4 ms·
The linked article points to the fact that because the Soviets were resource-constrained, theory was more accessible than equipment which drove the education sy
by wenc 7y ago
The linked article points to the fact that because the Soviets were resource-constrained, theory was more accessible than equipment which drove the education system to favor theoretical training.
I wonder if there's a trade-off to this. On one hand you produce some really elite theoretical minds (Pontryagin, Lyapunov, Kolmogorov, etc.). But the counterfactual is that it excludes those with high IQ but are more practically-oriented as well as late-bloomers who didn't take to math early but would have become reasonable applied mathematicians (I belong to this category). I guess we will never know.
To draw a parallel, one of the criticisms of the French system -- where mathematics is treated as the most important arbiter of intelligence (for grandes ecoles admissions) -- is that other aptitudes are almost seen as secondary. It optimizes too much for a very narrow aptitude -- which is great for producing Fields Medalists, but underoptimizes for talent elsewhere.
In my experience, while the American education system on the other hand is kind of a piece of cake from K-12, it somehow manages to catch up at the college level (more or less). At the graduate level, the differences in ability between a U.S. graduate student and a Soviet-system/Eastern European educated one is largely diminished. And it does this without over-optimizing for any particular aptitude so deep expertise is developed over a broader field in the U.S.
- elteto 7y ago> The linked article points to the fact that because the Soviets were resource-constrained, theory was more accessible than equipment which drove the education system to favor theoretical training. Yes, indeed. Most people don't realize that the soviets were awful at product engineering. Their consumer-oriented products (TVs, radios, cars) were pretty terrible when compared to their western counterparts. My pet theory is that this was, in part, due to the over-emphasis in theoretical approaches instead of practical applications (that plus the lack of resources and the communist ethos against consumerism).
- jeffreyrogers 7y agoBut they were pretty good at engineering things like jets, helicopters, missiles, etc. I think the consume products were bad because they lacked market feedback and had trouble with supply chains, while the military products were good, arguably better than US equivalents in some cases, because of the more top-down, spec-driven nature of that work.
- elteto 7y agoYes, they were. Their military products actually competed in a "free market": they had strong competition from the US, NATO countries, China, etc. Ironically, this free market competition is what made Soviet weapons as good as they were :) I wonder if they ever thought about it in this way.
- atrettel 7y agoI'm reminded of the engineer's triangle here: "Good, fast, cheap. Pick two." The problem with a lot of Soviet design was that they always had to pick cheap since there were often shortages of resources. Their designs were fundamentally influenced by scarcity, and it makes it difficult to make anything good, especially if you need something quickly. That doesn't excuse the fact that many designs were knockoffs and terrible in their own right, but it does explain their underlying design choices. There's an interesting book titled "Made in Russia: Unsung Icons of Soviet Design" that details many examples of this. The one example that always struck me was the Soviet soda machines. They could not waste previous metal on soda cans, so the soda machines came with a communal cup. You put coins in the machine for soda, and it filled the communal cup like a fountain drink. But once you were done drinking you had to return the cup to the machine and press a button to clean it out and make it ready for the next customer. This process seems ghastly and ridiculous but makes sense when resources are scarce. It was the design tradeoff the Soviets made so that soda machines would be available in the first place.
- Koshkin 7y ago> They could not waste precious metal on soda cans I have read somewhere that metal in Soviet Union was pretty cheap...
- blululu 7y agoThis is an interesting idea. Something that I have been thinking in the context of qualifying the quality of a nation's education program is how these things should be considered given that division of labor is the standard mode of operation. Germany for instance has a highly tracked education system, and consequently it has some world class scientists as well as some very talented mechanics but I suspect neither group is very good at the other's specialty. A country can have poor average math scores but be globally competitive in mathematics as long as some collection of people are trained well. The US for instance is largely terrible at mathematics (on average), but we have also produced a large number of world class mathematicians and scientists because we eventually dedicate serious resources toward training a small subset of the population to do these things well.
- mbeex 7y agoPontryagin is not simply an elite theoretical mind. On the contray, he illustrates in person the many aspects of the problem. During the fifties, he virtually vanished from public and came back years later with a Lenin prize and "The Mathematical Theory of Optimal Processes". Examples in there include 'two flying objects' and the task of an optimal solution for the problem to get them in close proximity... Obviously you don't receive a Lenin prize for pure mathematics. The other part is content: Bellman dealt with the same problem. But Bellman equations are notoriously hardware-demanding. Pontryagin on the other hand gave necessary (and sufficient for some cases) conditions in a form much more accessible to pen and paper.