support them — and without that scale, those elite positions just don’t exist.

Can intelligent achievers pivot to something else, like entrepreneurship? Sure, but in a smaller economy, the options are much more limited, even if they do a startup and invent new categories. They can also accept underemployment. There are inherent constraints in an economy due to natural factors like scale, geography, etc.

(My understanding is that Taiwan is in this situation -- highly educated people, limited industries that can employ them. Some move abroad, but many just curb their ambitions and try to get by with low pay and accept their lot in life, striving only for "little joys" they can afford like bubble tea and inexpensive street food)

Can you name some examples? Virtually every major revolution or civil war I can think of, would involve intelligent achievers who've made it. In fact, the core of the rebellion would be a class that's often vital for the exercise for political power, but won't be allowed access to that same power.

English gentry, New England merchants, nobles of the robe, army officers, etc.

Only the Russian revolution would involve people who were nobodies before it, but they took charge after the disaffected elites that came to power in February spend most of 1917 undermining each other.

Even the Russian Revolution was lead by elites: - Kerensky was lawyer - Lvov was an aristocrat - Lenin, Trotsky were highly educated and known for intellectual brilliance

The core of Russian revolution were highly educated nerds who would cancel their friends over slight differences in understanding of obscure socioeconomic theories

A few points for clarification:

-It’s a probabilistic model, so it only predicts the odd of a collapse

- Their main contribution was the creation and curation of a super detailed historical database: the Seshat. It spans almost 10000 years of human history with more than 400 polities from 30 regions around the world, using over 1,500 variables. Based on this data, Turchin & al devised the mathematical model for the prediction.

- One key area is to find surrogate data when others are not available. For ex. body size could be used to describe the nutrition and economic situation of the population.

- In 2010, Nature asked experts and super-forecasters for their prediction of 2020. Only Turchin predicted the coming collapse of America.

I disagree. Improving education for everyone reduces the barrier for cross domain improvements to occur. An artist who may need some technical knowledge to realize a vision would not be able to do so if the basis of that knowledge was barred through inherent passion. It also provides the long term basis for startup and business creation, which is precisely the actual solution to elite overproduction.

If you keep the masses intentionally dumb, then it makes sense to do the next step and also ban them from voting. And imagine to what kind of society this is leading.

Actually, voting is an excellent way to keep power away from the masses. A dictatorship has to constantly be aware of its approval ratings, whereas a parliament can ignore them for 3-4 years at a time.

I do not have the impression that any politician who is not about to retire, does not care about approval ratings. There is more to democracy, than voting once every 4 years.

A ruling party having a catastrophic electoral position only for it to rapidly improve as election approaches is a fairly common phenomenon in modern democracies. Most recently, Canada was in that situation. Before that, Britain several times. There are plenty of historical examples as well, Reagan and Thatcher in their first re-elections for one.

The latter would have undoubtedly faced a revolution if Britain had no elections. Later, she'd go on to become an invincible electoral juggernaut.

This comment is insane.

> Peter Turchin has developed a mathematical model to predict the collapse of a society and one of the main factors is an over-supply of graduates (or elites).

I know i will get downvoted for this but i feel HN is losing its intellectual side over such elitist crap. The original article is from a well-known racist / eugenist and people here keep going on posting more dubious content that tries to paint towards political policies to keep the masses out of higher education.

Yeah, have to say I am a little surprised to see a Jordan Lasker article here. It follows his usual race-science pattern: innocuously well-researched article that he takes to a somewhat bonkers conclusion.

This “elite overproduction” drivel needs to die out. It is not scientific or mathematical, it is just pop sociology. Producing a well educated populace is good, actually.

What is more important, raising next generation of Musks (albeit ideally much less broken sociopathic piece of shit as current one), or avoiding next generation of Trumps?

Both of those can add tons of societies (or avoid their downfall), but all of them have 1 in common - they are spoiled rich kids with 0 connection to lives of ordinary folks from Day 1. One of biggest tricks Trump pulled was convincing folks he is one of them, and understands and shares their plight.

So it seems we are already getting at least aome brilliant folks up where they belong, and lower rate of those ain't outright catastrophe for aociety. On the other hand - dumb trivial to manipulate general population can't be saved by producing more smart brilliant folks, populistic corrupt a-holes will still overcome them.

So I would focus on general education level much more, based on above. General prosperity over future trillionaires.

Unfortunately, in my class of students, being good at solving Olympiad level questions did not turn out to be a good predictor of their contributions to society.

Romania's current president is an international math olympic with two gold medals. We'll see how he turns out as a president. He's inherited quite some pressing issues and the President doesn't have all that much power. The parties made sure to neuter that institution. The alternative was a footbal hooligan with allegedly Russian funding behind him and a right wing discourse. Society is very polarised. Nearly half voted for the hooligan. Before, in the cancelled elections they voted for a nutcake Russian funded secret service puppet with a nicely sounding discourse void of any actual content and a very ballsy but quite dim witted woman, mayor in a small town. The Russians bet their money on multiple trojan horses, just in case one of them gets disqualified.

OTOH I am very impressed with how Volodymir Zelenski turned out. Who would have thought?

> OTOH I am very impressed with how Volodymir Zelenski turned out. Who would have thought?

He played his cards so well that Ukraine now has 100k dead people, another 300k injured, so much destroyed infrastructure and so many cities turned into battlegrounds. Yes, "impressive".

I am not saying he's to "blame" for this, but being "very impressed" is weird to me as well — whether it was possible to play the fine line between sovereignty and compromise I don't know, but I can certainly see less costly middle ground.

What would have impressed me was to have gotten Ukraine into EU, yet committed not to join the NATO and figured out a "neutral combat zone" for Eastern Ukraine — keep both Ukraine people and Russia happy, for instance.

So do what Russia didn’t want them to do and give Russia less than they wanted and they would be like “okay, cool. We won’t invade you then”?

That solution flies in the face of the real world reality.

Romanians I've spoken to all say they voted for Nicusor Dan because the other candidate(s) were/was so dire.

One challenge in this is how to prevent permanent alienation between the masses & high achievers where you separate them at increasingly earlier points of life.

I went to school in a small town where I still shared some non-core classes with the masses, and only had separate tracks for some science/math courses starting at say 13 or 14 years old. But I still had gym/art/homeroom/etc with the masses right until graduation at 18 years old.

The trend has of course been to split the smarter kids out at younger and younger ages.. you see completely separate smart kids schools starting at 14 or 11 years old. You hear stories of pre-K and kindergarten programs that require your kid test in, as if they can asses the intelligence of a 3 year old.

As a society I would observe it makes the masses more resentful & distrusting towards "the elites" and "the elites" more oblivious to what the life for 99% of the country actually entails.

> due to manipulation of uneducated voters.

Educated voters are manipulated as well, it is just a different kind of manipulation, and in many countries they represent a small part of the electorate.

Do you have any reason to believe you have a good algorithm to predict who these privileged few will be? Anecdotally, I've seen little evidence that being a good student at age X is reason to invest more heavily in that person going forward.

Here's one issue. Romania has a really lousy motorway system, what there is of it. I gather that corruption has much to do with this apart from construction difficulties involving the Carpathians. As an example there isn't even a motorway between Bucharest and Brasov (88 miles or 141 km apart), the latter being a favorite destination for tourists and wealthy and not-so wealthy second home owners alike. The trip by car either way is usually a nightmare. I should add that Brasov is one of the major towns of Romania not just a tourist attraction.

To the point! The plight of innumerable isolated rural communities trying to attract decent teachers and conditions for their kids is clear to see. Trains don't cut it. General poverty results with knock-on effects.

It's a bit more nuanced.

The teachers will just move to cities with more schools. Qualified workforce too. Rural areas are already depopulated.

Yes, the trip by car to Brasov is quite daunting on a Friday evening or Saturday morning. But infrastructure is getting better thanks to the EU. The politicians learned that motorways with EU and government funds is a great way to get them voted and they created a current account deficit.

Brasov is nice. What's not that nice about it, is brown bears roaming freely at night on the streets. Trivia: was also named after Stalin during stalinism. It also had a Hollywood like sign post cut in the treeline on the main hill with the dictator's name.

> I’d much rather see Romania adapt a system which educates everyone, rather than the world be better at filtering.

Be careful what you wish for.

I understand the sentiment, and I wish we could make education as good as possible for everyone. The problem is, "as good as possible" is still very different for different people. So if you change the system so that everyone learns the same and no concentration of cognitive elites is allowed, it will mean that you have to really slow down the curriculum, to allow the average (and below-average) students to catch up with it. So the smartest kids won't get the best education they can get, and probably not even the kind of education they can get today.

> The kind of math we did in 10th grade (there are 12 grades in Romania) was math people were only introduced to in their first year of university in Denmark.

I suspect that this is how it probably happened. You were better at math then average, so you were allowed to learn faster than the average. The kid in Denmark who was your equivalent probably had to learn math at the same speed as the average Danish student. That's why they had to wait to learn that kind of math at university.

> There’re also a significant amount of optional after-school programs for contests

Yes, but it's still a huge waste of time if at school you have the math you already know, and you can only get the better math in the after-school activity; when you could be learning it at school instead.

The problem with this line of thinking is that nobody is "predisposed" to intellectual work" It's entirely a system designed to recreate elites and study to tests. There is no scientific basis for the claim that teaching young students specialized mathematics is beneficial to their education

A fun fact surprisingly not mentioned in the article, and which I thought would be topical at this time, is that the Romanians apparently love their math olympiads so much that they recently elected as their president an International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) medalist. The current president Nicușor Dan had perfect scores at the IMO both times he participated (one of only 12 students so far with a perfect score in each of their ≥2 participations [1]). In fact at IMO 1988 he was one of only 11 students who solved the famous/notorious “Vieta jumping” problem [2], which eluded even Terence Tao (who, to be fair, was participating at only 13 years old!).

The Wikipedia section of “Notable [IMO] participants” has three sections: “Mathematicians”, “Computer scientists”, and “Other”, with Dan being the sole entry in the last one. :) [3]

[1]: http://imo-official.org/hall.aspx?column=perfectscores&order...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vieta_jumping&old...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Internati...

Sure, but that's not why he was elected president. Well, not directly.

His Olympiad results led to him getting a doctorate at Sorbonne, which led to him speaking french, which led to impressing Macron who threw France's weight into supporting Dan.

It was a power move to replace the German influence with French influence (previous praesident was ethnic German)

Germany and France are fairly aligned these days, no big deal :>

Tell that to the people involved in or suffering from the power struggles regarding FCAS ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Combat_Air_System ).

That's a really naive and wrong take.

He is popular, he was elected mayor of Bucharest.

He led a lot of anti corruption efforts for a very long time. (founded USB/USR)

He is smart (as you noted by olympiad, speaking multiple foreign languages)

He is religious as well (pretty important aparently)

All his opponents were much less competent.

A PSD candidate will never be president in a two term election unless the counter candidate is worse (because of iliescu and corruptiob)

The AUR candidate really is a russian puppet and not that smart either, he's mostly there for the 30% vote extremists always get and which were taken by georgescu first time. It's a shame he got far and shows how much influence external actors can have over facebook/tiktok etc.

The USR candidate that managed to squeeze through first time has no charisma and was a backup since Nicusor refused the first time...

So what else is left?

Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_medal_cou..., it seems that many neighbouring countries who had similar schooling systems perform similarly or better "per capita" (Hungary with <10M people, placed 5th; Romania 19M at 6th; Bulgaria with <7M at 8th; Serbia at 30th with <8M, Croatia at 42nd with <5M people — two of which should probably get some share of Yugoslavia's medals at 39th — there's also Serbia and Montenegro separately).

So, Romania is at the sweet spot of high selectivity and population size to really pop out in these types of competitions, but it seem it's not really that unique as it's being suggested.

There are many factors - most of them economic and cultural - but it all starts with an intense maths syllabus in school, Soviet Union style. Here's the current one for 5th to 8th grade: https://www.scribd.com/document/184259748/The-Romanian-Maths...

Most kids are overwhelmed by the complexity and volume (homework is brutal) but those few with an aptitude for it thrive and are picked up quickly by teachers looking to mentor them further for local, national and international contests.

Having seen what children are capable of, it’s neither overwhelming nor brutal.

What’s truly brutal is acquiescing to children droning away their youth mindlessly clicking meaningless games or watching vacuous streaming content. We live in what could be a golden age of thought but for the average kid it’s anything but.

I have to agree with you. Children are adaptable and will rise to the challenge. The west too often prefers to think children are capable of nothing, and have them wallow in an intellectual void.

It’s not just intellectual challenge that parents are unwilling to entertain. It’s part of a wider problem of avoiding any and all confrontation. The moment a child shows any disinterest, the activity is shut down.

It’s why you have a generation of kids that only eat chicken fingers and french fries. The average parent is unwilling to even teach their children to eat and enjoy actual food. Why bother when you can just heat up some tendies?

> It’s why you have a generation of kids that only eat chicken fingers and french fries.

I’m 42 years old and something like this was already said about kids when I was a child (I suspect it was like that before my time as well). Children’s palate develops with age and so does their taste.

Don’t know about that…it’s not some rule that palate develops with age. You have to actively try. And when you grow up on a diet consisting of limited foods, you will definitely have problems appreciating a variety of foods a ps an adult. Pretty sure that’s the main reason average restaurant food quality in the US is so bad. The customers can’t even tell the difference because their palate is so limited.

Of course, you are an enlightened parent that is better than all those other parents that spoil their children and prevent them from achieving all that they could do. More seriously, though, good and bad parents exist everywhere. It is intellectually lazy to call other people's kids tendie eaters because you think they are underserved. Grow up, man.

> It is intellectually lazy to call other people's kids tendie eaters because you think they are underserved.

It’s anecdata for sure, but it’s not a metaphor. I literally mean the parents are eating “real food” while regularly feeding the children just butter noodles and chicken fingers. The diet is a microcosm of their entire upbringing.

I ate plenty of junk when I was a child, too. Children love chicken nuggets and applesauce. Let them do their thing, within reason of course. I turned out ok.

> More seriously, though, good and bad parents exist everywhere.

Yes. And if makes a great difference which ones decide what the educational system will look like.

This level of generalization and certainty shouted down from the moral high ground is the hallmark of a great comment!

While I think the west is a huge generalization, I don't think the west thinks children are capable of nothing. It's more about letting children be children and play. Rather than forcing them to "work" almost constantly from a very young age.

I don't really envy the school systems that force kids to work very hard from an early age to get into a fancy university. From what I understand it's usually school systems with a heavy focus on rote memorization as well and that takes up quite a bit of time with diminishing results.

Having been through a post-Soviet school system, it's not about rote memorization, at least not in maths. The point is spending as much time with a problem as necessarily, without having a predefined algorithm, until it cracks. It's such a useful skill and satisfying experience that I feel sad that some children are denied it for the sake of psychological comfort.

> What’s truly brutal is acquiescing to children droning away their youth mindlessly clicking meaningless games or watching vacuous streaming content

Both of these things are droning. One is just culturally acceptable. Don't think so? Stop by your local Kumon center some time.

My grade school education in the US was similar to this (although you needed to qualify for "accelerated" math). There were maybe 90 people every year in this. Those who did well did not make it much past CML or AMC, maybe out of lack of interest. You had to be excellent to move on to Olympiad level maths.

Side note: I have many objections with the competition-ifaction of these things. Not everyone finds their best performance in a competition environment. In CS, maybe we would look at competitive programming and CTFs (arguably CP can be very mathematical). Nonetheless, we use competitions to measure performance, which in some way selects out people who are talented in a setting that isn't a competition, and glorifies people who do play the game.

That is roughly equivalent to what I did in honors math in the 90s in the US.

Looking over the math curriculum in the same school district today, the current level of instruction doesn't even come close. Standards have sadly fallen.

School in Romania in the 90s was way harder than it is now. Standards have dropped (a lot) here as well.

I have to say:

After all the talk in the article how the Romanian system makes part of the population perform higher by throwing a lot of the resources at them, lowering the performance of the people that are already below average. Which is a problem for Romania because a lot of the highly educated people leave the country afterwards ...

I was not really prepared for the final sentence where the author recommends as a solution that more countries should do it like that.

Well, a lot of countries aren't worth leaving. Taking my home of the UK as an example, Wikipedia lists 19 countries with higher GDP per capita, but if I don't want to learn a new language, overcome bureaucratic obstacles and leave my family behind, there is nowhere to go and this criteria describes almost everybody who gets an education here, even the smart ones. Romania is #53 on the list and their EU membership means they can emigrate easily.

I'm pretty sure there is a mass exodus of British Nurses to Australia.. And for tech or finance, America is the dream...

The finance sector is worth living in the UK for IMO.

A lot of British bio/med researchers in the US too

I believe the original intent of such Olympiads was to test how pupils equipped with only standard school education would tackle non-standard puzzles. Eventually this turned into pupils attending special schools, having coaches, doing such non-standrdad puzzles all day long during their studies in order to win medals. A leetcode grind all the way down.

Just like the physical Olympiads :)

The Olympics were originally founded on the principle of amateurism, on grassroots, individual passion and love of the sport, not as a career or life achievement.

To see what's its become today, especially how some suffer greatly to get the gold medal is depressing, if not disgusting when all of this are ultimately trivial activities. They were supposed to be a unifying reprieve from the real issues of the 20th century, not another stage of brutal national competition.

Thought the physical Olympics were a bit older than the 20th century. By about 2700 years.

I think it's the other way round. There were special schools or special groups in regular schools that prepared Soviet children to STEM careers by making them solve a lot of puzzles. Then IMO appeared on top of that to celebrate highest achievers

This!

The author is Jordan Lasker (also known by internet handle Crémieux). Much of Lasker's work and commentary focuses on race and IQ, and he has promoted eugenics. On X and Substack, Lasker is known for compiling charts on what he calls the "Black-White IQ gap"

Are his arguments sound, though?

In the middle ages, theologians had sound arguments for how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

Then their arguments must have stood the test of time, good for them! More likely, their arguments weren't ever sound at all.

Sound arguments from faulty premises are still sound arguments – but identifying whether premises are valid is hard.

My heuristic, "if a sound argument concludes that racism is true, there's something wrong with the premises", is pretty effective in telling me where to look, but doesn't eliminate the hard work of distinguishing truth from falsehood. That this heuristic has never failed doesn't actually prove that all racism is false: only that all racism is afaik unevidenced, and that many specific theories of racism are false. (It does, however, provide increasing evidence that racists believe racism for reasons other than empirical observation, allowing me to confidently discount the evidentiality of their claims.)

I have slightly less evidence, but still quite a lot, generalising this from racism specifically, to all bigotry, which does put me at odds with the academic consensus in certain areas where I'm not otherwise an expert. Those academic consensuses do seem to be moving towards my understanding, though, so it seems to me that this is a pretty neat trick for getting ahead of the curve. (I'm a little surprised that intersectional feminist theory isn't taught to social scientists in school: what I rediscovered by brute-force has been known to the philosophers for decades.)

Well, take racism out of it. Do a thought experiment.

Take a genetically identical starting population with identical culture, customs, etc. Split them onto two islands, island A and island B. Island A has temperate weather, plentiful food, resources, and no natural predators. Island B has natural disasters, brutal seasons, intermittent food shortages, etc.

Check back in on both populations (assuming they lived exclusively on islands A & B) in 1000 years from the identical starting point. Do you think there would be any differences between them?

Of course there would be differences between the populations. There would probably be genetically-linked psychological differences, too! But would B-islanders be more cooperative, because they needed to band together to survive? Would they be more competitive, because those who hoarded resources for themselves reproduced better? Would A-islanders be better at analytical philosophy, because ability to publish in analytical philosophy journals was sexually selected for? Would that have no impact, because analytical philosophy skill has no significant genetic correlate, or would they actually be worse at analytical philosophy because ability to publish in analytical philosophy journals is a poor proxy metric? Or would A-islanders decide that analytical philosophy nerds are undesirable mates, and select against such an ability? Would cultural factors on island B result in a better, safer society where a decade's worth of preserved food is kept at all times, and nobody has to venture out into storms, while the A-islanders become their own predators and destroy each others' food supplies until they suffer entirely-avoidable famines?

Would all these various effects cancel each other out, leaving no phenotypical variation except skin colour (due to the selective effects of melanoma and vitamin D deficiency), and no significant psychological differences except those caused by unselected genetic drift, which are utterly erased by the first generation of interbreeding? There is no way to tell, from the information you have provided. Your thought experiment reveals your (and my) own biases, nothing more. Thought experiments only work in mathematics and physics, not (except in extremely simple situations) evolutionary biology.

Agreed, there is no way to know the exact degree of differences between the two populations (although any geneticist would reject the notion of primarily unselected genetic drift in the example I described. I specifically outlined strong selective pressures in the environments). But at least we agree that they would not continue to be identical, and that the environmental pressure, over time, would also show up in genetic drift between the populations (there are surprisingly many blank-slaters who would disagree even with this premise).

We have tools in modern science to attempt to differentiate between different underlying components of genetic variation vs environmental variation (identical twin studies, adoption-at-birth studies, general population studies, longitudinal analyses, etc). In lieu of a 1000-year experiment (which we cannot recreate), we can make predictions. If factor X was primarily genetic, we would expect to observe A, B, C. If factor X was primarily environmental, we would expect to observe D, E, F. Then, we can basically incorporate various studies and results and do gradient descent, and observing which (means squared error) is smaller.

None of this is groundbreaking stuff, I know. But I have read arguments from both the primarily environmental camp and the primarily genetics camp, and one of them has to do a lot more mental gymnastics explain the differences between obvious predictions (under this paradigm) and the observed data in the real world.

> I specifically outlined strong selective pressures in the environments

No, you didn't, because humans behave quite differently to your average animal. The only strong selective pressure you described was climactic: everything else can be mitigated with straightforward tool use. (And heck, going "oh, our skin is getting sunburned, let's be nocturnal instead" might cause your A-islanders to develop paler skin.)

You seem to be confusing "observed data in the real world" and "things that seem obviously true". If you pit your "obviously true" against other people's "obviously true" in your own head, of course your own "obviously true" is going to be the victor.

I hear this argument a lot and I don't know what you think it demonstrates. Put two groups of people on separate islands for 1000 years. Check back up on them. They will be overwhelmingly phenotypically similar. It's not like one of the groups is going to become the X-Men. Really, these analogies mostly seem like a device for smuggling in the premise that innate intellectual ability is less like color vision and more like eye color. Maybe it is, but you have to make and ground that argument.

What is the color vision equivalent of a savant? Surely you don't believe that any person could (given infinite time & training from birth), match the intellectual performance of a savant on, say, multiplying 6 digit numbers in their head?

(I think a clear savant that has a untouchable ability in one small dimension of mathematics is a clearer example than, say, von Neumann - who was equally brilliant but across many domains and in a less obvious way)

> multiplying 6 digit numbers in their head?

This kind of thing is quite easy. Which mental delay-line caches you exploit depends on how your mind works, but multiplying 6-digit numbers in your head isn't a hard trick to learn, if you care.

There was a time when I cared about such parlour tricks, and I could pick them up quite quickly. I once spent a few days memorising the first 10 digits of pi. Once I'd figured that out, it was the effort of a few hours over the subsequent weeks to memorise to 36 digits. If I had cared, I could have learned twenty new digits a day, using the following scheme:

See how it's lyrical? Just learn the poem. Except… I quickly found I didn't care, and at that point my motivation vanished, and I lost the "savant" ability. (Sure, if I wanted to, I could easily bootstrap the requisite intrinsic motivation – and I suspect I could learn a hundred digits a day thereby – but I don't want to.)

Despite my generally-absent enthusiasm, I'm still capable of aceing IQ tests, scoring highly in measures of cognitive ability that I do not possess, etc, because I have a certain stubbornness towards the idea that these tests truly measure anything important, which means I approach them sideways with the objective of breaking the tests, which means I break the tests. If anything of value hinged on my ability to quickly multiply 6-digit numbers in my head, I expect I could pick it up in… six months?

I do not say these things to brag: rather, the opposite. I don't think I am particularly exceptional: I never learned a thousand digits of pi, would probably take an hour to multiply 6-digit numbers in my head…

I am able to solve problems I've never encountered with computer systems I've never used, after half a second of thought, while concentrating on other things – but from the inside that doesn't feel exceptional at all: it's just a few tricks, well-practised. People who have memorised millions of digits of pi likewise claim to use a few tricks – and while those particular tricks don't always work for everyone, I don't think these people are innately exceptional.

I understand the argument, but I think you're missing the nuance somewhat. There are a series of things that are learnable mental tricks; I have read Moonwalking with Einstein and am well aware about rhyme techniques, memory palace techniques, etc. I memorized ~250 digits of pi in the 6th grade, so I'm also aware of techniques for that. I wouldn't consider either of those a domain of savants.

(sidenote - I would be impressed with the people that could memorize millions of digits of Pi, given that the world record is either 70,000 digits or ~110,000 digits last time I checked (depends on the source), and it takes ~6 hours just to recite that many digits)

I'm talking specifically like things like Hypercalculia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercalculia , which are documented feats that cannot be explained by "tricks". Usually people with savant syndrome also have co-occurring autism and other neurological conditions like synesthesia.

Here is a an ABC profile of one of these savants: https://abcnews.go.com/2020/autistic-savant-daniel-tammet-so...

I don't think you could learn a "trick" to compute 27^7 in a few seconds.

Funny you should give 27^7 as an example, because I actually did get good at powers of 2 and 3. 27^7 is 3^21 is 3×81^5, which is easy to calculate in your head if you're good at multiples and powers of 8: it's just binomial expansion with the next row after 1 4 6 4 1, i.e. 1 5 10 10 5 1. (I used to be able to directly recall 1 5 10 10 5 1 and 1 6 15 20 15 6 1, but this is literally the first time I'm doing non-trivial mental arithmetic in a decade.) Multiplying a power of 2 by 5 is the same as halving and multiplying by 10, which reduces the problem to a simple addition of digits of small powers of 2 (^0 = 1, ^2 = 4, ^6 = 64, ^9 = 512, ^11 = 2048, ^15 = 32768), then a multiplication by 3 – both of which are easy to perform in a streaming fashion, if you have a suitable delay line. (I use the auditory processing delay line ("echoic memory"), which would probably work better if I spoke a language like Mandarin, where all digits have the same syllable length – but I got by. Some find the mental abacus more reliable, but I have no training in this approach.)

I only memorised my powers of 2 up to 2^16, powers of 3 up to 3^5, and powers of 5 up to 5^5, because the part that made it fun was only memorising things I'd calculated myself, in my head, and this was only an occasional game. If my goal had been "develop the skill of quick arithmetic", I would've memorised the first 12 powers of every prime below 12, and my times tables up to 100×100 – but I resented times tables, so never really memorised them until I (briefly) got really into division.

There is certainly variation in innate intellectual capability! There just isn't strong evidence of groupwide variation. Groupwide variation is the point of the "island" story.

I'm not going to make a scientifict argument about innate intellectual ability - I don't consider myself qualified enough for that.

I can only speak to my own observations. I have taught a lot of people to juggle. Juggling is an interesting discipline because it's pretty distinct from any other activity that most people have participated in in their life. It also has lower risk of "contamination", since people are unlikely to lie if you ask them if they've juggled before. You can also run this experiment with young kids, etc - you will still see very different rates of skill acquisition. I would bet that any other environmental arguments also fall flat - there are no big pro-juggling or anti-juggling cultures out there.

When you get a group of people together and instruct them to juggle, people will pick it up at very different rates. If you have enough of a sample size of observations, you can see extreme variability - some pick it up after 10-15 minutes, others still can't juggle after a year of trying (believe me, I've seen both). I've also observed brothers, both professional jugglers from a young age and both having invested identical amounts of time and passion into the activity (again, have no incentive to lie), progress at very different rates with acquisition of the skill.

From observing hundreds of people learning to juggle, I strongly believe that there is an "innate aptitude for juggling" in every person. Even people without this innate aptitude can learn to juggle and get to a certain level at the skill, beyond which progress will be so slow as to represent a de-facto "ceiling" on their juggling skill.

If you were to make this same argument in intellectual domains (i.e. chess, as an objective example), the argument gets more muddied in that you could make valid arguments that environment has played a role in "predisposing" someone to more rapid skill acquisition. However, I like to think of skill acquisition as more of a y = mx + b equation (not that all skill aquisition is linear). Every person has a certain rate (slope) at which they can aquire a given skill, and a certain intercept (predisposition) towards the acquisition of that skill. This model also works since someone that acquires skill more slowly can expend more time and achieve the same level of competence, but their ultimate ceiling of skill aquisition is lower (since time is finite).

I can make similar arguments about other domains, having spent time with IMO medalists, IOI medalists and other "outliers" in the intellectual domains. The same examples I showed above still apply, but the data is a lot more messy because it's hard in those cases separate the environmental/cultural effects from the genetic effects. That's why I reach for the juggling example as a clearer argument for that.

I'm not claiming that there's no variation in innate ability, only that one island won't be innately better at juggling than the other (certainly one island will be better at juggling, because they will care about juggling more, pass down more juggling, push forward the juggling sciences, &c. But those won't be innate, biological differences).

In other words: if, 1000 years later, you somehow stole an infant from bad-juggling island and had them raised on good-juggling island, they'd likely behave as you'd expect a good-juggle-islander to behave, despite their provenance. (Stipulate that there aren't outwardly evident signs of which island you're from, like inherited skin tone or whatever, which would alter your interactions with your environment).

I think if we agree that there are individual differences in predisposition towards juggling aptitude, and that the predisposition is mediated genetically somehow, and if juggling (in this hypothetical) is biologically advantageous for survival/reproduction on one of the islands (really stretching the analogy here) - then I don’t see a way how my 1000 years experiment doesn’t produce actual, population level genetic drift in juggling predisposition between the population on island A and island B (unless we could somehow prove that juggling predisposition is not heritable)

This is the crux of the issue. You assume, in the absence of evidence, that juggling aptitude predisposition is mediated genetically, in such a way that it is variable among humans; and you place the burden of proof on "somehow prove[ing] that [it] is not heritable" (emphasis mine). But it's far easier to prove the positive (in a world where the positive is true) than prove the negative (in a world where the positive is false), so the appropriate perspective to adopt if you want to investigate via experiment is "try to prove it true, and if we honestly fail, that's an argument that it's false".

If you don't intend to run the experiment, then different considerations dominate: you should justify this bias. Maybe you're drawing an analogy to something similar, which you know to work this way? Bias isn't the same thing as wrong, after all: but unjustified bias often is.

The problem with all IQ and race correlations is that you can never actually remove the effects of prenatal and childhood nutrition, socioeconomic differences, quality of education etc. Indeed, if you stabilize them, the differences go away. And that's still saying nothing of the culture-neutrality of IQ tests themselves.

Stop defending racism and racists

I don't think pillefitz is asking if the author's racist arguments in general are sound. I think he was asking if the arguments in this particular article are sound.

Many racists are actually quite competent outside of when they are trying to argue for racism, and this particular article doesn't seem to be making a racist argument.

It does talk about the possibility of an over performing ethnic group, and suggests Jews as a candidate, but that's not inherently a racist argument. There are in fact ethnic groups in many countries that do over or under perform as a whole, but this is almost always due to cultural factors.

In particular ethnic groups where education and scholarship are a big part of their culture unsurprising tend to over perform in general society unless their culture also is big on minimizing interacting outside their group.

Jewish culture is such a culture and they have long been over represented in intellectual fields unless they are in a country that has high social or legal barriers to keep Jews out of those fields. Heck, this is probably why so many stupid conspiracy theories have them as the people secretly running the world.

It's similar with many Asian cultures nowadays. Just take a stroll through the campus of Caltech or MIT if you want to see that those groups over perform. At both those schools around 48% of undergraduates are Asian. That's way above the 7% of Asians in the general US population. Even if we take into account that Caltech has a disproportionate number of students from California (if you can get into a top STEM school and are from California, are you really want to go deal with Boston weather?) and California has a high Asian population (about 16%) the 48% at Caltech is way higher.

That said, I don't think the arguments in this article are really all that good. He is emphasizing the IMO since 2020 and talking about how 2022-2024 stand out. But when you look farther back instead of starting at 2020 then 2022-2024 are still good years, but not really remarkable years for Romania. Over the period it has been good it has had some major changes in their education system which I think limits what you can infer from recent IMO success. I've got another comment that goes into more detail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071972

Not remotely; he operates in the phlogiston area of the science he makes claims in: old twin studies, Richard Lynn's overtly fraudulent numbers, &c. There is a vibrant field of research on these topics; he is not part of it. Search for his name alongside Turkheimer's on Twitter for some backstory.

The way he investigates how many of the winners from Romania are "Jews" (because apparently you can tell that by looking at their name and picture or whatever) is also very sus.

I have Ashkenazi friends that also love to point out how many of the winners of international Olympiads are Jewish. Does that make them sus too?

If it's a point of cultural pride, no. If it's a detached observation of racial intellectual superiority, yes.

[flagged]

You just read a comment that drew a distinction between racial supremacist claims and other claims and your rebuttal was that both kinds of claims are racial supremacist claims. Not interesting.

> your rebuttal was that both kinds of claims are racial supremacist claims

I said nothing about anything being racial or not. Perhaps you found it not interesting because you didn't pay attention to it and instead read into it what you already expected the rebuttal to be.

Yeah I was wondering where that came from, I think his background clears it up a bit.

Yeah, he post things like "there are no more excuses to be fat". Nasty dude. Romania's overall educational system is unimpressive, as he pointed out himself. Yet he suggested to replicate it in different countries to "get more out of the smartest ones".

The education system is stratified, keeping high-achieving students together, promoting them to schools with good teachers, etc.

OK, so then why don't the situations given in the elaborate description then show up in the statistics, like the "fat right tail" that isn't there?

It's because the students sent to olympiads are statistical outliers, too few in number to skew statistics. The system acts to identify and foster them, but to the detriment of national averages.

I wonder if national averages actually matter very much beyond being a vanity statistic? While it's good to have a generally more mathematically capable population, you would expect most actual "progress" (papers, discoveries, things built) to be made by the outliers.

I guess there's another layer tho in 2025 where, assuming they are rational, you wouldn't necessarily expect their efforts to benefit Romania.

Yes, a numerate population as assessed by national averages matters. A more numerate population reasons better about economic policies and may vote more wisely. Numeracy is closely tied to the ability to work in a variety of occupations. If we consider probability and statistics, the implications are especially salient.

This seems to me more like a reasonable hypothesis than a foregone conclusion.

Personally I suspect there's a floor (can read a chart, understands growth rates and compounding in general) which the public need to assess arguments constructed by specialists, while the rest is mostly understanding ideology.

The reason I believe that is, I think I can pretty much predict 100% of the conclusion of most articles written for the public by knowing the names & affiliations of the authors and the topic. The only uncertainty is what sources and statistics they will pick to reach the conclusion required by their ideology.

A numerate and literate population matters for many reasons, but in theory it’s possible to field a strong team for the Olympiad despite an abysmal national average literacy level. Just look at North Korea for example. They’ve got a “fat right tail” of sophisticated hackers but on average their literacy is terrible.

> Just look at North Korea for example ... on average their literacy is terrible.

Where do you get that information from? According to the CIA, it's 100% (https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/about/archives/2023/f...). North Korea Info (https://www.northkoreainfo.com/why-does-north-korea-have-a-h...) gives a slightly lower estimate of 97%-99%.

>A more numerate population reasons better about economic policies and may vote more wisely.

People with good STEM education, even with PhDs in that field aren’t necessarily competent voters and good decision makers outside of area of their interests. Understanding economic policies is still an effort that many aren’t willing to take.

In a global economy I think a good national average is more important than the peaks. The genius invention will spread, and there is significant value in having a population which can utilise it.

As another example, if cancer is cured tomorrow it won't necessarily be the country which found the cure which will be cancer free first, but the one with the most competent doctors, able to use and apply the cure.

I would first caution against reducing education to the practical and the economic. Education is much more, and much more important, that just that.

Second, I would caution against the trope that invention is some exclusive province of the "genius".

That out of the way, we can look to network effects. Consider that a populace with high literacy will permit more of the kind of collaboration that has literacy as a prerequisite, while one with low literacy and a few outliers won't. The outliers are constrained in how much they can collaborate, and collaboration is essential to scientific and economic development.

> The system acts to identify and foster them, but to the detriment of national averages.

This is the usual argument against stratified education systems but is it proven in any way? My experience with stratified systems is that they increase both high quantiles and the average. Maybe (even if not established), maybe they reduce low quantiles like the 0.1th, but very unlikely they damage the average. Quite the opposite.

It's kind of like this idea that communism makes an average citizen richer which sounds logical, but in the end everyone's poorer. Remove the stratification and there's no incentive to do anything.

> is it proven in any way?

The figure in the article claims to show that this is indeed the case -- though as I noted in my other comments, the y axis is actually uninterpretable ("percentiles" can't be negative).

Idiot author aside, even if the students were outliers being sent to the Olympiad, that would not explain the consistent performance over decades. Relative to the size of the country, and compared to the other dominant nations, the outliers seem disproportionate.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_medal_cou..., there are smaller countries performing better (Hungary, Bulgaria, for instance) and similarly as well.

This is a very interesting topic and the article seems quite thorough. But I have trouble interpreting the crucial "School and track sorting can bolster or bust academic achievement" plots: The y axis is labelled "Graduation score percentile", but it has negative numbers on the scale. How are these values being corrected?

The series for 1-school towns on the left plot is basically flat; am I supposed to believe that, in such towns, students entering the school with a 0.5 on the high school admission test appear at the same exit exam percentile (implying that they have the same average exit exam scores) as those who entered with a 9.5? That can't possibly be true.

ETA: I also thought the conclusion -- that other countries should adopt a similar education model -- was out of step with most of the body text, which seemed to stress the downsides for weaker students. (There's no actual contradiction here, and perhaps the claim about most of society's advances being due to the top-end achievers was intended to justify this angle, but I was nevertheless surprised that there wasn't much discussion of why this upside should overpower the concerns for weaker students.)

> That can't possibly be true

It tracks with spatial inequality.

A 1 school town is highly likely to be a small rural town with limited economic prospects. Like plenty of CEE countries, the overwhelming majority of opportunities have historically been clustered in the capital and a couple regional cities.

The kind of town or village with only a single school is going to have fewer social benefits or services compared to an urban school.

Basically, what it is saying is students in those kinds of towns are s** out of luck statistically speaking compared to their urban peers.

There's a reason Romania's HDI has remained lower than Russia's until recently thanks to EU funding to help develop Romania (which is now on track to become a major economic pole in the CEE)

Edit: can't reply

> A lot turns on this. (I suppose I could read the underlying paper, but I'm lazy.)

I recommend checking it out. It explains the methodology and some potential wonkiness. It's always good to read the docs

I acknowledge that effect is present, but it's simply not strong enough to dominate natural variation in ability (for which high school entrance exam scores are a proxy) to the point where the results are completely flat -- in fact, students who achieved the highest scores on the entrance exam were slightly lower in exit scores on average than those with low or medium entrance scores!

What this tells me is that some kind of correction is being applied to those y values (we already know this because of negatives numbers on a "percentile" axis) -- but what?

A lot turns on this. (I suppose I could read the underlying paper, but I'm lazy.)

It says "effect" of school sorting. So the "graduation score percentile" must be the change in percentile due to school sorting.

That seems plausible, but change with respect to what baseline? I think the sensible baseline would be the entry exam percentile (x axis), but others are conceivable.

Author aside I thought this was a very interesting answer to a question I didn't know I had.

I had been thinking that sending my children to a school with high achievers could leave her at a relative disadvantage but this data would seem to say otherwise.

I wonder if this conflicts with Malcolm Gladwell's observations on one's relative ranking when it comes to college matriculation (that its more important to be at a high percentile of your institution than your global rank)

After looking into the author a bit. Ugh

What is the answer that you found? All I see is a marginally defensible claim in the 24th paragraph. I stopped reading after that, although there were only a few paragraphs left.

One of the unintended but hard to avoid consequences of a high competition education environment is a lot of broken kids. Dealing with constant pressure and failure is hard even for adults, for some children it's literally fatal. Don't forget to consider this as well

Bulgaria has been performing pretty well despite of the declining quality of education, which was stellar during Communism. Nobody was pushing us to advance in Math and Science; there was just nothing better to do. I wish these times could come back. Right now, kids are faced with all kinds of distractions and little incentive to go into studying seriously.

>Nobody was pushing us to advance in Math and Science; there was just nothing better to do

Not true. Being a child prodigy at math or science in communism, meant you'd get a ticket to move the the nation's capital or other such big academic cities and have cushy desk jobs, instead of being stuck in underdeveloped rural areas doing nothing but backbreaking agricultural work. That was the big motivator. That's how my dad ended up in the big city from the poorest city of the country.

> Right now, kids are faced with all kinds of distractions and little incentive to go into studying seriously.

Why would kids today want to "study seriously" when they see top online streamers, influencers and serial hustlers(scammers) making way more money than lines of white collar people with academic degrees which are now filling the unemployment lines due to the economy. Kids want instant gratification, they want to make money quick and easy, not study for 16 years then get replaced by offshore workers or AI.

I think Poland is in very similar spot, often punching above its weight in software and math. My own amateur explanation is that Polish language is pretty complex and very particular about correct words and word forms. So Polish kids get a good training in keeping track of details of notations just by learning their native language.

And then there is China - remember that IOI for instance accepts 4 people from each country.

After all it all comes down to individuals. In Poland, there is famous informatics high school teacher who is credited for producing most IOI/IOM medalist per high school pupil in the world I believe.

They have special training program there. Another thing is to actually find geniuses, obviously. And if you don’t believe in geniuses, meet Jake - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OR36jrx_L44

For example, Jakub Pachocki (director of engineering of OpenAI) who graduated this high school, actually was on the verge of getting F from maths in his previous high school, because of problems being to easy I believe. Then they made the transfer where he could finally thrive. Interestingly, he wanted to do phd in 2 years in University of Warsaw, but people there didn’t want to allow it just because so they lost him - he went to do his PhD at Carnegie Mellon.

To summarise, from what I understand formula would be something like genius + great, inspiring and allowing teacher(s) + special personalised teaching programs + supportive environment.

Also don’t assume that these outliers are testament to the level of education of general population.

"Because Romania is a member state of the European Union, the people the country has put great effort into training and credentialing are easily able to leave the country and acquire jobs elsewhere" and "free movement of talent between countries, Romania ends up subsidizing talent discovery for other countries with less apt educational systems" Are pretty negative stances. UE is a union, so it's a pretty different situation than students leaving eg third world country to come to Europe. And the migration exists in the other direction, you'll be amazed by how many French dentists are studying in Romania. I hope such phenomenon progressively average the situation between UE countries and closes the gaps that may currently exist.

The EU echoes the SU, sadly. Central government, central planning, central banks, mix people, no local culture, blur national and ethnic identities, flatten the social structures, and most importantly, destroy the family unit. Young couples can't buy a house and can't afford to raise kids. And young Europeans face high unemployment and low wages for life-consuming jobs with not much career prospects.

Remote work would've lessen that. But it seems they didn't like it so they quickly rolled it back after the pandemic.

This is just plain wrong or a terrible misinterpretation...

> central banks

What are you trying to say here? Each member state has a central bank. They are independent from, coordinated by, the ECB. Each central bank assumes the responsibility of regulating the member state's banks, with the ECB paying close attention to system-critical banks.

The US also has a central bank, singular, the Fed. What's your point?

> no local culture, blur national and ethnic identities

Have you been to Europe? Each country has it's own, completely distinct culture based on the nation's historic identity. Hint: you know when you're crossing borders (the language usually changes).

Central bank: just see what they did with Greece, Italy, etc. Perennial debt in exchange of control. The central banks of the countries are completely at the mercy of Frankfurt.

Yes, the US central bank is quite controversial itself, but the states don't depend on loans from the Fed. Or at least not directly, AFAIK.

Of course Europe has culture and my point is they want to neuter it by moving a lot of people across countries, in particular the top of the graduate crop (as the original post pointed out). They blur the identities on purpose. Go to any major city in the bigger countries and you'll see they are losing the national identity very fast. Some are just unrecognizable.

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2025/05/28/christine-lag... Ruling from ECB with WEF directives.

> And the migration exists in the other direction, you'll be amazed by how many French dentists are studying in Romania.

Those people don't really plan to stay in Romania. They intend to get their degrees then move back to Western Europe. Hell, most of my former high-school colleagues who became doctors or dentists, emigrated to Western Europe.

Agreed but what I mean is that 15 years ago you wouldn't have thought about studying medicine in East Europe, or building startups etc. And now people study in Romania, Warsaw is perceived as a great place for entrepreneurs and so on. It's just my personal biased impression but it feels good.

Fair enough, this is a sign of clear progress for Eastern Europe.

I wonder if you can blame the climate and geography as some do in America. Bucharest is hot and sweaty in the summer (avg high 30 C, avg 68% rel H2O) and cold and snowy in the winter. The city lies on a flat plain, far from the mountains or the sea. Then you give people the opportunity to move to Amsterdam or Milan. Plus many other European countries have great infrastructure built up decades ago while Romania was undergoing economic crisis and revolution. It's hard to catch up.

The root of the issue might be that free migration in the age of modern transportation requires a shared tax base.

Yes that's my point, there is a shared budget so at least in some indirect way, the money a Romanian professional makes in another country may end up contributing to Romania's development and growth. I don't have number or what but this has to be taken into account.

Lived in Romania until I finished high school. Professors would always push us to compete in the olympiads, there was an informal system where some professors, even if they were not the one teaching your class, would take you under your wing to prepare you to hit county/national/international level, you’d be allowed to skip school for a week/month depending on the level you got to, there was even some prestige to be gained.

I was personally never motivated to go past county, but it was a fun time.

Funny how somehow in discussions in our country I always have to defend that sorting students is a good thing. A lot of people argue, that best student in average classes will still be great, and will lift the others, from my experience that is not true.

Actually, throughout Eastern Europe, there was an excellent math and science curriculum during the socialist era. Despite all the negatives of this system, the good education was one of the huge positives. In the last 30 years in Bulgaria, there has been a significant decline, but some good traditions are still maintained, at least in the elite schools.

I suspect that an important factor was that math was sufficiently abstract so that the smart people could go there and do their thing without risk of saying something that would offend the regime. If you said something carelessly in economy, you might have disagreed with Lenin. If you said something carelessly in biology, you might have disagreed with Lysenko. But in math, you could say anything you wanted, and you were okay. And in communism you were not allowed to start your own company anyway, which is why many smart people became math teachers instead.

> Since 2020, Romania’s performance in the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) has been nothing short of amazing. In 2022, Romania came in fifth overall, fourth in 2023, and twelfth in 2024.

Here's how those three years compare to surrounding years:

(Update: See note at the end with more years)

I'm not sure much can be read into this. The participants are usually high school students, and the top contestants from a given country usually participate in multiple years, and each country's team had 6 contestants.

It only takes getting a two or three outstanding students for a country to shoot significantly up for a couple years or so, depending on how close in age those students are.

For the 3 years the article mentions, 2022-2024, Romania had 2 people who were there all 3 years, 5 people who were there for 2 of the 3 years, and only 2 people who were only there for 1 year.

The 2023 team had 5 people from 2022. For 2024 half the 2023 team was replaced.

Looking at several years of their teams and individual performances it looks like they regularly have people who do well. A lot of people place in ranked 150+ one year, then shoot way up in the next year or next two, and then drop way down again.

For example they had a guy who 2018-2020 ranked 174, 15, 4. But they didn't in those last two years have anyone else also peaking.

In 2021-2024 they had a guy who went 143, 32, 1, 82.

In 2021-2023 they had a guy who went 319, 23, 46.

In 2017-2025 all the years except 2022-2024 had 2 people in the top 100. 2022 and 2023 had all 6 in the top 100, and 2024 had 3 in the top 100.

Looking at all this 2022-2024 plausibly could be explained as just a matter of timing. They seem to always have some people who are good enough to get a high score at least once. Some do it their first year and then don't participate any more. Some participate multiple times but only hit that high once. A smaller number hit multiple highs.

With just a small change in the timing of when some of these people appear or when they hit their peaks, so that they happen at the same time instead of missing each other by a small number of years, many of those other teams could before 2022 could have been top 10 teams.

Update: here is Romania's rank going backwards from 2025 to 1979:

  2025: 13, 12, 4, 5, 27, 15,
  2019: 17, 33, 22, 20, 13, 11, 22, 10, 8, 16,
  2009: 13, 17, 11, 6, 6, 10, 7, 8, 15, 11,
  1999: 4, 11, 7, 1, 2, 9, 11, 3, 3, 4,
  1989: 2, 2, 1, 6, 1, 3, 5, 11, 20, no IMO this year,
  1979: 2

It looks like they did very well in the IMP during their last decade of Communism (which ended there in 1989, and also for the decade after that.

For the next 10 years they fell off a little. It was during this time (2003 specifically) that they started using a national test to assign people to high schools.

The decade after that fell off a little more. It was at the start of that decade (2010) that they switched to the Evaluarea Națională mentioned in the article.

Quote ‘Yet another possibility is that Romania has an undersampled ethnic group that overperforms, but whose schools aren’t tested very well. The only group this might be is Romanian Jews’

Let’s say that there are probably many ways of interpreting this sentence, but I can’t find any nice one. I understand this as ‘it makes sense for a group with skin color X and hair color Y to be better at school’ followed by ‘it must be Jews’.

What am I missing ?

You're not missing anything. The author is a "race scientist".

Thanks - I should have done my homework, but didn’t expect things to be so clear cut.

I found this about Jordan Lasker https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/07/cremi...

Doesn't he just say that Romanian Jews overperform?

I don't think there's a need to read the authors words in the worst possible way.

> I understand this as ‘it makes sense for a group with skin color X and hair color Y to be better at school’

It wouldn't make sense for the author to mean it that way, because the "white skin black hair" classification likely includes more non-Jewish than Jewish Romanians.

> followed by ‘it must be Jews’

I mean, it's not that hard to believe. If you look at (Eastern) European history, A LOT of the people of scientific or cultural significance were Jews. Don't pin me on the numbers, but if you check the Wikipedia article of a random Easter European person that left a mark in science, there is an 33-50% chance that person has some sort of Jewish background.

Tl;dr - Romania, like other Eastern European states, uses "tracking" or separate educational streams, so students from "National Colleges" (the top tier of Romanian high schools) tend to be overrepresented.

> The design of Romania’s educational system makes it perhaps the most stratified educational system in the world

> One of the cruel parts of the Romanian system is that, though sorting is nationally available, students do not have equal opportunities to sort. Students located in smaller towns have fewer high school options to select from unless they’re among the few who opt into a military academy, which means joining the military

> This combined sorting between schools and tracks means that low-ability students get stuck with other low-ability students, and high-ability students are surrounded by other high-ability students. In effect, peer groups throughout high school are extremely homogeneous.

----------

While this is good for identifying talent for Olympiads, it's questionable whether this is a net benefit for Romania as a whole. Neighboring Poland doesn't have the same level of tracking in it's educational system and has much stronger human capital based on HDI compared to Romania, despite both being roughly comparable to each other in the 1990s.

Human capital isn't developed by having a minority of students becoming the cream of the crop, it comes by helping all students get the option or ability to rise to the academic level at which they can succeed irrespective of geographic location (small town vs city), ethnicity, or economic class.

Ik people tend to point to Russian, Chinese, and Indian Olympiad students as being examples of success, but most of them also attended top universities due to their Olympiad attendance, so I doubt the Olympiad itself had an impact compared to attending a Tsinghua, FyzTech (Citadel still hires from there for the London office at least circa 2023 despite the war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russia), or IIT Delhi.

And anecdotally at least, I went to HS and college with a decent number of national and international Olympiad winners (one of whom was both a IMO and IPhO team member concurrently), and while they did decent in life (some HFT, mostly academia) it wasn't much different of an outcome compared to our peers who didn't partake in those olympiads.

This shouldn't dissuade people from doing Olympiads if they wish, but targeting Olympiad success for the sake of Olympiad success seems toxic and a waste of resources.

Edit: cannot reply

> Cyberax

I am not opposed to students participating in Olympiads od they chose so with full autonomy and independence, just like I am not opposed to students who want to do well in sports because they like sports.

If you are forcing your kid to be a tier 1 quarterback OR a IMO participant, you aren't making them a well rounded student.

And if you as a society make "being a football player" or "being a topper" the primary goal, you aren't actually identifying new talent, because the only way to rise to the top in a field is if you have an actual aptitude AND interest.

There's a reason why China and India are seeing significant social opposition from younger generations about "test driven" and "rote" culture, the same way plenty of boomer nerds on HN who grew up in the 80s and 90s were probably ostracized for not being into football (idk - I wasn't around for much of the 90s, I'm subsisting of pop culture from that era like Daria)

> Neighboring Poland

they aren't neighbors.

What's HDI ?

> they aren't neighbors

Lviv will always be Lwow in my heart /s

Yep, but the distance between both isn't significant both physically and culturally.

> What's HDI

Human Development Index - it's a composite index that combines health, education, and economic indicators in a quick benchmark to compare relatively human capital development.

thanks

No worries! Good questions!

I don’t necessarily see a problem with enabling like talented groups to be mingled together, that said it depends on the metrics. A friend who had a 3.2 in HS did way better in life than several 4.0+ students.

The other end of the spectrum is the way most of the US handles high school. Long gone are gifted and talented programs before high school and in many cases, for instance those with an ability for math are stuck in classes with those that will top out before algebra.

I understand your point, but the catering to the mediocre that happens these days in US grade schools isn’t the right answer either.

The issue with "gifted only schools" is they end up eating the bulk of funds and legitimately don't have a strong predictive capacity on student success that couldn't already be explained the parental background and early childhood care.

In my case, I never placed in gifted academic programs in elementary and middle, but by HS was able to take 14 AP classes (and auto shop - always liked tinkering since elementary school; which was a major reason why I never placed well in gifted programs) and end up at HYS. Most of my peers there similarly didn't attended gifted programs or high schools - amongst the non-legacies the biggest predictor of success was SAT scores and GPA.

While giving and funding academic and gifted tracks within schools should be allowed, "gifted" students should not be segregated from "normal" students. There's no reason a high school can't both offer as many AP classes as possible ALONG with vocational classes.

Edit: can't reply

> Why should gifted schools need more money than normal schools

It's not that they need more funding. The issue is gifted programs tend to overlap with upper income families [0] - the same kinds of families that are overrepresented in School Boards and PTAs [1]

I'm not saying go all "San Francisco 2.0", but recognize that gifted only schools does lead to a moral perception that other students are not as deserving for funding or are "bad students".

[0] - https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2019/09/30/socioeconomic-status-...

[1] - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584188180...

> the highest-ability schools receive a decrement in funding

But are overrepresented in urban areas where human capital is significantly higher than rural areas within Romania [2]. Students in rural and small town schools are less liked to be as healthy or a affluent as students in cities or major urban centers, and this does have a tangible downstream effect on education as a whole.

[2] - https://www.shs-conferences.org/articles/shsconf/abs/2021/06...

> If you look at SF...

Note how I said << I'm not saying go all "San Francisco 2.0" >>

There is a happy middle ground between being an exclusionary system like Romania's or a delusional bussed system like San Francisco.

Giving the example of a city with a population the size of Cincinnati is clearly a facile argument, as it is obviously not representative of the rest of California, let alone the US.

Why should gifted schools need more money than normal schools? I would imagine "problematic children schools" would need the most funds because you would need the lowest teacher:student ratio to maintain order

>The issue with "gifted only schools" is they end up eating the bulk of funds

The article points out that the opposite is the case in Romania: the highest-ability schools receive a decrement in funding.

> The issue with "gifted only schools" is they end up eating the bulk of funds

No, they don't. If you look at SF, the high-performing Lowell High gets a bit _less_ funding than the average for the district. Stuyvesant in NYC is right at the average spending.

I studied in a magnet school with other gifted kids, including a future Olympiad winner. Our school barely had heating in winter. It's really the _other_ kids that make all the difference.

That is a lot to read. I’m no longer in my 40s. Grade school - in San Jose - gifted and talented classes were classes at the school not a separate school.

Sadly education has evolved where schools teach to the norm rather than acknowledging people have different strengths and weaknesses.

It does not require separate schools, it needs funding and more importantly, someone good at math needs to be able to work with others good at math.

The educational curriculum in the US for grade school has been standardized to the mediocre and any attempt to encourage gifted is considered a problem.

I agree with you!

Give students the ability to test out of classes and/or dual enroll in community colleges, BUT make sure they are all still in the same school meeting and greeting and bumping into each other.

Dumbing down curricula is a bad move, and preventing students from being able to test out or take classes earlier is also a bad move. But segregating students into different schools based on academic ability is equally as bad.

> Grade school - in San Jose - gifted and talented classes were classes at the school not a separate school

Yep. This is a model I agree with, and am a product of as well being a fellow Bay Area native

The funny thing, I went to five schools, 3 different districts across Bay Area cities. All had accommodations for different levels. High school, I ended up at UCSC my freshman year with enough credits from transfer in (from high school school) and my first quarter as a junior. Most were community college courses friends and I were interested in separate from school.

My step daughter, I hear her curriculum and shake my head (my BS was in computer engineering and computational chemistry), I could not help with the bs “common core” forced on her.

Thankfully she settled into the ability to have college courses in her last year.

It’s ridiculous how much of a push there is “standardizing” the skills of individuals. When their strengths should be encouraged.

Not to be that guy, but in my parent's old country - someone like your daughter would not have been given a chance to even get a bachelors degree. And we're from a country with the same tracked educational system as Romania.

I agree that "common core" is bulls** (I'm part of that generation as well, but my Asian parents made me take Kumon and taught me personally, but I was also lucky/blessed that my mother was a teacher in the old country), but the motivation wasn't wrong.

And this is what pains me about American educational reform. It has become ideological, instead of outcome driven.

Personally, our outcomes should be

1. Building a talented workforce (we need more October Skys)

2. Giving space for creativity (we need more Darias)

3. Building physical fitness (we need more Currahee Hill montages, as an ex-ROTC [found out I'd lose my OCI if I commissioned])

And this requires giving students autonomy to explore their limits mentally and physically. If peeps don't want to learn, nbd, but why should we limit access to students who want to but didn't initially build the fundamentals.

We also need to decouple emotion from education - no major or degree is better or worse than others. We should treat a HS grad, an AA/AS grad, a BA/BS/BE grad, andn a grad school grad the same.

Let's be a "Great Society" [0] again.

[0] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KuuEFTgodc8

> Ik people tend to point to Russian, Chinese, and Indian Olympiad students as being examples of success, but most of them also attended top universities due to their Olympiad attendance, so I doubt the Olympiad itself had an impact compared to attending a Tsinghua, FyzTech (Citadel still hires from there for the London office at least circa 2023 despite the war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russia), or IIT Delhi.

First, if you remove the Olympiad-based admission, there's no guarantee that these students could _get_ into the top-level universities.

Second, people in the US _love_ to point out that athletics "builds the character" and sets people up for success later in life. Well, do you think that training for Olympiads and competing in high-stakes academic tournaments also does nothing?

Path to FyzTech lies through FMSHs which accept high school students largely via regional-level Olympiads. And path to that lies through the Olympiad "circle" in your local school.

You probably can build a stratified education system without Olympiads, but as a matter of fact in Russia they do actually play an important role in the overall structure.

>Edit: cannot reply

What do you mean you cannot reply?

HN has limits on replies for threads that are popular, in order to prevent what it thinks is a back-and-forth flame war.

It can be overzealous at times.

Yes, but it does that by flagging and hiding the thread, not closing comments.

Both, actually. Both individual comment threads and individual users who post “low quality comments” too quickly get rate limited.

> individual users who post “low quality comments” too quickly get rate limited.

only if their karma is low, OP's karma is not low

> it's questionable whether this is a net benefit for Romania as a whole.

it depends what's most beneficial: having a few percents of very mathematically experts people in maths-heavy professions? Or having everyone somewhat decent at maths, even when it doesn't affect their productivity in their jobs?

I don't have any hard data about this, but instinctively I'd bet on the former: I'd rather have a few hundreds more Sutskevers, than most of the country's bakers know their way around PDE.

Yet Ilya Sutskever was not an Olympiad participant.

Heck, he attended a correspondence college for 2 years (Open University of Israel) before his family immigrated to Canada and then attended UToronto (an amazing university, but not significantly selective by any means).

Ilya is by definition an example of why heavily stratified systems are subpar for human capital development - they remove the opportunity to identify talent from a broad pool, because humans can change.

And as I pointed out from personal experience, the difference in outcomes between IMO and non-IMO participants when I studied CS at HYS was nonexistent - we all did equally well professionally as well as academically. The difference was we all had the ability to study and get guidance from the same professors if we so chose.

A rising tide raises all ships.

> Ilya Sutskever

And alternative explanation is that he's really nothing special. There are literally dozens of people like him in my social circle. Heck, my very spouse has a more impressive school record. The difference could be connections. He lucked out with his circle and a field of study.

Absolutely! And that's my point! Broading access to education is a net benefit to society, because fortune prepares an able mind.

> The difference could be connections

In Ilya's case, not really. He was an immigrant twice (first USSR to Israel, then Israel to Canada), and wouldn't have been able to do an MS/PhD at UT without actually being capable - it's not difficult to enter UToronto, but it's difficult to leave with a CS bachelors degree.

I've always felt a broad access system like the Warren-era UCs along with LBJ's "Great Deal" is of better benefit for a country than investing in building isolated ivory towers for education, because we have the ability to better ourselves, and that door should always remain open.

Well, you set up a system that fosters competition, you get excellence as a result.

DUH.

Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus also have similar systems, and they punch way above their weight in math and CS: https://www.imo-official.org/country_team_r.aspx?code=RUS https://www.imo-official.org/country_team_r.aspx?code=UKR https://www.imo-official.org/country_team_r.aspx?code=BLR

Ironically, the US schools do have tracking. For athletics.

The US absolutely _needs_ to have a school system that challenges students. No more nonsense about racist algebra.

"When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" is known as Goodhart's Law

The parent is arguing for a target, not for a metric, so Goodhart's Law doesn't apply here.

I didn't know Olympiads do not have any score (metric). Thank you.

This is a BS saying because it's so easy to find counterexamples.

Let's try to use the number of child deaths, for example. By your saying, trying to do that is bad. Because governments probably will somehow resurrect dead children to look good at this metric. Right?

No, but it is easy to see how reporting the death of children could be withheld - say for instance, if this metric had penalties associated with it.

Then it becomes a different metric.

Look at what France, Japan, and USA consider childhood deaths. Back when I did medical software and wrote reports, France and Japan both lumped at lot of deaths post birth into 'death at birth' to lower their childhood death statistics.

You get excellence in a tiny number of individuals who don't budge the statistics. The national averages are poor, and the excelling individuals are not even numerous enough to create a "fat right tail".

This is interesting if true, but without data I can't take this claim at face value.

Scientific and technological breakthroughs are created by the few. Always been, always will be. Fewer than 1 in 10,000 people are responsible for the current AI breakthroughs for instance, and I’m being conservative. You don’t need a fat right tail to completely change your country; of course, most of your tiny number of excellent individuals leaving for richer countries is a different problem altogether.

No, it's the same problem. Nobody wants to live in a country where everyone is impoverished and illiterate.

You do realize that if you go by "national averages" American math education is pretty bad right? People aren't leaving for countries with great national average in math. That's basically irrelevant.

IMHO there should be challenges but also opportunities for self correction and movement. The problem with test score stratification is that you start treating kids as unchanging objects being measured by an infallible yardstick, when neither assumption is true.

It's not racism it's essentialism and poor education. An ideal educational system would tailor material and projects to an individual student and adjust at the rate they improve.

I would like to point out for context that the author, Jordan Lasker, is a eugenist derided for shoddy science, falsely using university affiliations, and racist commentary.

I do not write this to contradict particular claims in the article above, but @cremieux should be read cautiously.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Lasker

This definitely adds a grain of salt, but as far as I can tell, none of that shows in the article, especially in the final paragraphs explaining how the elitist system is overall bad for the country. But it does make me wonder about possible hidden flaws in the methodology (I'm still confused at some of the earlier statistics contradicting the claims made later)

> Yet another possibility is that Romania has an undersampled ethnic group that overperforms, but whose schools aren’t tested very well. The only group this might be is Romanian Jews and using them as an explanation is problematic for two reasons. The first is that there are too few to realistically explain Romanian Olympiad performance. The second is that we know the identities of Olympiad participants from Romania, and they don’t seem to be Jewish.

This struck me as…odd…before I even saw the parent comment.

The general vibe of this magazine: support mainstreaming of eugenics ideas (and now eigenicists), the ubermensch / great man theory of history, and other ideas that we’ve largely shied away from for the last 75 years.

And cloak it in layers of language so that a quick read doesn’t catch it. It’s like human prompt poisoning.

This one is not odd and was worth mentioning before rejecting. Just look at American IMO team of 2024, in which most team members have Asian ancestry - some ethnic groups may indeed perform better than others. Picking Jews for this matter wasn’t unreasonable if you know the history of Eastern Europe.

This is not because people with Asian ancestry are smarter.

Who said they are smarter?

He should also be derided for terrible writing. It's not until the 24th paragraph (of 30 total) that we encounter something resembling a thesis.

> With all the pieces on the board, the key to Romania’s Olympiad success is three-fold: put the best students in the same classrooms, put the best teachers with the best students, and then incentivize schools, teachers, and students each to win Olympiads.

This could have been much shorter, but then the reader might notice the abject lack of supporting evidence for these central claims. I don't blame the author for burying them at the end.

I have no idea about author's background or about his other writings, but the conclusion quoted by you seems absolutely correct.

I do not understand why you say that it lacks supporting evidence.

Before this conclusion, the author has explained the system of national exams and of distribution into high schools and inside high schools, that ensures that the best students are grouped together and also that the best teachers are assigned to them.

There is no doubt that even if the average level of education is bad, this system guarantees that the best become very good and much better than students with similar native qualities who have stayed in high school in the middle of less capable colleagues, while being not taught things deemed too difficult for the general population. Moreover, the author has mentioned that the state provides rewards for good results at the International Olympiads, both for teachers and for students.

I do not see what more evidence could be brought. In my opinion the conclusion of the author is well supported and it explains why these students compete successfully against students from much bigger countries.

NB: None of what you are saying is confirmed by the WP page you are citing.

None?

> Much of Lasker's work and commentary focuses on race and IQ, and he has promoted eugenics.

So talking about eugenics in a positive way equals racist commentary?

I have a genetic mutation (de novo) that leads to a disability and that I don't want to pass on. Natural approach: Die, due to the lack of therapeutic modalities. No chance of offspring. With the help of medicine, I am alive. Now, to prevent passing on mutated genes but still have children, I could use something like IVF and reproductive genetics. This is textbook eugenics(?)

Obviously I disapprove of the stereotypical eugenics of the century. Ranging from Germans murdering disabled children to Danes forcing Greenland women on birth control.

Yes, culling the population by any means to select for the “intelligent” population is highly subjective and will result in racist outcomes.

Given that humanity has had a bad track record discussing eugenics positively, yes.

Shouldn't everyone be read cautiously?

Sure, but knowing the intention and bias of the author is sometimes more important than other times. For example, it doesn’t really matter what the bias is of the person giving you the weather report; the weather either is or isn’t accurate, based on the data.

The author of an article about how an education system is or should be structured, however, very much matters.

TL;DR

"With all the pieces on the board, the key to Romania’s Olympiad success is three-fold: put the best students in the same classrooms, put the best teachers with the best students, and then incentivize schools, teachers, and students each to win Olympiads."

The easiest way to understand why it works is to imagine the opposite strategy: put the best students in the same classrooms as the worst one so the entire class advances very slowly, make the school system centered on success at sport.

(I skipped the opposite to "put the best teachers with the best students" part, because if those best students are each in a different class, one of them will randomly get the best teacher and the others won't.)

A better question is: "Why should country X perform well in international Olympiads"?

It is just entertainment. It doesn't have any meaningful, deep or relevant impact on culture and quality of life of a country. At best it boost narcissistic jingoism and nationalism.

Life in a country won't get any better because someone that carries their flag appeared on television winning a medal. This is just a globalized version of the Roman "panis et circensis", but without the panis.

This magazine regularly publishes neo-fascist works that are clothed in techno-libertarian garb. Take this article [1]. Highlights include fawning homages to Werner von Braun while failing to mention his ardent pro-Nazi views, support for Cortes’ conquest of the new world, and a general vibe supporting the ubermensch/great man theory of history (as here).

They’ve recently toned things down a bit, but it’s hard not to notice this vibe once you see it.

[1] https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/04/25/entrepreneurial-stat...

> neo-fascist works that are clothed in techno-libertarian garb. Take this article [1]. Highlights include fawning homages to Werner von Braun while failing to mention his ardent pro-Nazi views, support for Cortes’ conquest of the new world, and a general vibe supporting the ubermensch/great man theory of history (as here).

I like how you imply that celebrating the space program, the Age of Discovery and math Olympiads is neo-fascist. Tells a lot about what neo-fascism apparently is.

Yes, it does.

Hungarian jews are also extremely smart anecdotally.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid...

Von Neumann, Wigner, and possibly Teller all went to the same central Budapest high school at about the same time, leading a friend to joke about the atomic bomb being basically a Hungarian high school science fair project.

Romania is wasting taxpayer money to groom bright students and then let them leave Romania for some higher GDP country

I would downvote you, but I won't, and instead I will leave a reply.

I was one of those students who left. Romania did not waste any more taxpayer money on me than on other students, and that money that it spent was really meager by any Western standards.

My kids now go to public school in NYC. The city spends north of $30k for each of them [1]. Yet, if they decide to leave the US nobody will complain that they were groomed with precious taxpayer money, and they betrayed the trust placed in them. It is understood that every person has the right pursue their own happiness the best way they can.

[1] https://www.schools.nyc.gov/about-us/funding/funding-our-sch...

În general, SUA nu are o problemă de "brain drain"

If they did, I'm sure you'd hear this complaint a lot more.

I'm assuming you went to a good school in Romania, with good teachers. Well the teacher's salary might be the same as any other school, but the quality of your teachers came at the expense of the quality of teaching in other schools.

You are a product of a neo-colonialist system.

In the age of knowledge work, brain drain from poor countries to rich countries is no different than stealing oil or gold resources.

Yes it works well for you, but that's because system is setup in that way.

Global capitalists are sharing a little bit of value with you so you remain content, while raping your country of all future potential by brain draining the nation.

In case the country decides to develop itself, instead of being a colony: they quickly reverse the election results and appoint their colonial administrator as president.

If you don't see the neocolonialism here, how capitalist is raping the future of your nation, I don't know how else to explain it to you

So what you suggest instead is that smart people from poor countries should stay where they are, even if it means they won't get the opportunity to fully use their talent (because that would be expensive, and the country does not have the money for that)? Like, maybe someone could go to USA and find a cure for cancer, but it's better if they stay in Romania and become e.g. a teacher instead?

During communism, many countries were literally surrounded by barbed wire to prevent their smartest people from escaping. But that didn't make those countries prosper. Yes, the smart people remained there, but they were not allowed to use their skills fully, so it didn't make a difference.

> If you don't see the neocolonialism here, how capitalist is raping the future of your nation, I don't know how else to explain it to you

You think communists raping you with a barbed wire is better? Maybe for the communists, but not for the people.

I think what China and India are doing is The right approach.

Gainthe knowledge, experience from capitalists, accumulate initial capital, then go back and build your own country once you have a name and expertise, connections, little bit of capital.

It doesn’t make sense for a Romanian to continue working for a capitalist and paying taxes that fund the genocide and oppression overseas. You are only making Zuckerbergs of this world a little bit more rich, instead of uplifting Romanian youth who are craving for someone like you to come and share expertise, knowledge, skills, jobs, etc.

Just bounce and lift up your own nation and be a hero for your own people, because for a global capitalist you are nobody - just another cost center and a line item in Excel spreadsheet, a potential for future cost cutting and offshoring.

A capitalist will forget about your existence after another round of layoff, but your own people will praise you forever

I think people who benefitted from elite-tier education in Romania, should feel some sense of civic duty to give something back to the country and to the education system, that sacrificed tens lf thousands of school students, and instead focused on providing You an elite olympic tier knowledge

By the way, China is for all practical purposes a capitalist country.

> go back and build your own country once you have a name and expertise

I agree that this would be a great outcome. But whether your country allows it or not, that depends on the country, not you.

Re China, I believe there is misunderstanding. China has free market economy, but China does not have big oligarchs running the country, the opposite of US.

In China, political and economic leadership are separate. Country is ran by the party, while economy is ran by small-med-large companies fiercely competing among themselves. Any oligarch trying to get political influence is quickly shut down (jack ma).

USA on the other hand are fully ran by the oligarchs, every single politician is beholden to special interest groups representing the big corporate capital, and nobody cares about the common man. Anyone trying to break into power representing the common man, at the expense of the big oligarchic capital, is quickly shut down (bernie)

USA wastes 1076x more money and us that have to live here could only hope most US-educated kids would please go elsewhere :)

The usual calculus here is that they don't capture ALL the upside of that training, but they capture plenty of it.

That's a problem with the opportunity in the country rather with the schools. Being able to produce exceptional students is an advantage, now figure out how to make them stay.

Romania was structurally handicapped after joining EU: they were forced to de-industrialize and lost their competitive manufacturing sectors, because Romania was not allowed to compete with other EU members.

I've seen this claim a lot, about various countries, but couldn't find any more detail on what the mechanisms of forced deindustrialisation might have been.

It's pretty typical for post-communist countries to lose their industries after being exposed to international competition, and probably even more so if you enter an open market like EU, but I wouldn't call it forced

UPD: ah, OK, they were indeed forced to privatise their industry, and it probably wasn't very competitive

you can judge policy by its outcomes, the countries that underwent neoliberal "privatisation" were deindustrialized, while countries that did not embrace neoliberal policies - managed to preserve their marquee industries and manufacturing, over time adapting and modernizing manufacturing to modern standards.

I noticed this phenomenon several years ago and came to the following conclusions: Romania is strongly multi-ethnic. Germans from Saxony and Swabia immigrated to Transylvania 800 years ago. A thousand years ago, people from northern India immigrated, whom we now know as Gypsies and who make up 8-10% of the population. In the south, the country was besieged by the Ottomans/Turks for 400 years. The cognitive differences between these ethnic groups are enormous.

Some time ago, I asked ChatGPT to find the winners of the Math Olympiads, their schools, and their places of birth. Most of the Olympiad winners attended elite schools in Bucharest, with few math participants coming from the south of the country and no participants who could be classified as Gypsies. But surprisingly many participants come from Transylvania.

In 2023, for example, a computer science Olympiad participant from Orăștie (Hunedoara County) won a silver medal. Orăștie is located in Transylvania and historically had a Saxon community. Brașov (Kronstadt) also recently produced medal winners: in 2025, a student from the Meșotă College in Brașov won silver at the Chemistry Olympiad. Cluj-Napoca (Klausenburg) also appears on the list – a student from the Bălcescu Lyceum there won silver at the Linguistics Olympiad in 2024. Timișoara (Temeswar)—also a western city with German history—was represented by a student (Carmen Sylva College) with an Honorable Mention in linguistics. These examples support the thesis that educational centers in the former Habsburg regions produce above-average talent.

Is there any further information about the ethnic origin of the Science Olympiad participants? I would be grateful for any information (even if it does not confirm the thesis).

Absolutely. That whole region (let's say Balkans+) has several different groups of people who are very different culturally and ethnically. And for some reason the press would blame whole countries for the crimes of specific minority groups. "Bulgarian gangs stealing cars", "Romanian gangs exploiting the UK benefits system", and so on.

I lost count of how many times I had to clarify to friends and family: "No, that's not representative of that country at all. I have friends and coworkers from there who are very well educated, hard workers, and good people. And you couldn't tell them apart from the rest of Europeans. Many of them won math/programming competitions and are smarter than me."

While most companies have a negative image of those countries due to media portrayals, investment banks in London figured it out so they fly whole recruiting teams there to hire graduates, _every year_. Some Big Tech companies figured this out, too. I've seen it first hand.

> No, that's not representative of that country at all

That goes for almost every country, no matter how culturally or ethnically homogeneous they are. This is how stereotypes work.

I disagree that there are cognitive differences between large ethnicities of people. Almost always, what we attribute as cognitive differences is differences in opportunity and societal power structures

When people say groups are different, such as one ethnic group from another, they are looking at averages. It has very little relevance to looking at the top performers in a field. Each country only brings six people to IMO.

> But surprisingly many participants come from Transylvania.

Makes sense, vampires have enough time to learn advanced math.

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