4 ms·

Hungary’s Golden Squad

21 points by Hooke 4y ago

lordnacho 4y ago
JW writes for the Guardian as well, very interesting perspectives in his books so that you can start to see what's actually going on in the pitch. I highly recommend it, a bit of history illuminates why exactly we have the formations that we have and why one right back is not the same as another.
thot_experiment 4y ago
Probably this is some sort of weird bias, I certainly haven't done any sort of rigorous analysis, but it really seems to me like there's something about Hungarian culture or genetics or something that causes an abundance of brilliant people from that country. Maybe the smartest person I know personally is Hungarian, and off the top of my head we have Szilard, von Neumann, Teller, Wigner, Erdos, Lanczos, Karman, Petzval. I'm sure there are more in fields I'm less familiar with. Has anyone studied this and come up with a theory?
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  There were a lot of Ashkenazi Jews in Hungary. There have been some studies suggesting that they're the group with the highest average IQ, likely due to cultural reasons (being outsiders, dual-language, etc...). Most of those Jews left because of of the Nazis, and many emigrated to the United States. There, they were given opportunities they never had at a home. Combine that with the urge to "make something" of their new lives, and you can see how that would provide the drive work hard and do better. Also, Hungary has a long tradition of taking education very seriously compared to many other countries. For example, sending young men overseas to be educated (e.g.: to Paris) was surprisingly common. My dad was telling me that even in his day, if someone came back to the village with a foreign degree, the party to celebrate would be bigger than their wedding. Last but not least, the work-ethic / culture is very similar to German culture. I suspect in part this culture is why there are also lots of famous scientists with German backgrounds: Einstein, Born, Heisenberg, von Braun, etc... And again, there are parallels: many German (and jewish-german) scientists fled during the war and did very well overseas when given the opportunity. The older generations in Hungary especially used to just "work-work-work". A comment I often heard was "Do it right, or don't do it at all." That is, there's this cultural expectation that you're going to do something to 100% without half-arsing it or trying to do just the "good enough". These days you would see this attitude in Japan, for example, where even the tiniest thing is often done to a ludicrous level of service. Having said that, you'll note that there are very few great Hungarian scientific achievements in the last 50 or so years.[1] That's because the Russians invaded and caused a second brain-drain in 1956. Their communist culture is not at all like the German work-ethic culture. Similarly, their isolation from the West doesn't help scientists trying to do world-class research. Lack of funding (relative to the West), again, is a stumbling block. PS: This is all going to get a bit of a repeat now that Russia has invaded Ukraine. Intellectuals are fleeing both countries, and a new iron curtain is going up between east and west. As Russia gets cut off, watch their intellectual output plummet, undoing decades of slow but steady improvement. For example, in recent years I've played Russian-made computer games, watched Russian movies, used Russian-developed software, and read cutting-edge AI/ML/CG papers written by Russians in a Russian university. That's all going to stop dead real soon. Instead, watch how suddenly there'll be an uptick of Russians in foreign universities doing even better than back at home... [1] Off the top of my head, the only recent one I can think of is Katalin Karikó inventing mRNA vaccines. However, she's nearly 70 years old and had to leave Hungary to... drumroll... the United States in '85 get the opportunity she needed.
  - manymanydots 4y ago
    Re recent - random sampling, but let's call tribute to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Lov%C3%A1sz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Lov%C3%A1sz for getting the Abel prize.
    - jiggawatts 4y ago
      I have an indirect personal story about this: I'm a political refugee born in Hungary and living overseas. I told everyone that my name is rare enough in Hungary, and unique in my new home, making me easy to find in the phone book. "There's another person with the same name!" someone told me once. And indeed, one state over, there was a professor with the same name at a University. I happened to get a consulting job for a few weeks at that University, so I knocked on his door. Just to see the reaction on his face, I didn't speak a word, I simply plopped down my drivers license on his desk. He stood up, pointed at me accusingly and shouted "YOU!" That was... not exactly the reaction I was expecting, to say the least. It turns out that he had been frustrated to no end for months and months by some poor student that contacted him from China. This student kept insisting that the professor was the only one that could help him with a very specific mathematics problem. The professor told him, yes, but I'm not a theoretical mathematician, I'm a computational mathematician. The student replied "Yes, I know!" It's some computational mathematics code that you published that I'm interested in. The professor told him that yes, he's published code in computational mathematics, but it can't be him. The student replied: "But lattices are your speciality! It has your name on it! You're the only professor to specialise in this field in the whole country, and you're the only one with this name to work at any University!" ... and so on, and so forth... I was the one who published the code! The only other Hungarian in the country with the same name just so happened to be interested in the exact same obscure computational mathematical theory! I had an interest in "reverse calculators" that could determine which symbolic forms could produce some long decimal value as an input. The LLL algorithm was one such method, and I wrote an implementation and published it online. So I should have known about László Lovász, because I wrote an implementation of the algorithm he co-invented! Sometimes it seems that it's a very small world...
- manymanydots 4y ago
  Disclaimer: I'm completely ignorant about this, so just personal impressions, or discussion starter. - A quotation comes to mind, ~"for math you only need pencil and paper". Indeed, Hungary is not the most resourceful nation, but sciences (and sports) that didn't need big upfront investment did/do well. Maybe for football, all you need(ed), was a ball. Nowadays it might be more industrialized, so competition is higher. But in sports that attract not much media, like canoeing and fencing, I heard we are still near top. - Hungary is geographically at intersection of cultures - not west, but not completely east either. It was often partitioned, either physically or mentally, between camps - Turks vs Austro-Hungary, Austrians vs Hungary, Soviet Union vs Hungary. This might evolve people who can cope with ambiguous situations. Not sure if this can translate directly to scientific mindset... but more practically, maybe lets some minds with great insights to escape to the West during troublesome times, giving them opportunity to show themselves. On a related note, maybe success needs not only academic excellence, but also navigating delicate politics? - We have Ulti (not so popular today) - https://www.pagat.com/marriage/ulti.html https://www.pagat.com/marriage/ulti.html. Said to be a card game greatly challenging for the mind. Ok, more trolling here, probably various nations have their akin games as well. - Jewish focus on education. IANAJ, but read that the culture fosters prioritizing education of children above others. While some people might spend a fortune buying a fancy car, Jews would invest into personal tutoring of children etc. Read that the Polgár's lived in a stock concrete flat under not flourishing financials, but still got a full chess book library for the daughters, personal trainers etc. And not all, but many of the emigrants seem to be of Jewish origin.
  - ahoka 4y ago
    Polgar is a huge outlier here, because he basically did a human experiment on his two children. He literally created a newspaper ad that he needs a mother for an experiment about creating experts by starting focused teaching before the age of three. He choose chess, because he was also a chess teacher.
    - manymanydots 4y ago
      Interesting. Not sure if being an outlier disqualifies, but I see your point. I read originally he had in mind to show 3 areas - chess, maths and piano - to prove the point. But it proved too expensive to furnish a library and private education, so went with chess for the other daughters too, since that was already established.
- ahoka 4y ago
  I know some very brilliant Hungarian people too, but there are a also lot more very stupid ones. I think this is just plain survivor bias.
- Majestic121 4y ago
  Not a study but Scott Alexander's essay touches the subject : https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid... If I remember the summary correctly, it's a mix between having a lot of Ashkenazis jews (not just Hungary, but Eastern Europe in general) who for some reason tends to have a higher IQ than average (even other jew population), having specifically good education system at the time, and the good environment and emulation created by having very smart people together in a good education system. I strongly recommend reading the essay

21 points by Hooke 4y ago

JW writes for the Guardian as well, very interesting perspectives in his books so that you can start to see what's actually going on in the pitch. I highly recommend it, a bit of history illuminates why exactly we have the formations that we have and why one right back is not the same as another.

thot_experiment 4y ago

Probably this is some sort of weird bias, I certainly haven't done any sort of rigorous analysis, but it really seems to me like there's something about Hungarian culture or genetics or something that causes an abundance of brilliant people from that country. Maybe the smartest person I know personally is Hungarian, and off the top of my head we have Szilard, von Neumann, Teller, Wigner, Erdos, Lanczos, Karman, Petzval. I'm sure there are more in fields I'm less familiar with. Has anyone studied this and come up with a theory?

jiggawatts 4y ago
There were a lot of Ashkenazi Jews in Hungary. There have been some studies suggesting that they're the group with the highest average IQ, likely due to cultural reasons (being outsiders, dual-language, etc...). Most of those Jews left because of of the Nazis, and many emigrated to the United States. There, they were given opportunities they never had at a home. Combine that with the urge to "make something" of their new lives, and you can see how that would provide the drive work hard and do better. Also, Hungary has a long tradition of taking education very seriously compared to many other countries. For example, sending young men overseas to be educated (e.g.: to Paris) was surprisingly common. My dad was telling me that even in his day, if someone came back to the village with a foreign degree, the party to celebrate would be bigger than their wedding. Last but not least, the work-ethic / culture is very similar to German culture. I suspect in part this culture is why there are also lots of famous scientists with German backgrounds: Einstein, Born, Heisenberg, von Braun, etc... And again, there are parallels: many German (and jewish-german) scientists fled during the war and did very well overseas when given the opportunity. The older generations in Hungary especially used to just "work-work-work". A comment I often heard was "Do it right, or don't do it at all." That is, there's this cultural expectation that you're going to do something to 100% without half-arsing it or trying to do just the "good enough". These days you would see this attitude in Japan, for example, where even the tiniest thing is often done to a ludicrous level of service. Having said that, you'll note that there are very few great Hungarian scientific achievements in the last 50 or so years.[1] That's because the Russians invaded and caused a second brain-drain in 1956. Their communist culture is not at all like the German work-ethic culture. Similarly, their isolation from the West doesn't help scientists trying to do world-class research. Lack of funding (relative to the West), again, is a stumbling block. PS: This is all going to get a bit of a repeat now that Russia has invaded Ukraine. Intellectuals are fleeing both countries, and a new iron curtain is going up between east and west. As Russia gets cut off, watch their intellectual output plummet, undoing decades of slow but steady improvement. For example, in recent years I've played Russian-made computer games, watched Russian movies, used Russian-developed software, and read cutting-edge AI/ML/CG papers written by Russians in a Russian university. That's all going to stop dead real soon. Instead, watch how suddenly there'll be an uptick of Russians in foreign universities doing even better than back at home... [1] Off the top of my head, the only recent one I can think of is Katalin Karikó inventing mRNA vaccines. However, she's nearly 70 years old and had to leave Hungary to... drumroll... the United States in '85 get the opportunity she needed.
- manymanydots 4y ago
  Re recent - random sampling, but let's call tribute to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Lov%C3%A1sz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Lov%C3%A1sz for getting the Abel prize.
  - jiggawatts 4y ago
    I have an indirect personal story about this: I'm a political refugee born in Hungary and living overseas. I told everyone that my name is rare enough in Hungary, and unique in my new home, making me easy to find in the phone book. "There's another person with the same name!" someone told me once. And indeed, one state over, there was a professor with the same name at a University. I happened to get a consulting job for a few weeks at that University, so I knocked on his door. Just to see the reaction on his face, I didn't speak a word, I simply plopped down my drivers license on his desk. He stood up, pointed at me accusingly and shouted "YOU!" That was... not exactly the reaction I was expecting, to say the least. It turns out that he had been frustrated to no end for months and months by some poor student that contacted him from China. This student kept insisting that the professor was the only one that could help him with a very specific mathematics problem. The professor told him, yes, but I'm not a theoretical mathematician, I'm a computational mathematician. The student replied "Yes, I know!" It's some computational mathematics code that you published that I'm interested in. The professor told him that yes, he's published code in computational mathematics, but it can't be him. The student replied: "But lattices are your speciality! It has your name on it! You're the only professor to specialise in this field in the whole country, and you're the only one with this name to work at any University!" ... and so on, and so forth... I was the one who published the code! The only other Hungarian in the country with the same name just so happened to be interested in the exact same obscure computational mathematical theory! I had an interest in "reverse calculators" that could determine which symbolic forms could produce some long decimal value as an input. The LLL algorithm was one such method, and I wrote an implementation and published it online. So I should have known about László Lovász, because I wrote an implementation of the algorithm he co-invented! Sometimes it seems that it's a very small world...
manymanydots 4y ago
Disclaimer: I'm completely ignorant about this, so just personal impressions, or discussion starter. - A quotation comes to mind, ~"for math you only need pencil and paper". Indeed, Hungary is not the most resourceful nation, but sciences (and sports) that didn't need big upfront investment did/do well. Maybe for football, all you need(ed), was a ball. Nowadays it might be more industrialized, so competition is higher. But in sports that attract not much media, like canoeing and fencing, I heard we are still near top. - Hungary is geographically at intersection of cultures - not west, but not completely east either. It was often partitioned, either physically or mentally, between camps - Turks vs Austro-Hungary, Austrians vs Hungary, Soviet Union vs Hungary. This might evolve people who can cope with ambiguous situations. Not sure if this can translate directly to scientific mindset... but more practically, maybe lets some minds with great insights to escape to the West during troublesome times, giving them opportunity to show themselves. On a related note, maybe success needs not only academic excellence, but also navigating delicate politics? - We have Ulti (not so popular today) - https://www.pagat.com/marriage/ulti.html https://www.pagat.com/marriage/ulti.html. Said to be a card game greatly challenging for the mind. Ok, more trolling here, probably various nations have their akin games as well. - Jewish focus on education. IANAJ, but read that the culture fosters prioritizing education of children above others. While some people might spend a fortune buying a fancy car, Jews would invest into personal tutoring of children etc. Read that the Polgár's lived in a stock concrete flat under not flourishing financials, but still got a full chess book library for the daughters, personal trainers etc. And not all, but many of the emigrants seem to be of Jewish origin.
- ahoka 4y ago
  Polgar is a huge outlier here, because he basically did a human experiment on his two children. He literally created a newspaper ad that he needs a mother for an experiment about creating experts by starting focused teaching before the age of three. He choose chess, because he was also a chess teacher.
  - manymanydots 4y ago
    Interesting. Not sure if being an outlier disqualifies, but I see your point. I read originally he had in mind to show 3 areas - chess, maths and piano - to prove the point. But it proved too expensive to furnish a library and private education, so went with chess for the other daughters too, since that was already established.
ahoka 4y ago
I know some very brilliant Hungarian people too, but there are a also lot more very stupid ones. I think this is just plain survivor bias.
Majestic121 4y ago
Not a study but Scott Alexander's essay touches the subject : https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid... If I remember the summary correctly, it's a mix between having a lot of Ashkenazis jews (not just Hungary, but Eastern Europe in general) who for some reason tends to have a higher IQ than average (even other jew population), having specifically good education system at the time, and the good environment and emulation created by having very smart people together in a good education system. I strongly recommend reading the essay