Why Romania excels in international Olympiads • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#201

Post by oytis » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 5:26 PM UTC

siva7 wrote: post #161

oytis wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inste…

I might be wrong here, but I never heard that PISA has proved that averages matter more than top results, I thought that's just the axiom they are basing their assessments on.

I understand why fostering top performants is a hard sell in a globalised society though. Poor countries will lose top talent to rich countries anyway, and rich countries can rely on the stream of talent from the outside. For the scientific progress of humanity as a whole, having geniuses matters more than rising average level IMO though

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#202

Post by piombisallow » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 5:35 PM UTC

corimaith wrote: post #147

lozenge wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mea…

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

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

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#203

Post by scythe » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 5:35 PM UTC

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…

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.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#204

Post by somenameforme » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 5:50 PM UTC

Lu2025 wrote: post #168

ACCount37 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#205

Post by wizzwizz4 » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 6:07 PM UTC

medvezhenok wrote: post #195

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 analy…

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 ge…

> 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.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#206

Post by wizzwizz4 » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 7:16 PM UTC

medvezhenok wrote: post #196

tptacek wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> 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.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#207

Post by borski » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 7:29 PM UTC

GeoAtreides wrote: post #120

borski wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#208

Post by medvezhenok » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 7:37 PM UTC

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #206

medvezhenok wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 th…

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.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#209

Post by tptacek » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 8:17 PM UTC

medvezhenok wrote: post #196

tptacek wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#210

Post by tptacek » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 8:19 PM UTC

medvezhenok wrote: post #199

tptacek wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 un…

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).