Why Romania excels in international Olympiads • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#161

Post by siva7 » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 1:44 PM UTC

oytis wrote: post #110

siva7 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

There aren't universally good teachers. A teacher who can help a good student achieve exceptional results will not necessarily be good at making sure an unmotivated student gets a bare minimum and vice versa. Unmotivated students need predefined structure, repetition, simplification and gamification. Talented ones need discussing first principles, being challenged, working at the edge of knowledge

We don't have to speculate on this. PISA research has described that effective teachers should adapt their teaching and also why a system like in Romania is a bad idea for the society (except for the elites). It is the second poorest country of the Union and one of the most unstable. The data and research is all public. It's not a popular opinion with this crowd here - but then you can argue against the science instead of populist opinions..

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#162

Post by wslh » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 1:46 PM UTC

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.

> 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.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#163

Post by alephnerd » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 1:52 PM UTC

fab13n wrote: post #157

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…

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.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#164

Post by kelipso » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 1:54 PM UTC

ido wrote: post #97

koolba wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 jus…

> 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.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#165

Post by username332211 » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 2:01 PM UTC

lukan wrote: post #150

username332211 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#166

Post by cgh » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 2:26 PM UTC

siva7 wrote: post #155

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…

> 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 politi…

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.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#167

Post by medvezhenok » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 2:29 PM UTC

jojomodding wrote: post #124

PunchTornado wrote: post #81

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"

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?

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#168

Post by Lu2025 » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 2:35 PM UTC

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…

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.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#169

Post by matthewdgreen » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 2:38 PM UTC

steveBK123 wrote: post #158

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…

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 degr…

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.)

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#170

Post by medvezhenok » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 2:42 PM UTC

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #154

pillefitz wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 al…

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?