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Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

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Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#151

Post by username332211 »

morsecodist wrote: post #140
sinuhe69 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 onl…

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…

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?

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#152

Post by nottorp »

corimaith wrote: post #149
nottorp wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 centu…

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

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#153

Post by john-h-k »

ACCount37 wrote: post #138
somenameforme wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#154

Post by wizzwizz4 »

pillefitz wrote: post #141
a0-prw wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#155

Post by siva7 »

sinuhe69 wrote: post #126
progbits wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 onl…

> 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.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#156

Post by steveBK123 »

progbits wrote: post #101
laserbeam wrote: post #68

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 l…

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.

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.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#157

Post by fab13n »

alephnerd wrote: post #2

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, st…

> 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.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#158

Post by steveBK123 »

morsecodist wrote: post #140
sinuhe69 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 onl…

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…

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.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#159

Post by falcor84 »

username332211 wrote: post #151
morsecodist wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#160

Post by alecco »

eric-burel wrote: post #137

"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 si…

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.

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