221–230 of 251 posts
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> 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
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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.
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…
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.
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Are his arguments sound, though?
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.
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…
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…
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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.…
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 co…
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
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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…
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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 vo…
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.
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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.
only if their karma is low, OP's karma is not low
I was personally never motivated to go past county, but it was a fun time.