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Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

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Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#231

Post by saagarjha »

koolba wrote: post #123
saagarjha wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, you are an enlightened parent that is better than all those other parents that spoil their children and prevent them from achieving all that they could do. More seriously, though, good and bad parents exist everywhere. It is intellectually lazy to call other people's kids tendie eaters because you think they are underserved. Grow up, man.

> It is intellectually lazy to call other people's kids tendie eaters because you think they are underserved. It’s anecdata for sure, but it’s not a metaphor. I literally mean the parents are eating “real food” while regularly feeding the children just butter noodles and chicken fingers. The diet is a microcosm of their entire upbringing.

I ate plenty of junk when I was a child, too. Children love chicken nuggets and applesauce. Let them do their thing, within reason of course. I turned out ok.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#232

Post by wizzwizz4 »

medvezhenok wrote: post #208
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

Funny you should give 27^7 as an example, because I actually did get good at powers of 2 and 3. 27^7 is 3^21 is 3×81^5, which is easy to calculate in your head if you're good at multiples and powers of 8: it's just binomial expansion with the next row after 1 4 6 4 1, i.e. 1 5 10 10 5 1. (I used to be able to directly recall 1 5 10 10 5 1 and 1 6 15 20 15 6 1, but this is literally the first time I'm doing non-trivial mental arithmetic in a decade.) Multiplying a power of 2 by 5 is the same as halving and multiplying by 10, which reduces the problem to a simple addition of digits of small powers of 2 (^0 = 1, ^2 = 4, ^6 = 64, ^9 = 512, ^11 = 2048, ^15 = 32768), then a multiplication by 3 – both of which are easy to perform in a streaming fashion, if you have a suitable delay line. (I use the auditory processing delay line ("echoic memory"), which would probably work better if I spoke a language like Mandarin, where all digits have the same syllable length – but I got by. Some find the mental abacus more reliable, but I have no training in this approach.)

I only memorised my powers of 2 up to 2^16, powers of 3 up to 3^5, and powers of 5 up to 5^5, because the part that made it fun was only memorising things I'd calculated myself, in my head, and this was only an occasional game. If my goal had been "develop the skill of quick arithmetic", I would've memorised the first 12 powers of every prime below 12, and my times tables up to 100×100 – but I resented times tables, so never really memorised them until I (briefly) got really into division.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#233

Post by sinuhe69 »

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…

A few points for clarification:

-It’s a probabilistic model, so it only predicts the odd of a collapse

- Their main contribution was the creation and curation of a super detailed historical database: the Seshat. It spans almost 10000 years of human history with more than 400 polities from 30 regions around the world, using over 1,500 variables. Based on this data, Turchin & al devised the mathematical model for the prediction.

- One key area is to find surrogate data when others are not available. For ex. body size could be used to describe the nutrition and economic situation of the population.

- In 2010, Nature asked experts and super-forecasters for their prediction of 2020. Only Turchin predicted the coming collapse of America.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#234

Post by sinuhe69 »

username332211 wrote: post #179
steveBK123 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can you name some examples? Virtually every major revolution or civil war I can think of, would involve intelligent achievers who've made it. In fact, the core of the rebellion would be a class that's often vital for the exercise for political power, but won't be allowed access to that same power. English gentry, New England merchants, nobles of the robe, army officers, etc. Only the Russian revolution would involve…

Even the Russian Revolution was lead by elites: - Kerensky was lawyer - Lvov was an aristocrat - Lenin, Trotsky were highly educated and known for intellectual brilliance

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#235

Post by wizzwizz4 »

medvezhenok wrote: post #227
tptacek wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think if we agree that there are individual differences in predisposition towards juggling aptitude, and that the predisposition is mediated genetically somehow, and if juggling (in this hypothetical) is biologically advantageous for survival/reproduction on one of the islands (really stretching the analogy here) - then I don’t see a way how my 1000 years experiment doesn’t produce actual, population level genetic…

This is the crux of the issue. You assume, in the absence of evidence, that juggling aptitude predisposition is mediated genetically, in such a way that it is variable among humans; and you place the burden of proof on "somehow prove[ing] that [it] is not heritable" (emphasis mine). But it's far easier to prove the positive (in a world where the positive is true) than prove the negative (in a world where the positive is false), so the appropriate perspective to adopt if you want to investigate via experiment is "try to prove it true, and if we honestly fail, that's an argument that it's false".

If you don't intend to run the experiment, then different considerations dominate: you should justify this bias. Maybe you're drawing an analogy to something similar, which you know to work this way? Bias isn't the same thing as wrong, after all: but unjustified bias often is.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#236

Post by oytis »

slt2021 wrote: post #212
oytis wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a problem with the opportunity in the country rather with the schools. Being able to produce exceptional students is an advantage, now figure out how to make them stay.

Romania was structurally handicapped after joining EU: they were forced to de-industrialize and lost their competitive manufacturing sectors, because Romania was not allowed to compete with other EU members.

I've seen this claim a lot, about various countries, but couldn't find any more detail on what the mechanisms of forced deindustrialisation might have been.

It's pretty typical for post-communist countries to lose their industries after being exposed to international competition, and probably even more so if you enter an open market like EU, but I wouldn't call it forced

UPD: ah, OK, they were indeed forced to privatise their industry, and it probably wasn't very competitive

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#237

Post by vixen99 »

petre wrote: post #171
objektif wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Romanians I've spoken to all say they voted for Nicusor Dan because the other candidate(s) were/was so dire.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#238

Post by oytis »

username332211 wrote: post #179
steveBK123 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can you name some examples? Virtually every major revolution or civil war I can think of, would involve intelligent achievers who've made it. In fact, the core of the rebellion would be a class that's often vital for the exercise for political power, but won't be allowed access to that same power. English gentry, New England merchants, nobles of the robe, army officers, etc. Only the Russian revolution would involve…

The core of Russian revolution were highly educated nerds who would cancel their friends over slight differences in understanding of obscure socioeconomic theories

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#239

Post by slt2021 »

oytis wrote: post #236
slt2021 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Romania was structurally handicapped after joining EU: they were forced to de-industrialize and lost their competitive manufacturing sectors, because Romania was not allowed to compete with other EU members.

I've seen this claim a lot, about various countries, but couldn't find any more detail on what the mechanisms of forced deindustrialisation might have been. It's pretty typical for post-communist countries to lose their industries after being exposed to international competition, and probably even more so if you enter an open market like EU, but I wouldn't call it forced UPD: ah, OK, they were indeed forced to privat…

you can judge policy by its outcomes, the countries that underwent neoliberal "privatisation" were deindustrialized, while countries that did not embrace neoliberal policies - managed to preserve their marquee industries and manufacturing, over time adapting and modernizing manufacturing to modern standards.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#240

Post by eric-burel »

rciorba wrote: post #173
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…

> And the migration exists in the other direction, you'll be amazed by how many French dentists are studying in Romania. Those people don't really plan to stay in Romania. They intend to get their degrees then move back to Western Europe. Hell, most of my former high-school colleagues who became doctors or dentists, emigrated to Western Europe.

Agreed but what I mean is that 15 years ago you wouldn't have thought about studying medicine in East Europe, or building startups etc. And now people study in Romania, Warsaw is perceived as a great place for entrepreneurs and so on. It's just my personal biased impression but it feels good.
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