Jewish Problems • Hacker News Board

Re: Jewish Problems

#51

Post by WalterGR » Fri, Nov 09, 2012, 10:52 AM UTC

pav3l wrote: post #2

I'm assuming this is a follow-up on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4752047 Wow, that is crazy!! Even though i have 2 math degrees and am doing applied math and stats for a living, there is a very good chance I'd fail such an exam if I took it now!

Just to add some context, the HN submission above is for an article entitled, "The Fifth problem: math and anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union"

The URL of the submission is http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-Fifth-problem--...

Re: Jewish Problems

#52

Post by eli_gottlieb » Fri, Nov 09, 2012, 1:37 PM UTC

continuations wrote: post #37

DaniFong wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Affirmative action? Are you mad? Perhaps you're unaware of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Jewish_pogroms_in_the_Russ... Affirmative action is not the same thing as making it artificially harder for a discriminated minority!

It is exactly like affirmative action: http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2011/04... "Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and researcher Alexandria Walton Radford examined data on students applying to college in 1997 and found what looks like different standards for different racial groups. They calculated that Asian-Americans needed nearly perfect SAT scores of 1550 to have the same chance of b…

There is a slight difference.

If elite American universities didn't penalize Asians, they would almost literally have no non-Asian students. This is because Asian-Americans optimize the entire lives of their youth around maximizing their admissions chances to elite universities. There's racism here, but there's also just Goodhart's Law, normal old American anti-intellectualism, and the proper acknowledgement that standardized exam scores show very little about a university applicant's real life prospects.

Part of turning 18 in the USA is making the transition from subservient child to independent adult, over a period of years (usually by 26 you're considered definitely adult or way behind). Part of the problem with Asian-Americans is, they don't make the transition. Striver-immigrant culture and extreme focus on family (at one time a part of Jewish-American immigrant culture too, often more an immigrant thing than a particular culture's thing) cause people to overoptimize their kids' upbringing on being good little subservient worker-bee children, often leaving them semi-crippled when required to function as independent adults.

And then let's not even get into the cultural differences in areas of authority, ego and freedom between East Asia and America, which put Asians at a severe disadvantage due to their inclination, ground in by "Chinese mothers" over periods of years, to expect being ordered around all the time.

Before anyone calls me a vicious racist, a Chinese student in a class at university once referred to me as "more Asian than the Asians". I like to look back on how completely wrong he was :-).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Re: Jewish Problems

#53

Post by eli_gottlieb » Fri, Nov 09, 2012, 1:43 PM UTC

taejo wrote: post #46

goldfeld wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because you have a name for non-Jews doesn't make it a cohesive group and most importantly nowhere near a minority. It's insane to say discriminating against a minority is like affirmative action for everyone else. So if I don't like Bob I could phrase it that it's not that I don't like him--I do!-- it's just that I like everyone else better (including other people I dislike). And for someone to fall for that wo…

> most importantly nowhere near a minority. Affirmative action is not just for minorities... in some (many?) places, the historically excluded group form a majority.

And yet, Russians have never been the historically excluded group in Russia. Jews were.

Re: Jewish Problems

#54

Post by eli_gottlieb » Fri, Nov 09, 2012, 1:48 PM UTC

ucee054 wrote: post #41

davidkatz wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unnecessary bashing. The OP singled Jews out, which framed this discussion mostly around Jews. Prejudice against Jews is called anti semitism. There's really nothing to see here, nobody implied that there was no discrimination against other groups.

Well in the first place framing this discussion mostly around jews is precisely the problem. Don't you understand why it is offensive? The same way it's offensive when my jewish relatives claim the Nazi genocide was the worst catastrophe in all history , conveniently forgetting the Cultural Revolution, the Cambodian Killing Fields, the Armenian Genocide etc etc So I don't like the use of the word "anti-semitism" in t…

The basic problem here is that Russia is blatantly, horrifically racist in general. I'm sharing an apartment with a Russian Jew who shows no outward signs of Jewish practice or culture, but whose father nonetheless had to live a double-life between Russia and America just because he was descended from Jewish stock. That's plainly racial antisemitism and every bit deserving of the word.

Re: Jewish Problems

#55

Post by eli_gottlieb » Fri, Nov 09, 2012, 1:49 PM UTC

charlesjshort wrote: post #50

Jews invented racial discrimination. Let a gentile apply to a Jewish school, even if his father is Jewish and he practices Judaism they will turn him down if his mother is not ethnically Jewish.

You actually can't see the difference between religious law being used to discriminate among applicants to a private, parochial, religious K-12 school and discrimination at a public, state-funded institution based on inescapable racial identities recorded by the government at birth?

Re: Jewish Problems

#56

Post by shmerl » Fri, Nov 09, 2012, 3:53 PM UTC

pandaman wrote: post #44

jvm wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe this troll comment is the top comment. > Our team of the best eight Soviet students, during the month we had the problems, solved only half of them. Those questions weren't hard. They were impossible. The point was simply to not allow any undesirables to pass. Higher standards for Asians might be bullshit but it's not the same as literally keeping all Asians out regardless of skill.

The entrance math exam in MSU is not pass/fail but graded. There are two math exams (at least in the "math department", I imagine she meant either Mech-Mat or VMK), written and oral. Written exam consists of 6 problems with the passing mark 3 and maximum 5 (you only need to solve 5 correctly, 5th and 6th problems are the hardest and usually allow a choice between an algebra and a geometry problem, giving the time lim…

Jews were not completely kept out. There were admitted with a census. I.e. there was a fixed small percentage that was permitted to be accepted, and the rest were to be rejected using these kind of tactics. The obviously antisemitic nature of those methods was practically government sanctioned, but nowhere officially articulated. This existed until USSR fell apart in the beginning of 1990s. Since then this discrimination is practically gone. (Now there are no oral exams altogether anyway).

Re: Jewish Problems

#57

Post by pandaman » Fri, Nov 09, 2012, 4:15 PM UTC

shmerl wrote: post #56

pandaman wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entrance math exam in MSU is not pass/fail but graded. There are two math exams (at least in the "math department", I imagine she meant either Mech-Mat or VMK), written and oral. Written exam consists of 6 problems with the passing mark 3 and maximum 5 (you only need to solve 5 correctly, 5th and 6th problems are the hardest and usually allow a choice between an algebra and a geometry problem, giving the time lim…

Jews were not completely kept out. There were admitted with a census. I.e. there was a fixed small percentage that was permitted to be accepted, and the rest were to be rejected using these kind of tactics. The obviously antisemitic nature of those methods was practically government sanctioned, but nowhere officially articulated. This existed until USSR fell apart in the beginning of 1990s. Since then this discrimina…

Unless it's an official policy rejecting somebody using these tactics is impossible: everyone get the same written test and the "ticket" questions on the oral test are fixed and randomly chosen .

You can definitely make it less likely to be admitted for certain groups (e.g. people from out of city who would need a dorm room, there are only so many rooms) or more likely (e.g. minorities or "natzmen") but the article and comments imply the examiners had full ability to reject Jews. This was simply impossible.

Later is actually easier than former because while an unfairly low grade will have to be defended in front of several official committees an unfairly high grade will only draw attention of few students.

PS. Sorry to learn the oral test is gone. Though even during my time (91-96) the number of applications dropped dramatically and if this trend continued they probably have less applications than places by now.

Re: Jewish Problems

#58

Post by shmerl » Fri, Nov 09, 2012, 7:06 PM UTC

pandaman wrote: post #57

shmerl wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jews were not completely kept out. There were admitted with a census. I.e. there was a fixed small percentage that was permitted to be accepted, and the rest were to be rejected using these kind of tactics. The obviously antisemitic nature of those methods was practically government sanctioned, but nowhere officially articulated. This existed until USSR fell apart in the beginning of 1990s. Since then this discrimina…

Unless it's an official policy rejecting somebody using these tactics is impossible: everyone get the same written test and the "ticket" questions on the oral test are fixed and randomly chosen . You can definitely make it less likely to be admitted for certain groups (e.g. people from out of city who would need a dorm room, there are only so many rooms) or more likely (e.g. minorities or "natzmen") but the article a…

I disagree. The policy was "official" in a sense of coming from above. But they attempted to wrap it around in "natural causes".

> but the article and comments imply the examiners had full ability to reject Jews. This was simply impossible.

There are multiple evidences that it was going on. I'm not familiar with exact mechanics of how those failure problems were given to undesirables (it was before my time). But it's a historic fact that it was happening on a massive scale. There were even "Jewish" institutes, like MIIT which got disproportionally big percentage of Jews, because of the census policy in MSU (Mekhmat & VMK).

> Sorry to learn the oral test is gone.

In many colleges there are no entry tests at all these days. Major ones like MSU have written exams.

See https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%95%D0%B4%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%8B...

Re: Jewish Problems

#59

Post by ucee054 » Fri, Nov 09, 2012, 10:06 PM UTC

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #54

ucee054 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well in the first place framing this discussion mostly around jews is precisely the problem. Don't you understand why it is offensive? The same way it's offensive when my jewish relatives claim the Nazi genocide was the worst catastrophe in all history , conveniently forgetting the Cultural Revolution, the Cambodian Killing Fields, the Armenian Genocide etc etc So I don't like the use of the word "anti-semitism" in t…

The basic problem here is that Russia is blatantly, horrifically racist in general. I'm sharing an apartment with a Russian Jew who shows no outward signs of Jewish practice or culture, but whose father nonetheless had to live a double-life between Russia and America just because he was descended from Jewish stock . That's plainly racial antisemitism and every bit deserving of the word.

Agreed.

Are you clear that "anti-semitism" carries some meaning other than "prejudice against jews"? So if you use it to mean "prejudice against jews" it is a euphemism. I can give you the history of the term if you like.

Re: Jewish Problems

#60

Post by charlesjshort » Sat, Nov 10, 2012, 12:44 AM UTC

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #55

charlesjshort wrote: post #50

Jews invented racial discrimination. Let a gentile apply to a Jewish school, even if his father is Jewish and he practices Judaism they will turn him down if his mother is not ethnically Jewish.

You actually can't see the difference between religious law being used to discriminate among applicants to a private, parochial, religious K-12 school and discrimination at a public, state-funded institution based on inescapable racial identities recorded by the government at birth?

If you've been subject to the discrimination it probably feels the same. public/private whatever you call them, they are all just groups of people, and exclusionary judgment based on a couple generations of dna, well I think THAT should be reserved for haShem only. Live by the sword die by the sword, reciprocity, lex talionis, karma, ... almost always catches up.