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I could be completely off the mark here, but is it wrong in my part to assume that China may not necessarily have the right environment for basic research to fl

by nebula 10y ago

I could be completely off the mark here, but is it wrong in my part to assume that China may not necessarily have the right environment for basic research to flourish? The way you mentioned the "China being excited" translates to "Chinese authorities deciding to push basic research". That will no doubt get human and other resources allocated for it, but is it sufficient? China, and USSR may not be a fair comparison, but I feel China is much closer to how the USSR functioned, of course with the added opening up of the economy, and probably economic freedom within the country (The two missing pieces that led to bankruptcy of USSR). Now, let me explain the reason why I brought this comparison here. USSR in its day probably matched the west in defence, and to some extent space tech, but did USSR produce any original major basic research breakthroughs? Basic research is not amenable to top-down push and needs an environment where ideas and expressions of those ideas have freedom. Anyway those are passing thoughts I had when I read your comment.

lostlogin 10y ago
The following wiki page is interesting - the Nobel prize section in particular. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_th... And a counter example: The regime in 1930s-1940s Germany was more repressive and they had a lot of major research breakthroughs.
neves 10y ago
You are believing too much in American propaganda of the association of free markets and creativity.
- johnzim 10y ago
  One does not beget the other but it certainly makes it easier to propagate.
  - neves 10y ago
    Maybe. What I'm saying is that there is a correlationm but we can't say there's causation, at least not how the American propaganda states. It is plain simple propaganda as the soviet Russia used to do.
- product50 10y ago
  The level of brainwashedness here is unbelievable! The OP didn't even bother to research or put data behind his claim/theory.
T-A 10y ago
The USSR had world-class mathematicians and theoretical physicists. A partial list of household names among the latter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Alexeyevich_Abrikosov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Alexeyevich_Abrikosov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolay_Bogolyubov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolay_Bogolyubov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Cherenkov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Cherenkov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludvig_Faddeev https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludvig_Faddeev https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Fock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Fock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitaly_Ginzburg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitaly_Ginzburg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Gribov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Gribov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abram_Ioffe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abram_Ioffe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Landau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Landau
- gnipgnip 10y ago
  Not to mention many results in optimization/computer-science came out of Russia.
- nebula 10y ago
  Thanks a lot for the pointers. Many here have already pointed that I am buying too much into the "free market" propaganda; may be I was indeed brainwashed into buying that, but I am trying to open my eyes and learn. AFAICT, there seems to be strong correlation between wealth/prosperity of a nation and the openness of its economy. Are there any counter examples to this? Coming to back to the original topic, is it fair to say there is no strong correlation between development of science and freedom of thought? Well, it may be true if the state does not repress the ideas being produced under science; I can now see why that might have been the case under USSR, and even in China. Scientific thought being largely apolitical may not have to be repressed by authoritarian regimes. Any holes in this logic? Sorry for being naive!
  - T-A 10y ago
    I agree about the relation between prosperity and openness of the economy. But the relation to science, especially theoretical work requiring little more than pencil and paper, is less clear. Trivial example: lucrative opportunities in finance might have lured away some of the old USSR's math talent, to the detriment of Soviet mathematics. The best and worst thing about authoritarian / totalitarian / one-party systems may be their focus. Few people making all the important decisions lead to few things being pursued vigorously. If they happen to be good things, great; you get an Academy of Science or a national space program with plenty of resources and social support. If they happen to be bad things, you get national disasters like Lysenkoism [1], "Deutsche Physik" [2] and the shuttering of Chinese schools and universities during the Cultural Revolution [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Education
resfirestar 10y ago
IMO, the problems with scientific research in China have little or nothing to do with state repression and more to do with an overcommodified educational system: too much competition at every step from primary school exams to tenure track positions, too much pressure to get high impact publications every few months, too much administrative bloat and rankings-centered priorities. In other words, they have the same problems that American researchers complain about on HN all the time, only worse. It's fine to find the quality of Chinese research intolerable, but there should be more awareness that that's where we're headed.
geofft 10y ago
> did USSR produce any original major basic research breakthroughs? Yes. If you look through just a college-level algorithms class curriculum, you'll find: - Leonid Levin, who discovered the concept of NP-completeness in the early 1970s (as did Stephen Cook, independently) - Georgy Adelson-Velsky and Evgenii Landis, who invented the AVL tree, the first self-balancing binary search tree, in 1962 - Andrey Kolmogorov, who did a bunch of things including Kolmogorov complexity, an important concept in information theory that underlies our understanding of entropy and compression - Vladimir Levenshtein, another information theorist who gave his name to the concept of Levenshtein distance
- vkou 10y ago
  All this despite a few decades of suppression of computing science as an un-Marxist "bourgeois pseudoscience". There were plenty of passionate and talented Soviet researchers - although it also helped to work in a discipline that was promoted, as opposed to repressed by the state.

by nebula 10y ago

lostlogin 10y ago

The following wiki page is interesting - the Nobel prize section in particular. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_th... And a counter example: The regime in 1930s-1940s Germany was more repressive and they had a lot of major research breakthroughs.

neves 10y ago

You are believing too much in American propaganda of the association of free markets and creativity.

johnzim 10y ago
One does not beget the other but it certainly makes it easier to propagate.
- neves 10y ago
  Maybe. What I'm saying is that there is a correlationm but we can't say there's causation, at least not how the American propaganda states. It is plain simple propaganda as the soviet Russia used to do.
product50 10y ago
The level of brainwashedness here is unbelievable! The OP didn't even bother to research or put data behind his claim/theory.

T-A 10y ago

The USSR had world-class mathematicians and theoretical physicists. A partial list of household names among the latter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Alexeyevich_Abrikosov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Alexeyevich_Abrikosov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolay_Bogolyubov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolay_Bogolyubov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Cherenkov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Cherenkov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludvig_Faddeev https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludvig_Faddeev https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Fock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Fock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitaly_Ginzburg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitaly_Ginzburg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Gribov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Gribov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abram_Ioffe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abram_Ioffe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Landau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Landau

gnipgnip 10y ago
Not to mention many results in optimization/computer-science came out of Russia.
nebula 10y ago
Thanks a lot for the pointers. Many here have already pointed that I am buying too much into the "free market" propaganda; may be I was indeed brainwashed into buying that, but I am trying to open my eyes and learn. AFAICT, there seems to be strong correlation between wealth/prosperity of a nation and the openness of its economy. Are there any counter examples to this? Coming to back to the original topic, is it fair to say there is no strong correlation between development of science and freedom of thought? Well, it may be true if the state does not repress the ideas being produced under science; I can now see why that might have been the case under USSR, and even in China. Scientific thought being largely apolitical may not have to be repressed by authoritarian regimes. Any holes in this logic? Sorry for being naive!
- T-A 10y ago
  I agree about the relation between prosperity and openness of the economy. But the relation to science, especially theoretical work requiring little more than pencil and paper, is less clear. Trivial example: lucrative opportunities in finance might have lured away some of the old USSR's math talent, to the detriment of Soviet mathematics. The best and worst thing about authoritarian / totalitarian / one-party systems may be their focus. Few people making all the important decisions lead to few things being pursued vigorously. If they happen to be good things, great; you get an Academy of Science or a national space program with plenty of resources and social support. If they happen to be bad things, you get national disasters like Lysenkoism [1], "Deutsche Physik" [2] and the shuttering of Chinese schools and universities during the Cultural Revolution [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Education

resfirestar 10y ago

IMO, the problems with scientific research in China have little or nothing to do with state repression and more to do with an overcommodified educational system: too much competition at every step from primary school exams to tenure track positions, too much pressure to get high impact publications every few months, too much administrative bloat and rankings-centered priorities. In other words, they have the same problems that American researchers complain about on HN all the time, only worse. It's fine to find the quality of Chinese research intolerable, but there should be more awareness that that's where we're headed.

geofft 10y ago

> did USSR produce any original major basic research breakthroughs? Yes. If you look through just a college-level algorithms class curriculum, you'll find: - Leonid Levin, who discovered the concept of NP-completeness in the early 1970s (as did Stephen Cook, independently) - Georgy Adelson-Velsky and Evgenii Landis, who invented the AVL tree, the first self-balancing binary search tree, in 1962 - Andrey Kolmogorov, who did a bunch of things including Kolmogorov complexity, an important concept in information theory that underlies our understanding of entropy and compression - Vladimir Levenshtein, another information theorist who gave his name to the concept of Levenshtein distance

vkou 10y ago
All this despite a few decades of suppression of computing science as an un-Marxist "bourgeois pseudoscience". There were plenty of passionate and talented Soviet researchers - although it also helped to work in a discipline that was promoted, as opposed to repressed by the state.