In this country many teachers have been taught that it's important for kids to be able to use a range of approaches to solve a problem.
They then force them to use each of the prescribed set of methods even when they are totally inappropriate for the task. Any deviation from the method they are told to use for that question is wrong. No creation of your own adapted methods is acceptable.
In other words, the teachers were taught that kids should use different methods, but seemingly weren't taught why.
When my kid was three I encountered this lovely book and thought I'd read it to attempt to replicate something like it (despite all the warnings that it's a journal and not a guide); unfortunately I never got around to finishing the book (nothing against the book, just got distracted) and now the kid's already past seven :) But what little I read was delightful; thanks for posting this summary!
I have a similar experience. The book skips the first 20 weeks. Many of the activities require materials and I could have benefited from a more prescriptive curriculum. Some other math circle curricula are not as inspiring but are much easier to follow.
I have this book, it's a fun read but difficult to replicate on your own. Tried on my children but it's hard work and I'm not a mathematician like the author and the society is different.
> All joking aside, we fledgling mathematicians understood that the single most important thing was not raw intelligence or knowledge (Americans tend to lag behind in the latter compared to all international students). What mattered was passion. The way to become successful in mathematics, like almost every endeavor, is to care about it, to love it, to obsess over it.
This is the most important point from the article. My theory is that if you are not obsessed with something, you won’t be good enough with it, wether it’s a math, coding, business or something else… Thats how most of us got started in tech from the early ages.
I think this must be a very stupid question, but I’ll ask it anyway. I always thought the Soviet Union was smaller than the US population wise, and really did punch above their weight. But Soviet Union census of 1970 lists 241,720,134 people, while the US census of 1970 lists 203,392,031 people.
If not, is the belief that the Soviet Union was smaller than the US population widespread and wrong? If it is widespread and wrong, where’s it come from? (Although, I must admit the possibility that it isn’t widespread, and was just unusually wrong. In which case the answer is just that I’m unusually bad at geopolitics, which would not be surprising at all).
To be fair, the US and Western Europe were a somewhat combined bloc wrt. trade and being allies. So in that respect the combined USSRs population is smaller? But purely US v USSR, the latter has always had more people
The SU and Eastern Europe countries were also such a 'combined block' though (both for trade via COMECON and militarily via the TFCMA (aka 'Warsaw Pact'). Although AFAIK Western Europe had a much higher population than the Eastern European socialist countries.
But in general, the education and health care systems were usually the 'flag ships' with easy and free access for the 'working class' (which also means extreme discimination against anybody else though).
I don't think anybody except you thought it was smaller. Why are you suggesting theres a widespread misconception instead of the more likely alternative - you made a mistake?
> These days, the same scenes are dominated by Chinese and Indian kids. But China and India have large populations — the Russians were punching way about their weight, demographically speaking.
> Well, with the Soviets it all went in the opposite direction: they had a smaller population, a worse starting industrial base, a lower GDP, and a vastly less efficient economic system. How, then, did they maintain military and technological parity1 with the United States for so long?
The truth is, the Soviet bloc consistently made lower quality stuff or had much poorer training.
There's are a persistent set of myths that both the Soviets and the western arms manufacturers like to perpetuate.
The t-34 tank was the greatest tank ever (sometimes had 10:1 losses offset by 14:1 manufacturing)
The ak-47 is the best due to is reliability (poor tolerances made it both reliable and astoundingly inaccurate)
Soviet/russian tanks have not come out on top in any conflict for the past 50 years. On the battlefields of Ukraine, the t72 has been infamous for its design flaws wherein even mild penetration to the gun autoloader housed in the turret ring often leads to catastrophic explosions instantly killing all the crew inside.
In Israel's fights against Syria, syrian Soviet tanks had a critical design flaw wherein they were not able to shoot downward at an angle, effectively making them sitting ducks.
The last time Soviet jets had parity with the west was when both sides were copying the same German jet fighter designs appropriated from Focke-wulf at the end of world War 2.
Repeatedly in actual combat situations, the soviet equipment fares poorly... In Israel, Iraq, and Ukraine. Perhaps the only conflicts Soviet equipment has been used effectively is when Iraq deployed its mostly Soviet weapons against Irans mostly American weapons and even that's arguable considering the United States backed Saddam (and later obliterated his army with more modern western technology)
The author raises an interesting question as to how the Soviets produced so much scientific talent, but his discussion of math circles strikes me as more of a tangent than a convincing answer. Were these math circles really so widespread, and were they a big part of producing mathematical and scientific question? He doesn't address this. However, the book he is reviewing is available online [1] and I see from skimming it that Zvonkin says only one of his students ultimately chose math as a profession. My hunch is that the structure of the formal education system in the USSR played a larger role.
If you study much of 20th century mathematics and physics, you'll certainly find Soviet mathematicians showing up everywhere. Control theory, probability, nonlinear differential equations, etc.
Just from the names of theorems alone, it's pretty hard to miss.
The Soviets produced a lot of outstanding mathematicians.
It's remarkable in absolute terms and it's even more remarkable considering that Soviet education was generally anti-science for much of its existence (e.g. see [0]).
IIRC Stalin eventually left a group of mathematicians and physicists alone because it was clear that if they were suppressed the Soviet Union couldn't win wars or plan the economy.
My initial hypothesis would be that creating this kind of playground in the otherwise dismal intellectual atmosphere, combined with the ability to select the best people from all over the empire, and the urgency and funding that came with the wars and cold war, played a major role in their ability to do important work.
Russian was a scientific power in the 19th Century before Soviet Union, and continued during the Soviet era. The west had limited access to it, due to the Cold War.
Soviet Union wasn't called a superpower for nothing. USSR had many world class achievements in scientific and applied areas, and some organizational achievements in social and manufacturing areas. There are examples and counterexamples, but the result is what we have, and while at some areas ex-Soviets were seen as backwards people in early 1990-s, in some others they really brought some positive advancements to the West - or First World - when the borders became open.
Case in point: The reason why the US heavily relied on Soviet rocket engines for their launches for ~15 years (before SpaceX dominance) was because they were simply more advanced and cost effective. Material science apparently was a step above - Soviet scientists were able to create an alloy for use in oxygen-rich engines which was unbelievable to Western counterparts till they visited and had it demonstrated.
This is one example, and there could be many - both where USSR had an edge and where it was behind. I believe here we want to have the overall picture - and that picture was that there actually were some novelties which were interesting on the West, even though in overall quality of life and some associated parameters USSR was notably losing. Or, saying it from another end, USSR wasn't advanced enough to avoid dissolution after - not necessarily caused by - the Cold war, even though it had some achievements unavailable on the West.
Quantify in my opinion requires qualify because, how many is "a lot?" But broad strokes, the USSR was an intellectual powerhouse. Add as many "in spite of"'s as you like, but in my opinion the "a lot" target is achieved. You mention science and I'll get to that, but I want to first target what I feel is a general misconception of the Soviet Union as like, a bleak concrete-ridden, muddy backwater of labor camps (it kinda was of course) with nothing to contribute to the world.
Post revolutionary periods always produce fantastic art, literature, and social experiments. See post-revolutionary American religious scene for an example. In the Soviet Union, there's a clumping of great literature around 1917. Summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_literature#Early_post-...
> The Imaginists were post-Revolution poetic movement, similar to English-language Imagists, that created poetry based on sequences of arresting and uncommon images. The major figures include Sergei Yesenin, Anatoly Marienhof, and Rurik Ivnev.[65] Another important movement was the Oberiu (1927–1930s), which included the most famous Russian absurdist Daniil Kharms (1905–1942), Konstantin Vaginov (1899–1934), Alexander Vvedensky (1904–1941) and Nikolay Zabolotsky (1903–1958).[66][67] Other famous authors experimenting with language included the novelists Boris Pilnyak (1894–1938), Yuri Olesha (1899–1960), Andrei Platonov (1899–1951) and Artyom Vesyoly (1899–1938), the short-story writers Isaak Babel (1894–1940) and Mikhail Zoshchenko (1894–1958).
Sorry for the big copy paste, but, there's just so many of them, and to literature nerds, what they did was "groundbreaking." I know it sounds silly but let us literature nerds have our thing.
Then there's a bunch of fun leftist / communist poetry, from Vladimir Mayakovsky and Nikolai Tikhonov (the "Could nails from such people be fashioned" guy).
And on and on. Art had some interesting characters as well, "in spite of" the Socialist Realism thing. Isaak Brodsky, for example.
Re: science, as someone else linked, efforts were hampered slightly by the repression of science that was perceived as in opposition to dialectical materialism, but in general the Soviet Union seemed very determined to create a lot of engineers.
You have Fields medal winners: Grigory Margulis (interestingly he suffered from the Soviet antisemitism mentioned in this article), Vladimir Drinfeld, and Sergei Novikov. And you have nobel prize winners such as Nikolay Semenov, Nikolay Basov + Alexander Prokhorov, Pavel Cherenkov (the Cherenkov radiation guy) + Ilya Frank + Igor Tamm, Leonid Kantorovich (basically invented linear programming), Pyotr Kapitsa, and Lev Landau.
Then there's the obvious such as the fact that the Soviets were first to put a satellite in orbit, first to put a human in orbit (arguably far more useful than putting a human on the moon, though putting a human on the moon is probably more inspiring).
What is interesting is how during the time these may not be "contributions to science" due to the USA and the Soviet Union often not sharing advancements in science with eachother because of the Cold War. Imagine if the two nations had been cooperating with eachother. Then again maybe there wouldn't have been a "Space Race."
This book and the culture it come from are so influential, that many people who did "enrichment" have already been exposed to many of the activities in the book. Most famous may be the Scratch JR / code.org introductory computer programming, but with pencil and paper.
> All joking aside, we fledgling mathematicians understood that the single
most important thing was not raw intelligence or knowledge (Americans tend
to lag behind in the latter compared to all international students). What
mattered was passion. The way to become successful in mathematics, like
almost every endeavor, is to care about it, to love it, to obsess over it. And in
this, Eastern Europeans had a clear superiority, a cultural advantage. They
had been trained, from an early age, to love mathematics more intensely.
IMHO this is what drove American superiority in software engineering for several decades. The people who self selected into software engineering really loved the field.
I suspect we'll see a continuous slow decrease in all aspects of quality of software as those who have a genuine love and passion for the field are replaced by those in it just for the money.
Other examples I can think of (from my Gen Z experience, growing up in SoCal):
- Elementary school: Making custom action replay codes, hacking game saves with programs, CheatEngine/memory/hex editor and following YouTube tutorials, Javascript "document.contentEditable=true" hack and changing stuff on websites, pressing F12 and changing random javascript code until something interesting happens or breaks.
- Middle school: making sites on Weebly/freewebs, embedding chats and flash games
on them, sharing them during computer class
- High school: Making PHP sites/vbulliten/Newgrounds/flash games, later iOS apps
I wasn't the only one doing these things. There were always like 3 other kids like me in any classroom that would do the same things.
Most of us ended up becoming passionate SWEs, besides one that became an accountant.
Hasn’t that happened already? As someone who started coding a long time ago and who did it for fun, I’ve seen the industry move from enthusiasts to mainstream and finally to massive comp optimisers who spend more time on angling for a promotion than building.
I’ve fallen in and out of enjoyment of engineering many times. But I still come back because I love making something that adds value.
There will always be space for the builders who give a shit.
> IMHO this is what drove American superiority in software engineering for several decades. The people who self selected into software engineering really loved the field.
People in the Soviet Union had much less access to computers than in the US. And the first years after the fall of the USSR were quite lean for the vast majority of the population. Only by the late 90-s people in the xUSSR started getting enough money to buy computers en-masse.
> I suspect we'll see a continuous slow decrease in all aspects of quality of software as those who have a genuine love and passion for the field are replaced by those in it just for the money.
This seems narrow minded. In the early days of software development, the barrier for entry was incredibly high. The possibility of people making high quality, unique software is greater than it ever has been.
It's also narrow minded to insist that only passion for engineering itself can produce high quality results. It's like claiming famously wealthy musicians can't and don't make remarkable, impactful music.
> It's also narrow minded to insist that only passion for engineering itself can produce high quality results. It's like claiming famously wealthy musicians can't and don't make remarkable, impactful music.
I think you're making a logical fallacy, or at least you seem to be implying that the set of "famously wealthy" people is disjoint with the set of people who are passionate.
Sure, famously wealthy musicians can make great music. So can poor ones. But I haven't seen a lot of lazy, uninspired musicians make great music.
I never said anything about laziness, so I’m not sure why you’re adding that qualifier. I take it you believe that without pure love or enjoyment in something, a person could only be lazy.
Inspiration doesn’t require passion for the art to come first, or even at all. Look at Gene Simmons. He co-founded one of the most successful, influential rock bands ever, driven by the goal of becoming rich and running a successful business, not by an unadulterated love for music.
John Carmack, a juvenile delinquent, dropped out of university and went on career programming, soon upending the game industry.
Linus Torvalds released Linux while being a university student, five years before obtaining a master's degree.
Vitalik Buterin dropped out of university and created Etherium, funded by a grant from Thiel foundation. Whatever you may say about cryptocurrencies, Etherium is a nontrivial piece of software, showing remarkable longevity in the fast-moving field.
None of them had a ton of formal qualifications. None of them had to obtain a license. They could just sit at a computer, write great software, and release it to the world, changing the world quite much.
What they all have is a passion for (and resulting deep knowledge of) computers, mathematics, logic, plus independent thinking, and, well, not asking for permission.
This is what a low barrier to entry plus universal availability of powerful tools (computers, compliers, etc), and books leads to.
(High barriers bring very different results: look now many small aircraft still fly with engines designed in 1950s, burning leaded avgas. A worthy challenger still fails to step over the sky-high barrier.)
For Carmack and Torvalds, I’d argue the barrier to entry was still very high at that time. Both had the opportunity to attend university, which in itself gave them access to people and resources they otherwise wouldn’t have had. Additionally, they had access to personal computers when almost the entire world did not, along with the time and resources to focus on their interests. They were extremely fortunate to have that kind of privilege.
As for Buterin, I have no idea who they are, so I can’t speak to them.
> IMHO this is what drove American superiority in software engineering for several decades. The people who self selected into software engineering really loved the field.
IMO it was funding that made the difference. People outside of USA did not have any less passion towards the field.
Survivorship bias. Eastern Europeans are actually very bad with math, no better than your regular American. But immigrants you see were very really motivated to leave the post-Soviet hell, so they had to show excellent results.
Math is taught horrifyingly badly in Eastern Europe. It presented as something extremely overcomplicated and most teachers, having a laughably low salary they barely survive on, don't care teaching it in a way kids would understand.
> Survivorship bias. Eastern Europeans are actually very bad with math, no better than your regular American.
Most people everywhere are bad at math. However, Eastern Europeans and Asians have a larger percentage of people who end up good at math compared to the US. And it's not even close, if you look at math competitions. Immigrants and children of immigrants are over-represented among the US team members.
I've long pondered a similar question - why are there so many Indian and Pakistani women in SWE in comparison to western women? Are Indian/Pakistani women better than western women in engineering? Is the education there better? How are these countries successful in mitigating this gender gap?
My theory is that this is actually caused by sexism and gender discrimination. There are smart, intelligent women everywhere, but due to sexism many career options have been traditionally closed for women in these societies, while SWE (as a completely new field) isn't. Their high numbers can be explained by the lack of opportunities in other areas. If you're an intelligent woman in Pakistan, IT is one of the few ways to prosper, meanwhile a woman in the West has way more opportunities.
I think it used to be the same principle with science in EE. Like, you're a highly intelligent person, you strive for success and recognition. In US, the classic path is entrepreneurship, but that was pretty much closed / very difficult in the Soviet block. You could get into politics, but you have to bend the knee to the party line. Science is one of the few avenues where you can thrive intellectually, get recognition and keep yourself relatively unaffected by politics.
There is a general finding that women go into engineering fields (and other relatively high-paying fields) more the poorer their country is. Neither "software engineering" nor "India / Pakistan" is an exceptional case; there is no reason to look at the specifics of the field or the region.
Usually the theory is that women everywhere hate engineering, but poor women may suck it up and go into engineering anyway because they need the money.
Immigrants and children of immigrants are over-represented among the US team members.
Still survivorship bias. Immigrants from China and India are not selected randomly from the population, they're selected by their means and determination to emigrate. Furthermore, if you include the fact that the US caps the number of visas granted on a per-country-of-origin basis and the fact that China and India have the 2 largest populations in the world, the people who successfully obtain visas from these countries are the survivors of the most stringent selection process.
> Eastern Europeans and Asians have a larger percentage of people who end up good at math compared to the US.
These are two different claims:
Eastern Europeans and Asians who are in the US have a larger percentage of people who end up good at math.*
Eastern Europeans and Asians who are in their respective countries have a larger percentage of people who end up good at math.*
If you are making the first claim, you're just restating the parent comment's survivorship bias claim. If you're making the second, then you are making a strong claim, but it would be interesting to see data behind it. (I don't have any insight one way or the other.)
There are lots of Chinese and Indians, are you sure that there is a larger percentage who are good at math? When you take 1.4 billion x2 compared to 380 million Americans, the percentages don’t have to be high. Immigrants from those two countries at least, also tend to be in highly educated and more well off segments of those societies. You could find a lot of Chinese refugees from Vietnam in the early 80s not actually good at math, and instead having typical problems refugee communities have. You’ll also find this in African immigrant populations today if you compare refugees from east Africa to Africans who went the work visa route. Race isn’t really an indicator of anything compared to education background and the resources your family has access to (and inter generational knowledge on using those resources).
> Immigrants and children of immigrants are over-represented
That's exactly the bias. Immigrants are self-selected for higher risk tolerance, higher endurance, often wider or deeper knowledge, and readiness to think hard and work hard to achieve a better place in life.
Unsurprisingly, these same qualities help achieve results in studying and professional career.
Coming from a culture that respects abstracted knowledge (Chinese, Jewish, Russian, Indian, etc) helps additionally, but is by far not sufficient by itself.
> They had been trained, from an early age, to love mathematics more intensely.
Nonsense, sounds like post-hoc rationalization. Maybe talk to some actual Slavic people. Sure the Russians had "math clubs" and "chess clubs" but it wasn't as if the US didn't have RadioShack and garage/ham culture. Talk to some of the older generations that still remember the Berlin Wall and you might also understand why so many women from the ex USSR states are in STEM while it's the opposite in the West. TL;dr: STEM was a quick way to prosperity, the eastern bloc countries were poor, and engineers are useful even in a communist regime. They studied math because there wasn't much else they couldn't have done.
And this attitude was everywhere. For example, getting low marks and then overcoming them was a theme for a lot of iconic Soviet cartoons and stories ("The country of undone homework", "Vovka in a Faraway Kingdom", etc.). I have not seen anything similar in the US.
EDIT: wait a moment, now I'm confused: if her (Lena's?) marks weren't an issue for induction, why does it matter that her friend got jealous and ruined her test?
(or did I get this story right, but it wasn't necessarily a general all-Union thing, just that in this specific case a 2 would have been problematic for her troop/school/family?)
> Hah. In the USSR an average engineer earned less money than an average worker.
But in the USSR, your ability to buy something was generally not limited by the amount of money you had. It was limited by whether you'd be allowed to buy the thing for other reasons.
> But STEM was seen as far more prestigious than manual labor.
Sounds like an engineer's money may have been worth much more than a laborer's?
> Sounds like an engineer's money may have been worth much more than a laborer's?
Not in general. It heavily depended on individual circumstances.
For example, machinists could earn a bit more money by using factory tools (lathes, drills, etc.) to make replacement parts for cars. And a lot of workers were stealing some of the product their factory was making. There was a common attitude of "everything around is common, so everything's around is mine".
On the other hand, engineers had more career perspectives. They were more likely to be promoted to managerial positions.
Universities in eastern bloc were really elite places. Only low single digits percent of people were able to enroll. Also majority of degrees were in STEM, education or medicine as they were deemed useful for the state. To get degree outside of STEM, political background of your family was checked and things like having family member (even say uncle) who emigrated outside of country or having grandparents who owned businesses or farm decades ago will get you discarded. So the smart kids usually have very limited path forward, so STEM it was (if you were lucky)
Regarding Soviet prowess, I always considered the fact that going to higher education considerably shortened and made easier your military draft term to be a main factor.
Everyone who could went to university, because why wouldn't you? This incentive pressure and selection bias we're probably insane.
The USSR was indeed the most reading country in the world.
Soviet citizens spent approx. 11 hours a week reading books, newspapers and journals on average, which was twice more as the British, North Americans and French people did. It was the findings of the world study of 1966.
Not a good metric for producing scientific talent, and it doesn't distinguish reading fiction from actually educating yourself. For the purposes of producing scientific talent, reading fiction helps you as much as watching TV.
I don’t know any definition of actually educating yourself that would exclude reading fiction. And why are you focused on the purpose of producing scientific talent?
Yes, people had a lot of time for hobbies. Reading, writing poems, electronics.
Sometimes I watch old interviews of people on the streets and compare with the interviews they do on the streets now. It's night and day. Even people, like working class, drunk in a bar in the end of 80's collapse were more well spoken and intelligent then the people now. Either it's Putin, emigration or capitalism or whatever but there is a serious degradation in the populace.
I've noticed this aspect in general of revolutionary societies. What I'm personally quite selfishly interested in is whether this is unique to leftist revolutionary societies - were Germans or Italians in 1936 having spirited debates about fascism and how best to serve the Fatherland? I have no idea, from what I've read so far it sounds like no.
Meanwhile, for example in Spain in the same time period, there was a remarkably broad activation of the population in revolutionary activism and political engagement, which allegedly doubled productivity and dramatically increased agricultural yields, which to me indicates that the anarchists were basically everywhere (how else did they syndicalize such wide swaths of the economy?).
Similarly there's the whole French Revolution cafe / salon culture.
He almost lost me when he said the USSR was punching about its weight with a lower population which is untrue. The USSR had a significantly higher population than the US during the Cold War.
If Russians punch way above their weight demographically and are so good at math - how come then that the French have even more Fields medals per capita?
Maybe this article was written by a Russian troll farm, as it is essentially claiming Russian math supremacy.
omg, 'midwit teacher deducts marks for failing to write answers in a designated format'
this is exactly the math teacher my kids have. So frustrating.
In this country many teachers have been taught that it's important for kids to be able to use a range of approaches to solve a problem.
They then force them to use each of the prescribed set of methods even when they are totally inappropriate for the task. Any deviation from the method they are told to use for that question is wrong. No creation of your own adapted methods is acceptable.
In other words, the teachers were taught that kids should use different methods, but seemingly weren't taught why.
When my kid was three I encountered this lovely book and thought I'd read it to attempt to replicate something like it (despite all the warnings that it's a journal and not a guide); unfortunately I never got around to finishing the book (nothing against the book, just got distracted) and now the kid's already past seven :) But what little I read was delightful; thanks for posting this summary!
I have a similar experience. The book skips the first 20 weeks. Many of the activities require materials and I could have benefited from a more prescriptive curriculum. Some other math circle curricula are not as inspiring but are much easier to follow.
Yep, I thought the idea seemed cool, but I couldn't figure out how to execute it.
I have this book, it's a fun read but difficult to replicate on your own. Tried on my children but it's hard work and I'm not a mathematician like the author and the society is different.
> All joking aside, we fledgling mathematicians understood that the single most important thing was not raw intelligence or knowledge (Americans tend to lag behind in the latter compared to all international students). What mattered was passion. The way to become successful in mathematics, like almost every endeavor, is to care about it, to love it, to obsess over it.
This is the most important point from the article. My theory is that if you are not obsessed with something, you won’t be good enough with it, wether it’s a math, coding, business or something else… Thats how most of us got started in tech from the early ages.
I think this must be a very stupid question, but I’ll ask it anyway. I always thought the Soviet Union was smaller than the US population wise, and really did punch above their weight. But Soviet Union census of 1970 lists 241,720,134 people, while the US census of 1970 lists 203,392,031 people.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970_Soviet_census
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970_United_States_census
Is this statistic somehow not representative?
If so, what’s up with that?
If not, is the belief that the Soviet Union was smaller than the US population widespread and wrong? If it is widespread and wrong, where’s it come from? (Although, I must admit the possibility that it isn’t widespread, and was just unusually wrong. In which case the answer is just that I’m unusually bad at geopolitics, which would not be surprising at all).
The OP is wrong. The USSR had a larger population than the US by around 20% from 1950 to 1990: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000380594.pdf
Chances are he's only counting the population of Russia proper, which would be a bit like only counting the US East Coast population.
My guess is rather that he's conflating the US with US + Western Europe.
And then you can make the appropriately similar conflation of USSR with Warsaw pact countries.
Probably just conflating Soviet Union with Russia, which does have a smaller population. The Soviet Union encompassed so many more countries.
To be fair, the US and Western Europe were a somewhat combined bloc wrt. trade and being allies. So in that respect the combined USSRs population is smaller? But purely US v USSR, the latter has always had more people
The SU and Eastern Europe countries were also such a 'combined block' though (both for trade via COMECON and militarily via the TFCMA (aka 'Warsaw Pact'). Although AFAIK Western Europe had a much higher population than the Eastern European socialist countries.
But in general, the education and health care systems were usually the 'flag ships' with easy and free access for the 'working class' (which also means extreme discimination against anybody else though).
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/1...
I don't think anybody except you thought it was smaller. Why are you suggesting theres a widespread misconception instead of the more likely alternative - you made a mistake?
The article strongly implies this.
> These days, the same scenes are dominated by Chinese and Indian kids. But China and India have large populations — the Russians were punching way about their weight, demographically speaking.
Also
> Well, with the Soviets it all went in the opposite direction: they had a smaller population, a worse starting industrial base, a lower GDP, and a vastly less efficient economic system. How, then, did they maintain military and technological parity1 with the United States for so long?
The truth is, the Soviet bloc consistently made lower quality stuff or had much poorer training.
There's are a persistent set of myths that both the Soviets and the western arms manufacturers like to perpetuate.
The t-34 tank was the greatest tank ever (sometimes had 10:1 losses offset by 14:1 manufacturing)
The ak-47 is the best due to is reliability (poor tolerances made it both reliable and astoundingly inaccurate)
Soviet/russian tanks have not come out on top in any conflict for the past 50 years. On the battlefields of Ukraine, the t72 has been infamous for its design flaws wherein even mild penetration to the gun autoloader housed in the turret ring often leads to catastrophic explosions instantly killing all the crew inside.
In Israel's fights against Syria, syrian Soviet tanks had a critical design flaw wherein they were not able to shoot downward at an angle, effectively making them sitting ducks.
The last time Soviet jets had parity with the west was when both sides were copying the same German jet fighter designs appropriated from Focke-wulf at the end of world War 2.
Repeatedly in actual combat situations, the soviet equipment fares poorly... In Israel, Iraq, and Ukraine. Perhaps the only conflicts Soviet equipment has been used effectively is when Iraq deployed its mostly Soviet weapons against Irans mostly American weapons and even that's arguable considering the United States backed Saddam (and later obliterated his army with more modern western technology)
I did cover that option. Although, the thing that brought it to mind is the fact that the author made the same mistake.
The author raises an interesting question as to how the Soviets produced so much scientific talent, but his discussion of math circles strikes me as more of a tangent than a convincing answer. Were these math circles really so widespread, and were they a big part of producing mathematical and scientific question? He doesn't address this. However, the book he is reviewing is available online [1] and I see from skimming it that Zvonkin says only one of his students ultimately chose math as a profession. My hunch is that the structure of the formal education system in the USSR played a larger role.
[1] https://sites.icmc.usp.br/sasha_a/zvonkin-e.pdf
And that one was his own son, if memory serves. Genetics and family culture may play a big role.
It's all part and parcel of a deeply mathematical culture.
"Math as a profession" is a limited subset of "professions that rely heavily on math", despite what some mathematicians might say.
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If you study much of 20th century mathematics and physics, you'll certainly find Soviet mathematicians showing up everywhere. Control theory, probability, nonlinear differential equations, etc. Just from the names of theorems alone, it's pretty hard to miss.
The Soviets produced a lot of outstanding mathematicians.
It's remarkable in absolute terms and it's even more remarkable considering that Soviet education was generally anti-science for much of its existence (e.g. see [0]).
IIRC Stalin eventually left a group of mathematicians and physicists alone because it was clear that if they were suppressed the Soviet Union couldn't win wars or plan the economy.
My initial hypothesis would be that creating this kind of playground in the otherwise dismal intellectual atmosphere, combined with the ability to select the best people from all over the empire, and the urgency and funding that came with the wars and cold war, played a major role in their ability to do important work.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repression_of_science_in_the_S...
They invented space ships, for one thing.
Russian was a scientific power in the 19th Century before Soviet Union, and continued during the Soviet era. The west had limited access to it, due to the Cold War.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_Ru...
Soviet Union wasn't called a superpower for nothing. USSR had many world class achievements in scientific and applied areas, and some organizational achievements in social and manufacturing areas. There are examples and counterexamples, but the result is what we have, and while at some areas ex-Soviets were seen as backwards people in early 1990-s, in some others they really brought some positive advancements to the West - or First World - when the borders became open.
Case in point: The reason why the US heavily relied on Soviet rocket engines for their launches for ~15 years (before SpaceX dominance) was because they were simply more advanced and cost effective. Material science apparently was a step above - Soviet scientists were able to create an alloy for use in oxygen-rich engines which was unbelievable to Western counterparts till they visited and had it demonstrated.
This is one example, and there could be many - both where USSR had an edge and where it was behind. I believe here we want to have the overall picture - and that picture was that there actually were some novelties which were interesting on the West, even though in overall quality of life and some associated parameters USSR was notably losing. Or, saying it from another end, USSR wasn't advanced enough to avoid dissolution after - not necessarily caused by - the Cold war, even though it had some achievements unavailable on the West.
Lol what
Quantify in my opinion requires qualify because, how many is "a lot?" But broad strokes, the USSR was an intellectual powerhouse. Add as many "in spite of"'s as you like, but in my opinion the "a lot" target is achieved. You mention science and I'll get to that, but I want to first target what I feel is a general misconception of the Soviet Union as like, a bleak concrete-ridden, muddy backwater of labor camps (it kinda was of course) with nothing to contribute to the world.
Post revolutionary periods always produce fantastic art, literature, and social experiments. See post-revolutionary American religious scene for an example. In the Soviet Union, there's a clumping of great literature around 1917. Summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_literature#Early_post-...
> The Imaginists were post-Revolution poetic movement, similar to English-language Imagists, that created poetry based on sequences of arresting and uncommon images. The major figures include Sergei Yesenin, Anatoly Marienhof, and Rurik Ivnev.[65] Another important movement was the Oberiu (1927–1930s), which included the most famous Russian absurdist Daniil Kharms (1905–1942), Konstantin Vaginov (1899–1934), Alexander Vvedensky (1904–1941) and Nikolay Zabolotsky (1903–1958).[66][67] Other famous authors experimenting with language included the novelists Boris Pilnyak (1894–1938), Yuri Olesha (1899–1960), Andrei Platonov (1899–1951) and Artyom Vesyoly (1899–1938), the short-story writers Isaak Babel (1894–1940) and Mikhail Zoshchenko (1894–1958).
Sorry for the big copy paste, but, there's just so many of them, and to literature nerds, what they did was "groundbreaking." I know it sounds silly but let us literature nerds have our thing.
Then there's a bunch of fun leftist / communist poetry, from Vladimir Mayakovsky and Nikolai Tikhonov (the "Could nails from such people be fashioned" guy).
And on and on. Art had some interesting characters as well, "in spite of" the Socialist Realism thing. Isaak Brodsky, for example.
Re: science, as someone else linked, efforts were hampered slightly by the repression of science that was perceived as in opposition to dialectical materialism, but in general the Soviet Union seemed very determined to create a lot of engineers.
You have Fields medal winners: Grigory Margulis (interestingly he suffered from the Soviet antisemitism mentioned in this article), Vladimir Drinfeld, and Sergei Novikov. And you have nobel prize winners such as Nikolay Semenov, Nikolay Basov + Alexander Prokhorov, Pavel Cherenkov (the Cherenkov radiation guy) + Ilya Frank + Igor Tamm, Leonid Kantorovich (basically invented linear programming), Pyotr Kapitsa, and Lev Landau.
Then there's the obvious such as the fact that the Soviets were first to put a satellite in orbit, first to put a human in orbit (arguably far more useful than putting a human on the moon, though putting a human on the moon is probably more inspiring).
What is interesting is how during the time these may not be "contributions to science" due to the USA and the Soviet Union often not sharing advancements in science with eachother because of the Cold War. Imagine if the two nations had been cooperating with eachother. Then again maybe there wouldn't have been a "Space Race."
Peripheral, but not totally irrelevant: Psmith was an Edwardian dandy of PGWodehouse’s imagination
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psmith
6 years ago and 10 years ago, with a few comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Math+from+Three+to+Seven
This book and the culture it come from are so influential, that many people who did "enrichment" have already been exposed to many of the activities in the book. Most famous may be the Scratch JR / code.org introductory computer programming, but with pencil and paper.
Ah good find. Macroexpanded:
Math from Three to Seven: The Story of a Mathematical Circle for Preschoolers [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17018583 - May 2018 (20 comments)
Math from Three to Seven: Chapters One and Three [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8811334 - Dec 2014 (21 comments)
From the book being reviewed:
> All joking aside, we fledgling mathematicians understood that the single most important thing was not raw intelligence or knowledge (Americans tend to lag behind in the latter compared to all international students). What mattered was passion. The way to become successful in mathematics, like almost every endeavor, is to care about it, to love it, to obsess over it. And in this, Eastern Europeans had a clear superiority, a cultural advantage. They had been trained, from an early age, to love mathematics more intensely.
IMHO this is what drove American superiority in software engineering for several decades. The people who self selected into software engineering really loved the field.
I suspect we'll see a continuous slow decrease in all aspects of quality of software as those who have a genuine love and passion for the field are replaced by those in it just for the money.
Good example of passion from early bell Labs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0
Other examples I can think of (from my Gen Z experience, growing up in SoCal):
- Elementary school: Making custom action replay codes, hacking game saves with programs, CheatEngine/memory/hex editor and following YouTube tutorials, Javascript "document.contentEditable=true" hack and changing stuff on websites, pressing F12 and changing random javascript code until something interesting happens or breaks.
- Middle school: making sites on Weebly/freewebs, embedding chats and flash games on them, sharing them during computer class
- High school: Making PHP sites/vbulliten/Newgrounds/flash games, later iOS apps
I wasn't the only one doing these things. There were always like 3 other kids like me in any classroom that would do the same things.
Most of us ended up becoming passionate SWEs, besides one that became an accountant.
Hasn’t that happened already? As someone who started coding a long time ago and who did it for fun, I’ve seen the industry move from enthusiasts to mainstream and finally to massive comp optimisers who spend more time on angling for a promotion than building.
I’ve fallen in and out of enjoyment of engineering many times. But I still come back because I love making something that adds value.
There will always be space for the builders who give a shit.
> IMHO this is what drove American superiority in software engineering for several decades. The people who self selected into software engineering really loved the field.
People in the Soviet Union had much less access to computers than in the US. And the first years after the fall of the USSR were quite lean for the vast majority of the population. Only by the late 90-s people in the xUSSR started getting enough money to buy computers en-masse.
> I suspect we'll see a continuous slow decrease in all aspects of quality of software as those who have a genuine love and passion for the field are replaced by those in it just for the money.
This seems narrow minded. In the early days of software development, the barrier for entry was incredibly high. The possibility of people making high quality, unique software is greater than it ever has been.
It's also narrow minded to insist that only passion for engineering itself can produce high quality results. It's like claiming famously wealthy musicians can't and don't make remarkable, impactful music.
> It's also narrow minded to insist that only passion for engineering itself can produce high quality results. It's like claiming famously wealthy musicians can't and don't make remarkable, impactful music.
I think you're making a logical fallacy, or at least you seem to be implying that the set of "famously wealthy" people is disjoint with the set of people who are passionate.
Sure, famously wealthy musicians can make great music. So can poor ones. But I haven't seen a lot of lazy, uninspired musicians make great music.
I never said anything about laziness, so I’m not sure why you’re adding that qualifier. I take it you believe that without pure love or enjoyment in something, a person could only be lazy.
Inspiration doesn’t require passion for the art to come first, or even at all. Look at Gene Simmons. He co-founded one of the most successful, influential rock bands ever, driven by the goal of becoming rich and running a successful business, not by an unadulterated love for music.
> the barrier for entry was incredibly high
Hmm, for some values of "incredibly".
John Carmack, a juvenile delinquent, dropped out of university and went on career programming, soon upending the game industry.
Linus Torvalds released Linux while being a university student, five years before obtaining a master's degree.
Vitalik Buterin dropped out of university and created Etherium, funded by a grant from Thiel foundation. Whatever you may say about cryptocurrencies, Etherium is a nontrivial piece of software, showing remarkable longevity in the fast-moving field.
None of them had a ton of formal qualifications. None of them had to obtain a license. They could just sit at a computer, write great software, and release it to the world, changing the world quite much.
What they all have is a passion for (and resulting deep knowledge of) computers, mathematics, logic, plus independent thinking, and, well, not asking for permission.
This is what a low barrier to entry plus universal availability of powerful tools (computers, compliers, etc), and books leads to.
(High barriers bring very different results: look now many small aircraft still fly with engines designed in 1950s, burning leaded avgas. A worthy challenger still fails to step over the sky-high barrier.)
For Carmack and Torvalds, I’d argue the barrier to entry was still very high at that time. Both had the opportunity to attend university, which in itself gave them access to people and resources they otherwise wouldn’t have had. Additionally, they had access to personal computers when almost the entire world did not, along with the time and resources to focus on their interests. They were extremely fortunate to have that kind of privilege.
As for Buterin, I have no idea who they are, so I can’t speak to them.
> IMHO this is what drove American superiority in software engineering for several decades. The people who self selected into software engineering really loved the field.
IMO it was funding that made the difference. People outside of USA did not have any less passion towards the field.
Survivorship bias. Eastern Europeans are actually very bad with math, no better than your regular American. But immigrants you see were very really motivated to leave the post-Soviet hell, so they had to show excellent results.
Math is taught horrifyingly badly in Eastern Europe. It presented as something extremely overcomplicated and most teachers, having a laughably low salary they barely survive on, don't care teaching it in a way kids would understand.
> Survivorship bias. Eastern Europeans are actually very bad with math, no better than your regular American.
Most people everywhere are bad at math. However, Eastern Europeans and Asians have a larger percentage of people who end up good at math compared to the US. And it's not even close, if you look at math competitions. Immigrants and children of immigrants are over-represented among the US team members.
I've long pondered a similar question - why are there so many Indian and Pakistani women in SWE in comparison to western women? Are Indian/Pakistani women better than western women in engineering? Is the education there better? How are these countries successful in mitigating this gender gap?
My theory is that this is actually caused by sexism and gender discrimination. There are smart, intelligent women everywhere, but due to sexism many career options have been traditionally closed for women in these societies, while SWE (as a completely new field) isn't. Their high numbers can be explained by the lack of opportunities in other areas. If you're an intelligent woman in Pakistan, IT is one of the few ways to prosper, meanwhile a woman in the West has way more opportunities.
I think it used to be the same principle with science in EE. Like, you're a highly intelligent person, you strive for success and recognition. In US, the classic path is entrepreneurship, but that was pretty much closed / very difficult in the Soviet block. You could get into politics, but you have to bend the knee to the party line. Science is one of the few avenues where you can thrive intellectually, get recognition and keep yourself relatively unaffected by politics.
There is a general finding that women go into engineering fields (and other relatively high-paying fields) more the poorer their country is. Neither "software engineering" nor "India / Pakistan" is an exceptional case; there is no reason to look at the specifics of the field or the region.
Usually the theory is that women everywhere hate engineering, but poor women may suck it up and go into engineering anyway because they need the money.
In fact, that was pointed out in this very thread a couple hours before your comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41716578
Immigrants and children of immigrants are over-represented among the US team members.
Still survivorship bias. Immigrants from China and India are not selected randomly from the population, they're selected by their means and determination to emigrate. Furthermore, if you include the fact that the US caps the number of visas granted on a per-country-of-origin basis and the fact that China and India have the 2 largest populations in the world, the people who successfully obtain visas from these countries are the survivors of the most stringent selection process.
You can also look at Fields Medal winners. The majority of award ceremonies have at least one Slavic person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fields_Medal
> Eastern Europeans and Asians have a larger percentage of people who end up good at math compared to the US.
These are two different claims:
Eastern Europeans and Asians who are in the US have a larger percentage of people who end up good at math.*
Eastern Europeans and Asians who are in their respective countries have a larger percentage of people who end up good at math.*
If you are making the first claim, you're just restating the parent comment's survivorship bias claim. If you're making the second, then you are making a strong claim, but it would be interesting to see data behind it. (I don't have any insight one way or the other.)
There are lots of Chinese and Indians, are you sure that there is a larger percentage who are good at math? When you take 1.4 billion x2 compared to 380 million Americans, the percentages don’t have to be high. Immigrants from those two countries at least, also tend to be in highly educated and more well off segments of those societies. You could find a lot of Chinese refugees from Vietnam in the early 80s not actually good at math, and instead having typical problems refugee communities have. You’ll also find this in African immigrant populations today if you compare refugees from east Africa to Africans who went the work visa route. Race isn’t really an indicator of anything compared to education background and the resources your family has access to (and inter generational knowledge on using those resources).
> Immigrants and children of immigrants are over-represented
That's exactly the bias. Immigrants are self-selected for higher risk tolerance, higher endurance, often wider or deeper knowledge, and readiness to think hard and work hard to achieve a better place in life.
Unsurprisingly, these same qualities help achieve results in studying and professional career.
Coming from a culture that respects abstracted knowledge (Chinese, Jewish, Russian, Indian, etc) helps additionally, but is by far not sufficient by itself.
> They had been trained, from an early age, to love mathematics more intensely.
Nonsense, sounds like post-hoc rationalization. Maybe talk to some actual Slavic people. Sure the Russians had "math clubs" and "chess clubs" but it wasn't as if the US didn't have RadioShack and garage/ham culture. Talk to some of the older generations that still remember the Berlin Wall and you might also understand why so many women from the ex USSR states are in STEM while it's the opposite in the West. TL;dr: STEM was a quick way to prosperity, the eastern bloc countries were poor, and engineers are useful even in a communist regime. They studied math because there wasn't much else they couldn't have done.
Hah. In the USSR an average engineer earned less money than an average worker.
I'm not joking.
But STEM was seen as far more prestigious than manual labor. This was very much a cultural thing, pushed by the government (engineers are useful!).
Another thing, there was a huge societal pressure to excel at school. It was common for parents to check their children's marks every day.
There's a very famous picture about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Marks_Again - a kid knows that his parents are going to check his marks and berate him.
And this attitude was everywhere. For example, getting low marks and then overcoming them was a theme for a lot of iconic Soviet cartoons and stories ("The country of undone homework", "Vovka in a Faraway Kingdom", etc.). I have not seen anything similar in the US.
> getting low marks and then overcoming them
Do I understand https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvrS6z4tUtI correctly to mean that it wasn't possible to join a scouting troop without good marks?
It was done by individual schools, there were no hard-and-fast rules.
Straight "A" students did get some additional rewards, such as trips to summer camps in Crimea.
Where they might have the opportunity to make music videos with famous singers? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NepI7BTYpnY
Thanks for the correction!
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOnxu62nz9g
EDIT: wait a moment, now I'm confused: if her (Lena's?) marks weren't an issue for induction, why does it matter that her friend got jealous and ruined her test?
(or did I get this story right, but it wasn't necessarily a general all-Union thing, just that in this specific case a 2 would have been problematic for her troop/school/family?)
> Hah. In the USSR an average engineer earned less money than an average worker.
But in the USSR, your ability to buy something was generally not limited by the amount of money you had. It was limited by whether you'd be allowed to buy the thing for other reasons.
> But STEM was seen as far more prestigious than manual labor.
Sounds like an engineer's money may have been worth much more than a laborer's?
> Sounds like an engineer's money may have been worth much more than a laborer's?
Not in general. It heavily depended on individual circumstances.
For example, machinists could earn a bit more money by using factory tools (lathes, drills, etc.) to make replacement parts for cars. And a lot of workers were stealing some of the product their factory was making. There was a common attitude of "everything around is common, so everything's around is mine".
On the other hand, engineers had more career perspectives. They were more likely to be promoted to managerial positions.
Universities in eastern bloc were really elite places. Only low single digits percent of people were able to enroll. Also majority of degrees were in STEM, education or medicine as they were deemed useful for the state. To get degree outside of STEM, political background of your family was checked and things like having family member (even say uncle) who emigrated outside of country or having grandparents who owned businesses or farm decades ago will get you discarded. So the smart kids usually have very limited path forward, so STEM it was (if you were lucky)
Regarding Soviet prowess, I always considered the fact that going to higher education considerably shortened and made easier your military draft term to be a main factor.
Everyone who could went to university, because why wouldn't you? This incentive pressure and selection bias we're probably insane.
The USSR was indeed the most reading country in the world. Soviet citizens spent approx. 11 hours a week reading books, newspapers and journals on average, which was twice more as the British, North Americans and French people did. It was the findings of the world study of 1966.
Not a good metric for producing scientific talent, and it doesn't distinguish reading fiction from actually educating yourself. For the purposes of producing scientific talent, reading fiction helps you as much as watching TV.
I don’t know any definition of actually educating yourself that would exclude reading fiction. And why are you focused on the purpose of producing scientific talent?
The article is trying to explain why the Soviets were so good at keeping up with the US in science/math
This is an incredibly pessimistic view. Do you have any sources to these claims?
Yes, people had a lot of time for hobbies. Reading, writing poems, electronics. Sometimes I watch old interviews of people on the streets and compare with the interviews they do on the streets now. It's night and day. Even people, like working class, drunk in a bar in the end of 80's collapse were more well spoken and intelligent then the people now. Either it's Putin, emigration or capitalism or whatever but there is a serious degradation in the populace.
I've noticed this aspect in general of revolutionary societies. What I'm personally quite selfishly interested in is whether this is unique to leftist revolutionary societies - were Germans or Italians in 1936 having spirited debates about fascism and how best to serve the Fatherland? I have no idea, from what I've read so far it sounds like no.
Meanwhile, for example in Spain in the same time period, there was a remarkably broad activation of the population in revolutionary activism and political engagement, which allegedly doubled productivity and dramatically increased agricultural yields, which to me indicates that the anarchists were basically everywhere (how else did they syndicalize such wide swaths of the economy?).
Similarly there's the whole French Revolution cafe / salon culture.
He almost lost me when he said the USSR was punching about its weight with a lower population which is untrue. The USSR had a significantly higher population than the US during the Cold War.
Every study which examines different populations across the world and expects them to be identical will be confused.
If every cultural group was equally interested in math, that would be shocking.
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"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Would you like to share why or do you just want to insult the piece?
If Russians punch way above their weight demographically and are so good at math - how come then that the French have even more Fields medals per capita?
Maybe this article was written by a Russian troll farm, as it is essentially claiming Russian math supremacy.