7 ms·

Someone Has to Run the Fabs

81 points by jseliger 4y ago

bediger4000 4y ago
Math education in the US is pitiful. The last attempt to fix it (common core) mostly emphasized memorizing arithmetic facts. Like anybody doesn't have multiple calculators in their pockets. I'm all for teaching arithmetic, but emphasizing the algorithms and how to prove them correct should be paramount. Teaching arithmetic in various bases is important, as should be the basics of numeric analysis. Formal logic should also be a core math subject. But no, the USA has to teach subjects as were common in the 1920-1950 time frame, in the same manner as back then. This is a consequence of "home rule".
- vkou 4y ago
  > Math education in the US is pitiful. No arguments there. > The last attempt to fix it (common core) mostly emphasized memorizing arithmetic facts Did it? My understanding is that it uses a few different approaches to build basic intuition about numbers, and that parents hate it because many of those approaches don't make sense to them, because that's not how they learnt math. Which makes it an incredibly convenient punching bag.
  - btilly 4y ago
    You're describing what it was in theory. In PRACTICE it was kids being present with a confusing array of things all at once when they hadn't sorted out the basics, and as a result learning none of them. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634210 for my rant about what my son actually went through. There is an old saying about writing. "Writing is easy, just open a vein and bleed." That particular rant I'm pretty sure that I hit an artery.
    - vkou 4y ago
      Your problems mostly stem from the fact that your son's teacher doesn't know his elbow from his ass, mathematically. Which, given the current climate, is unsurprising, as anyone with a basic understanding of mathematics will run[1], not walk away from a teaching job. Unfortunately, it's a valid criticism. More unfortunately, switching to another standard for teaching math isn't going to solve this. [1] Why be society's punching bag, on the front-lines of an insane litigation and culture war, have your heavily-backloaded pay be contingent on putting up with decades of this kind of bullshit, all while trying to do a mixture of teaching and social work?
      - btilly 4y ago
        You're right about where the problems come from, and that the criticism is valid. However I stand by my point that Common Core should be described in terms of what it did do, and not what its supporters hoped it would do.
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      >given how many teachers in practice can't tell you whether 3/5 is larger than 2/3 Teaching requirements are NOT standardized at the federal level, and lots of states have decided to just lower standards instead of paying professionals more. If you only hire baby-sitters, don't be surprised when they can't teach simple stuff. In my state, we have high standards for teachers, and every single one, from kindergarten right through high school, from french teacher to cooking to history, could teach a middle school math course. Your state or municipality cheaping out on your child's education is not the fault of federal regulation, or of a federal curriculum. You'd be whining about the same thing no matter what the national curriculum was, because the problem is that your local governments don't care about education.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    Common Core was also the target of a full on QAnon/Covid style conspiracy push by republicans. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/rnc-embraces-common-core-conspiracy-theory-flna1c9388203 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/rnc-embraces-common-core-... > If you're familiar with Glenn Beck's broadcasts, you've no doubt heard about his unhinged crusade against Common Core, including his declaration last week that he will no longer send his kids to college -- Common Core will only indoctrinate them and make them part of "the system that is coming." > Republicans are taking this all very seriously, with lawmakers in 18 states considering legislation to block Common Core, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) denouncing it on Beck's radio show. As mentioned in the article there are some actual experts with criticisms to make but many of the people getting unusually upset about it had got sucked into a conspiracy theory.
- brigadier132 4y ago
  > The last attempt to fix it (common core) mostly emphasized memorizing arithmetic facts. Memorizing facts is the foundation of all learning. When you add 7+7 in your head do you instantly know the answer is 14 because of "understanding" or because you memorized over all the years. Also the current US education system strictly deemphasizes memorization. Instead it pushes for "understanding" (conveniently a concept that is not measurable). > Like anybody doesn't have multiple calculators in their pockets. Ok and? China and India are producing the smartest people in the world and their education systems strongly emphasize memorization. Understanding comes when you've memorized enough information that you can connect the dots. Once you get to advanced math it's basically impossible to understand from the start and you can only rely on memorization until you've memorized enough and experienced enough that it finally clicks.
  - yummypaint 4y ago
    People really underestimate the importance of creativity to advanced technical problem solving. That has been the key human ingredient pushing the frontiers of STEM forward, especially in the most recent decades with better computational tools. The best mathematicians aren't the ones just proving theorems anymore, they're discovering interesting conjectures through exploration and then handing the grunt work off to a computer. Engineers aren't calculating anything remotely complex by hand anymore, nor should they. The best scientists also tend not to be people who were problem set whizzes in school.
    - anon291 4y ago
      > The best mathematicians aren't the ones just proving theorems anymore, they're discovering interesting conjectures through exploration and then handing the grunt work off to a computer. I'm sorry no. This is simply wrong. Computer proofs are not there yet, and plus, a lot of the interesting theorems (including many of the well-known ones) are non-constructive which are difficult to prove on a computer. In fact, many theorem provers cannot prove 'basic' facts about math due to how constructive proof theory works. Indeed it is not clear what truth means at that level, but considering we regularly use non-constructive proofs to build things, I'm not sure that matters. I think what is most undervalued is the utility of sheer competence and technical skill to creativity. Without the former, there is no latter. If someone who never studied piano told you they had a beautiful piano solo in their head, would you believe them? More importantly, would you trust them to execute on the creative impulse?
- waboremo 4y ago
  Common core standards are pretty good, if you have the chance read into them you'll find you agree with most if not all of it. It's failing stem entirely from implementation and execution (on every level), leaving a lot of people wondering if general standards top-down are even the solution here, seeing how No Child Left Behind was handled.
  - guyzero 4y ago
    Common Core was as much about the "common" as it was about the "core." It's not the previous standards were bad (or even different from current standards) but that there were 50 of them instead of one nationwide.
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      Which is fine and all, and the national standard was fine, but for some reason, very big houses of teaching material put their dumbest interns on the job and there was A LOT of teaching material that was downright incompetent, and taught nothing. You could see exactly what it was trying to get at but it was obvious the person who wrote that material never understood the underlying concept themselves.
- yardie 4y ago
  > Math education in the US is pitiful. Yeah, no disagreement there. > The last attempt to fix it (common core) mostly emphasized memorizing arithmetic facts. In fact, just the opposite. The old math system was rote memorization. Then common core came along and made all those parents and their limited math skills obsolete. It didn't help that teachers who also learned the old math couldn't or didn't understand common core methodology. BTW, I'm a parent of one those school kids who was trying to learn common core. I got it right away and don't consider myself particularly brilliant. But the grumbling from so many parents who just thought they knew more than the educators was deafening. In the end, the state dropped common core and they are still complaining about it years later. The right made it into a boogeyman and now that and trans kids are all they can fixate on.
  - EFreethought 4y ago
    It seemed like a lot of the hate for common core started (or at least got louder) when Obama said he thought it was a good idea.
questime 4y ago
The US government is competent but really, really slow, this nativism/anti-immigrant trend will disappear when we actually start falling behind China but that's not for several years.
- 0l 4y ago
  Last time I checked China had much lower immigration numbers than the US.
  - roncesvalles 4y ago
    The unspoken subtext of immigration is that the native culture is failing. Birth rate not at replacement. Not enough educated people. All the BS described in TFA. Immigration is not just about importing people. It's about importing a culture that is better suited for the demands of your society's ambitions. On the surface it's about bringing in people but really it's about bringing in a people.
    - ForHackernews 4y ago
      > native culture Nope, America largely exterminated its native cultures hundreds of years ago. The culture that exists today is the immigrant culture of nation founded on ideas (freedom, slavery, capitalism, democracy) not bloodlines. America can be for anyone who wants to be part of that story.
  - questime 4y ago
    Yeah but they have a billion more people.
- itsoktocry 4y ago
  >this nativism/anti-immigrant trend will disappear when we actually start falling behind China but that's not for several years. Can you explain the relationship between anti-immigration and manufacturing success? As the sibling comments says, the USA has far more immigration than, well, anywhere in the world.
btilly 4y ago
I'm a big fan of Singapore math. The countries that score top in the world on primary math education use it. In basically every research study that has been done, it works. 3/4 of my children were lucky enough to go to a school that taught it, and it worked well for them. Unfortunately the US approach has been to throw out every research study suggesting it might work, while failing to fund better studies. See https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/Docs/InterventionReports/wwc_singaporemath_122215.pdf https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/Docs/InterventionReports/wwc_sin.... Behind this is that fact that the educational establishment makes a ton of money off of rewriting textbooks and retraining teachers for each reform wave. The hasty changes are guaranteed to lead to disaster, which motivates the NEXT reform wave, which they then also profit on. My mother became a school teacher in the 1950s, and this cycle was ALREADY in progress back then. (Think Sputnik leads to New Math leads to Why Johnny Can't Add, etc.) Switching to already existing books for an approach that actually will work would be a disaster for the education establishment. And so we'll never do it. No matter how embarrassing our regular (but profitable for the education establishment) disasters are. I complain about this occasionally. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13822577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13822577 for a more general complaint, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634210 for a rant about the Common Core disaster specificially.
- bencpeters 4y ago
  What is the TL;DR version of the difference between Singapore math & US math education?
  - btilly 4y ago
    Singapore math focuses on teaching every concept by first manipulating physical objects, then manipulating pictures, then manipulating abstract symbols. Encouraging children to draw connections between these. It also spreads each concept over time so that you keep revisiting the same ideas to ensure it gets fully integrated. And mixes them. So grade 1 kids may be doing "multiplication" by arranging blocks in a grid before they've fully mastered the + sign. The USA gives a much more cursory pass through operational actions and goes straight to the abstract representation. We also do a lot more of one concept at a time, only to move on to the next while kids forget the first. The result is that kids learn to blindly follow poorly learned procedures, hoping to do it well enough to pass the test before forgetting the concept. And then the following year do it all over again, having forgot the material from last year. Yeah, yeah, we have an official curriculum, sequencing, and there is lots of verbiage in official documents about how and when kids are supposed to get reminded, etc. But I described what ACTUALLY tends to happen. And you only have to glance at test scores to realize that the official narrative about what is learned is more myth than reality.
vkou 4y ago
The problem isn't the how of education. The problem is culture. We built an actively knowledge-hostile culture that glorifies and rewards managers, hustlers, grifters, and influencers, and we're then surprised that nobody with ambition wants to... Actually build things.
- spacemadness 4y ago
  Taking this back to STEM, what is the pay like for FAB jobs? How are employees treated? Hand wringing about math competence ignores whether the jobs themselves are competitive to their peers. If it requires a masters degree in EE, but pays less than a CS degree bachelors on average, the incentives are not going to be there for those that already are generally competent in the sciences.
  - Robotbeat 4y ago
    Employees of Taiwanese fans work insane hours and one of the problems with replicating it here was workers not willing to work the hours that Taiwan did. Don’t know if pay in Taiwan is competitive, but when we’re talking about work/conditions, it should be pointed out.
    - philipkglass 4y ago
      The United States already has a lot of semiconductor fabs. It was only in recent years that AMD processors fabricated by TSMC overtook the performance of Intel processors fabricated by Intel. Is there something about newer process nodes that makes the employment conditions worse? Otherwise, I'd point to Intel fabs in the United States as an existence proof that the USA can get qualified workers for domestic semiconductor fabrication. (Plus US fabs operated by Texas Instruments, Samsung, GlobalFoundries, and others.)
      - Robotbeat 4y ago
        We were discussing being competitive with peers and what peers are doing vs what we are doing. It seemed pretty relevant. Also, I mentally separate long working hours from other aspects of “worker conditions.” You can have low working hours but a toxic and unsafe work environment or a physically safe and supportive work environment with long hours. You can also have high and low pay with various working hours (although typically high pay isn’t supported by low working hours unless the business has some sort of massive moat).
bob1029 4y ago
I worked in semiconductor manufacturing. The hardest stuff is troubleshooting the state of the live system and performing root cause analysis. In my time at Samsung, we politely referred to the facility as "bootcamp for engineers". Indeed, I learned how to troubleshoot incredibly complex systems after just a few months of direct exposure. The #1 skill I learned was to not ever make an assumption about a thing. "Trust but verify" was burned into our souls. Perhaps the best way to train the next generation is to create actual bootcamps on-site where young professionals get a chance to try and answer questions like "How did lot ABC123 end up with unexpected CU exposure while it was sitting inside a N2-purged storage area?" The only tools they get to use: historical logs of every event that occurred and a copy of grep. In my experience, the deep PhD-style education was absolutely not essential for the day-to-day. Only a few people need to master the idea. Once the complex academia is converted into a physical reticle or CMP process recipe, you then need an army of people to reliably execute on that standardized vision. I think someone coming into semiconductor manufacturing would have an easier time if they were dropped right into it on day one. The theory is nice but we found it to be mostly a waste of time when someone from manufacturing was calling us on the phone and complaining about a stuck lot.
- josaka 4y ago
  Same fab, same experience. I would add that a deep understanding (and ability to explain) statistics was more critical than understanding the underlying device physics for most roles I encountered. Enormous amounts of noisy data, characterizing several hundred process steps, is harnessed to apply massive pressure on engineers to "fix" problems that might just be a statistical blip. Economic stakes of minor yield deviations are so high that you often have to act as if something might be wrong before signals reach statistical significance. I bailed after four years, but it was great experience to start my career.
- drivers99 4y ago
  > The #1 skill I learned was to not ever make an assumption about a thing. "Trust but verify" was burned into our souls. There's a book I like called "Stop Guessing" (Nat Greene) about that.
softfalcon 4y ago
I straddle a unique perspective of North American education. I am the descendant of uneducated farmers, but the son of an engineer. My nerdy father left the small town life to get educated and become an engineer. Now I live in a family of nerds amidst a sea of extended family who are all rather poorly educated. I watched as my cousins cared more about ski-doos and video games than they did about their math homework. Unsurprisingly, they didn't get far academically and now as they are approaching their adult life, are struggling to be employed and do not like their job prospects, the same as their parents did before them. Meanwhile, me and my siblings were eagerly pushed to pursue education. Curiosity was ignited at every opportunity to encourage us to think hard and explore big ideas. This has paid off in spades for our family. Innovation, thinking, and exploration are often pre-cursors to success. Seeing my extended family (and their friends) justify their uneducated views of the world, hearing their bigotry, listening to their hatred against "smart people". It hurts my soul. Knowing that my extended family out numbers my close family 5 to 1 by family size makes me worry about the future of our society. These ignorant folks are voting with their wallets, ballots, and social media voices. What does that say about the future of North America? What does it say about the changes we need to make to enlighten our people for the future?
- zwieback 4y ago
  You can see both sides - what do you think would be an effective outreach to the rural undereducated population? Snomobile mechanic could be one stepping stone to a technical education, more of that kind of thing?
- stalfosknight 4y ago
  It seems like the dystopian world shown in the movie Idiocracy is inevitable.
  - roncesvalles 4y ago
    And yet, GP shows that nerds do emerge in a family of idiots. There is quite a bit of jitter in the genetics of human intelligence.
anon291 4y ago
The only part of the article I disagree with is that 'inborn talent' is a major force behind disparities in math ability. While I will grant the existence of superstar prodigies, by far most people 'good at math', including most mathematicians behind most of math's most used fields, are simply those who spent time studying mathematics and taking it seriously. We often mistake parental investment for 'in-born talent', while both are due to the lottery of birth, calling it 'in-born talent' makes it seem unachievable for others. It's a harder hill for sure, but not insurmountable.
- medvezhenok 4y ago
  We accept differential outcomes in sports and how genetics plays a strong role there, but we seem utterly resistant to accept it in intellectual pursuits for some dang reason. I've taught many people to juggle from literally zero juggling experience. Hand eye coordination is not equally distributed among the population, and some people are naturally significantly more talented (and make more progress much more quickly than others. 10X differences are not a joke). I'm not sure why we keep believing intellectual things are any different. Having gone to school with some exceptionally smart/not-smart people at both questionable public schools and then one of the best universities, the discrepancies there are definitely not just due to parental investment (though I'm not denying that it can play a role)
zwieback 4y ago
I don't know, complaining about lack of STEM and throwing in a side-swipe to equity thinking isn't that helpful to answer what we need to run our fabs. In my experience you need a ton of people with practical thinking skills, good work ethic and some hands-on training. I think you'll find enough nerds to fill the engineering/science pipeline. The real problem is with the broad technical workforce, that needs to be bolstered.
- WillPostForFood 4y ago
  In my experience you need a ton of people with practical thinking skills, good work ethic and some hands-on training. So you don't think STEM education is important? It seems like you left that out of the list intentionally, but not sure. If so, also consider not whether it is important to the fabs, but whether it is important to kids who eventually want and need jobs. You probably will be able to kill fabs with the nerds in the engineering/science pipeline, but you are then excluding 95% of the current student base.
  - zwieback 4y ago
    Sorry, I was unclear. I think STEM is very important but I don't think we need to force everyone into it. I think there are enough STEM-interested kids that will choose this route, if you start with the assumption "STEM is so important we have to make sure everyone gets some" then you have to answer the question how to make it accessible to everyone. I'm in favor of outreach programs and picking out top performers but I don't think forcing a minimum level of STEMness across all students is wise.
    - WillPostForFood 4y ago
      I don't think we need to force everyone into it. 100% agree! We need myriad education options for myriad types of students. But the legit critique of the "equity approach", as is happening in the Bay Area, is that it is you they aren't allowing students to advance in STEM (especially M), even students want to. It is not forcing a minimum level, it is capping max level at a relatively low/mid spot.
roncesvalles 4y ago
The problem is largely cultural instead of political. It just isn't "cool" in American culture to be good at school. How do you fix that?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
zabzonk 4y ago
> In 2014, the city of San Francisco decided to try to improve equity in math education by barring kids from taking algebra in 8th grade i honestly thought this had to be satire - it seems it wasn't.
- i-use-nixos-btw 4y ago
  Who could possibly have thought that it was a good idea? It makes absolutely no sense.
  - zabzonk 4y ago
    it is like not teaching geography. now, i kind of can get behind this thought, as whenever i went into a geography lesson at school, there would be a clunk which was my head falling on the desk into deep slumber - teacher: "somebody wake up hicks", except this was long pre "alien", much less "aliens". but people should have the chance of being taught these things, or indeed anything. to deny them of this is flatly wrong.
  - 908B64B197 4y ago
    It's genius. Kids are failing? Lower the bar! Suddenly everyone has "improved". The bureaucrats are happy, the unions are happy, even the parents who don't care about education are happy! Makes it easier to push for the next part of the bureaucrat's agenda [0] [1] : CRT laced math and computer science education. [0] https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11... [1] https://criticallyconsciouscomputing.org/ https://criticallyconsciouscomputing.org/
paulpauper 4y ago
The bar for gifted and other enrichment is set so low, it's not going to do much. The push for egalitarianism and inclusion means lowering of standards. It used to be an IQ of at least 125 or so was needed to be accepted for gifted programs. Even then, only a small % of gifted kids actually study math, and of those ,even a smaller % get good enough to become competent engineers. Sorta like high school sports...only a tiny % become pro level.
ForHackernews 4y ago
https://www.eetimes.com/tsmcs-arizona-culture-clash/ https://www.eetimes.com/tsmcs-arizona-culture-clash/ > they are doing even more than 12-hour days often Running the fabs sounds like a shitty job for chumps. Stick to node.js.
rayiner 4y ago
> At a time when America is desperately trying to re-shore strategic industries like semiconductors, we need a broad workforce with basic numeracy even more than usual. The more we refuse to teach our kids math — not the well-prepared upper crust, but the broad middle of the distribution — the more we’ll be dependent on immigration to run the fabs. Americans need to readjust their attitude toward math. People just say “oh I’m not good at math” because nobody will shame you for not being good at math. It’s not considered a personal flaw. There’s no social pressure for the middle/upper middle part of the workforce to bang their heads against it and get good as they can at math.
- dctoedt 4y ago
  > People just say “oh I’m not good at math” because nobody will shame you for not being good at math. It’s not considered a personal flaw. My undergrad degree was in math, but neither my wife nor either of our (now-adult) kids think they're any good at it. They smile tolerantly when I sometimes shake my head over their seeming inability to grasp — and their evident lack of interest in — what, to me, are simple mathematical concepts. (Of course, my own higher-math skills have atrophied to nearly nothing after decades of not using them ....)
  - rayiner 4y ago
    Mine as well unfortunately. My wife was a German literature major but is very focused on math education for the kids.

81 points by jseliger 4y ago

Math education in the US is pitiful. The last attempt to fix it (common core) mostly emphasized memorizing arithmetic facts. Like anybody doesn't have multiple calculators in their pockets. I'm all for teaching arithmetic, but emphasizing the algorithms and how to prove them correct should be paramount. Teaching arithmetic in various bases is important, as should be the basics of numeric analysis. Formal logic should also be a core math subject. But no, the USA has to teach subjects as were common in the 1920-1950 time frame, in the same manner as back then. This is a consequence of "home rule".

vkou 4y ago
> Math education in the US is pitiful. No arguments there. > The last attempt to fix it (common core) mostly emphasized memorizing arithmetic facts Did it? My understanding is that it uses a few different approaches to build basic intuition about numbers, and that parents hate it because many of those approaches don't make sense to them, because that's not how they learnt math. Which makes it an incredibly convenient punching bag.
- btilly 4y ago
  You're describing what it was in theory. In PRACTICE it was kids being present with a confusing array of things all at once when they hadn't sorted out the basics, and as a result learning none of them. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634210 for my rant about what my son actually went through. There is an old saying about writing. "Writing is easy, just open a vein and bleed." That particular rant I'm pretty sure that I hit an artery.
  - vkou 4y ago
    Your problems mostly stem from the fact that your son's teacher doesn't know his elbow from his ass, mathematically. Which, given the current climate, is unsurprising, as anyone with a basic understanding of mathematics will run[1], not walk away from a teaching job. Unfortunately, it's a valid criticism. More unfortunately, switching to another standard for teaching math isn't going to solve this. [1] Why be society's punching bag, on the front-lines of an insane litigation and culture war, have your heavily-backloaded pay be contingent on putting up with decades of this kind of bullshit, all while trying to do a mixture of teaching and social work?
    - btilly 4y ago
      You're right about where the problems come from, and that the criticism is valid. However I stand by my point that Common Core should be described in terms of what it did do, and not what its supporters hoped it would do.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    >given how many teachers in practice can't tell you whether 3/5 is larger than 2/3 Teaching requirements are NOT standardized at the federal level, and lots of states have decided to just lower standards instead of paying professionals more. If you only hire baby-sitters, don't be surprised when they can't teach simple stuff. In my state, we have high standards for teachers, and every single one, from kindergarten right through high school, from french teacher to cooking to history, could teach a middle school math course. Your state or municipality cheaping out on your child's education is not the fault of federal regulation, or of a federal curriculum. You'd be whining about the same thing no matter what the national curriculum was, because the problem is that your local governments don't care about education.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Common Core was also the target of a full on QAnon/Covid style conspiracy push by republicans. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/rnc-embraces-common-core-conspiracy-theory-flna1c9388203 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/rnc-embraces-common-core-... > If you're familiar with Glenn Beck's broadcasts, you've no doubt heard about his unhinged crusade against Common Core, including his declaration last week that he will no longer send his kids to college -- Common Core will only indoctrinate them and make them part of "the system that is coming." > Republicans are taking this all very seriously, with lawmakers in 18 states considering legislation to block Common Core, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) denouncing it on Beck's radio show. As mentioned in the article there are some actual experts with criticisms to make but many of the people getting unusually upset about it had got sucked into a conspiracy theory.
brigadier132 4y ago
> The last attempt to fix it (common core) mostly emphasized memorizing arithmetic facts. Memorizing facts is the foundation of all learning. When you add 7+7 in your head do you instantly know the answer is 14 because of "understanding" or because you memorized over all the years. Also the current US education system strictly deemphasizes memorization. Instead it pushes for "understanding" (conveniently a concept that is not measurable). > Like anybody doesn't have multiple calculators in their pockets. Ok and? China and India are producing the smartest people in the world and their education systems strongly emphasize memorization. Understanding comes when you've memorized enough information that you can connect the dots. Once you get to advanced math it's basically impossible to understand from the start and you can only rely on memorization until you've memorized enough and experienced enough that it finally clicks.
- yummypaint 4y ago
  People really underestimate the importance of creativity to advanced technical problem solving. That has been the key human ingredient pushing the frontiers of STEM forward, especially in the most recent decades with better computational tools. The best mathematicians aren't the ones just proving theorems anymore, they're discovering interesting conjectures through exploration and then handing the grunt work off to a computer. Engineers aren't calculating anything remotely complex by hand anymore, nor should they. The best scientists also tend not to be people who were problem set whizzes in school.
  - anon291 4y ago
    > The best mathematicians aren't the ones just proving theorems anymore, they're discovering interesting conjectures through exploration and then handing the grunt work off to a computer. I'm sorry no. This is simply wrong. Computer proofs are not there yet, and plus, a lot of the interesting theorems (including many of the well-known ones) are non-constructive which are difficult to prove on a computer. In fact, many theorem provers cannot prove 'basic' facts about math due to how constructive proof theory works. Indeed it is not clear what truth means at that level, but considering we regularly use non-constructive proofs to build things, I'm not sure that matters. I think what is most undervalued is the utility of sheer competence and technical skill to creativity. Without the former, there is no latter. If someone who never studied piano told you they had a beautiful piano solo in their head, would you believe them? More importantly, would you trust them to execute on the creative impulse?
waboremo 4y ago
Common core standards are pretty good, if you have the chance read into them you'll find you agree with most if not all of it. It's failing stem entirely from implementation and execution (on every level), leaving a lot of people wondering if general standards top-down are even the solution here, seeing how No Child Left Behind was handled.
- guyzero 4y ago
  Common Core was as much about the "common" as it was about the "core." It's not the previous standards were bad (or even different from current standards) but that there were 50 of them instead of one nationwide.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    Which is fine and all, and the national standard was fine, but for some reason, very big houses of teaching material put their dumbest interns on the job and there was A LOT of teaching material that was downright incompetent, and taught nothing. You could see exactly what it was trying to get at but it was obvious the person who wrote that material never understood the underlying concept themselves.
yardie 4y ago
> Math education in the US is pitiful. Yeah, no disagreement there. > The last attempt to fix it (common core) mostly emphasized memorizing arithmetic facts. In fact, just the opposite. The old math system was rote memorization. Then common core came along and made all those parents and their limited math skills obsolete. It didn't help that teachers who also learned the old math couldn't or didn't understand common core methodology. BTW, I'm a parent of one those school kids who was trying to learn common core. I got it right away and don't consider myself particularly brilliant. But the grumbling from so many parents who just thought they knew more than the educators was deafening. In the end, the state dropped common core and they are still complaining about it years later. The right made it into a boogeyman and now that and trans kids are all they can fixate on.
- EFreethought 4y ago
  It seemed like a lot of the hate for common core started (or at least got louder) when Obama said he thought it was a good idea.

questime 4y ago

The US government is competent but really, really slow, this nativism/anti-immigrant trend will disappear when we actually start falling behind China but that's not for several years.

0l 4y ago
Last time I checked China had much lower immigration numbers than the US.
- roncesvalles 4y ago
  The unspoken subtext of immigration is that the native culture is failing. Birth rate not at replacement. Not enough educated people. All the BS described in TFA. Immigration is not just about importing people. It's about importing a culture that is better suited for the demands of your society's ambitions. On the surface it's about bringing in people but really it's about bringing in a people.
  - ForHackernews 4y ago
    > native culture Nope, America largely exterminated its native cultures hundreds of years ago. The culture that exists today is the immigrant culture of nation founded on ideas (freedom, slavery, capitalism, democracy) not bloodlines. America can be for anyone who wants to be part of that story.
- questime 4y ago
  Yeah but they have a billion more people.
itsoktocry 4y ago
>this nativism/anti-immigrant trend will disappear when we actually start falling behind China but that's not for several years. Can you explain the relationship between anti-immigration and manufacturing success? As the sibling comments says, the USA has far more immigration than, well, anywhere in the world.

btilly 4y ago

I'm a big fan of Singapore math. The countries that score top in the world on primary math education use it. In basically every research study that has been done, it works. 3/4 of my children were lucky enough to go to a school that taught it, and it worked well for them. Unfortunately the US approach has been to throw out every research study suggesting it might work, while failing to fund better studies. See https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/Docs/InterventionReports/wwc_singaporemath_122215.pdf https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/Docs/InterventionReports/wwc_sin.... Behind this is that fact that the educational establishment makes a ton of money off of rewriting textbooks and retraining teachers for each reform wave. The hasty changes are guaranteed to lead to disaster, which motivates the NEXT reform wave, which they then also profit on. My mother became a school teacher in the 1950s, and this cycle was ALREADY in progress back then. (Think Sputnik leads to New Math leads to Why Johnny Can't Add, etc.) Switching to already existing books for an approach that actually will work would be a disaster for the education establishment. And so we'll never do it. No matter how embarrassing our regular (but profitable for the education establishment) disasters are. I complain about this occasionally. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13822577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13822577 for a more general complaint, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634210 for a rant about the Common Core disaster specificially.

bencpeters 4y ago
What is the TL;DR version of the difference between Singapore math & US math education?
- btilly 4y ago
  Singapore math focuses on teaching every concept by first manipulating physical objects, then manipulating pictures, then manipulating abstract symbols. Encouraging children to draw connections between these. It also spreads each concept over time so that you keep revisiting the same ideas to ensure it gets fully integrated. And mixes them. So grade 1 kids may be doing "multiplication" by arranging blocks in a grid before they've fully mastered the + sign. The USA gives a much more cursory pass through operational actions and goes straight to the abstract representation. We also do a lot more of one concept at a time, only to move on to the next while kids forget the first. The result is that kids learn to blindly follow poorly learned procedures, hoping to do it well enough to pass the test before forgetting the concept. And then the following year do it all over again, having forgot the material from last year. Yeah, yeah, we have an official curriculum, sequencing, and there is lots of verbiage in official documents about how and when kids are supposed to get reminded, etc. But I described what ACTUALLY tends to happen. And you only have to glance at test scores to realize that the official narrative about what is learned is more myth than reality.

vkou 4y ago

The problem isn't the how of education. The problem is culture. We built an actively knowledge-hostile culture that glorifies and rewards managers, hustlers, grifters, and influencers, and we're then surprised that nobody with ambition wants to... Actually build things.

spacemadness 4y ago
Taking this back to STEM, what is the pay like for FAB jobs? How are employees treated? Hand wringing about math competence ignores whether the jobs themselves are competitive to their peers. If it requires a masters degree in EE, but pays less than a CS degree bachelors on average, the incentives are not going to be there for those that already are generally competent in the sciences.
- Robotbeat 4y ago
  Employees of Taiwanese fans work insane hours and one of the problems with replicating it here was workers not willing to work the hours that Taiwan did. Don’t know if pay in Taiwan is competitive, but when we’re talking about work/conditions, it should be pointed out.
  - philipkglass 4y ago
    The United States already has a lot of semiconductor fabs. It was only in recent years that AMD processors fabricated by TSMC overtook the performance of Intel processors fabricated by Intel. Is there something about newer process nodes that makes the employment conditions worse? Otherwise, I'd point to Intel fabs in the United States as an existence proof that the USA can get qualified workers for domestic semiconductor fabrication. (Plus US fabs operated by Texas Instruments, Samsung, GlobalFoundries, and others.)
    - Robotbeat 4y ago
      We were discussing being competitive with peers and what peers are doing vs what we are doing. It seemed pretty relevant. Also, I mentally separate long working hours from other aspects of “worker conditions.” You can have low working hours but a toxic and unsafe work environment or a physically safe and supportive work environment with long hours. You can also have high and low pay with various working hours (although typically high pay isn’t supported by low working hours unless the business has some sort of massive moat).

bob1029 4y ago

I worked in semiconductor manufacturing. The hardest stuff is troubleshooting the state of the live system and performing root cause analysis. In my time at Samsung, we politely referred to the facility as "bootcamp for engineers". Indeed, I learned how to troubleshoot incredibly complex systems after just a few months of direct exposure. The #1 skill I learned was to not ever make an assumption about a thing. "Trust but verify" was burned into our souls. Perhaps the best way to train the next generation is to create actual bootcamps on-site where young professionals get a chance to try and answer questions like "How did lot ABC123 end up with unexpected CU exposure while it was sitting inside a N2-purged storage area?" The only tools they get to use: historical logs of every event that occurred and a copy of grep. In my experience, the deep PhD-style education was absolutely not essential for the day-to-day. Only a few people need to master the idea. Once the complex academia is converted into a physical reticle or CMP process recipe, you then need an army of people to reliably execute on that standardized vision. I think someone coming into semiconductor manufacturing would have an easier time if they were dropped right into it on day one. The theory is nice but we found it to be mostly a waste of time when someone from manufacturing was calling us on the phone and complaining about a stuck lot.

josaka 4y ago
Same fab, same experience. I would add that a deep understanding (and ability to explain) statistics was more critical than understanding the underlying device physics for most roles I encountered. Enormous amounts of noisy data, characterizing several hundred process steps, is harnessed to apply massive pressure on engineers to "fix" problems that might just be a statistical blip. Economic stakes of minor yield deviations are so high that you often have to act as if something might be wrong before signals reach statistical significance. I bailed after four years, but it was great experience to start my career.
drivers99 4y ago
> The #1 skill I learned was to not ever make an assumption about a thing. "Trust but verify" was burned into our souls. There's a book I like called "Stop Guessing" (Nat Greene) about that.

softfalcon 4y ago

I straddle a unique perspective of North American education. I am the descendant of uneducated farmers, but the son of an engineer. My nerdy father left the small town life to get educated and become an engineer. Now I live in a family of nerds amidst a sea of extended family who are all rather poorly educated. I watched as my cousins cared more about ski-doos and video games than they did about their math homework. Unsurprisingly, they didn't get far academically and now as they are approaching their adult life, are struggling to be employed and do not like their job prospects, the same as their parents did before them. Meanwhile, me and my siblings were eagerly pushed to pursue education. Curiosity was ignited at every opportunity to encourage us to think hard and explore big ideas. This has paid off in spades for our family. Innovation, thinking, and exploration are often pre-cursors to success. Seeing my extended family (and their friends) justify their uneducated views of the world, hearing their bigotry, listening to their hatred against "smart people". It hurts my soul. Knowing that my extended family out numbers my close family 5 to 1 by family size makes me worry about the future of our society. These ignorant folks are voting with their wallets, ballots, and social media voices. What does that say about the future of North America? What does it say about the changes we need to make to enlighten our people for the future?

zwieback 4y ago
You can see both sides - what do you think would be an effective outreach to the rural undereducated population? Snomobile mechanic could be one stepping stone to a technical education, more of that kind of thing?
stalfosknight 4y ago
It seems like the dystopian world shown in the movie Idiocracy is inevitable.
- roncesvalles 4y ago
  And yet, GP shows that nerds do emerge in a family of idiots. There is quite a bit of jitter in the genetics of human intelligence.

anon291 4y ago

The only part of the article I disagree with is that 'inborn talent' is a major force behind disparities in math ability. While I will grant the existence of superstar prodigies, by far most people 'good at math', including most mathematicians behind most of math's most used fields, are simply those who spent time studying mathematics and taking it seriously. We often mistake parental investment for 'in-born talent', while both are due to the lottery of birth, calling it 'in-born talent' makes it seem unachievable for others. It's a harder hill for sure, but not insurmountable.

medvezhenok 4y ago
We accept differential outcomes in sports and how genetics plays a strong role there, but we seem utterly resistant to accept it in intellectual pursuits for some dang reason. I've taught many people to juggle from literally zero juggling experience. Hand eye coordination is not equally distributed among the population, and some people are naturally significantly more talented (and make more progress much more quickly than others. 10X differences are not a joke). I'm not sure why we keep believing intellectual things are any different. Having gone to school with some exceptionally smart/not-smart people at both questionable public schools and then one of the best universities, the discrepancies there are definitely not just due to parental investment (though I'm not denying that it can play a role)

zwieback 4y ago

I don't know, complaining about lack of STEM and throwing in a side-swipe to equity thinking isn't that helpful to answer what we need to run our fabs. In my experience you need a ton of people with practical thinking skills, good work ethic and some hands-on training. I think you'll find enough nerds to fill the engineering/science pipeline. The real problem is with the broad technical workforce, that needs to be bolstered.

WillPostForFood 4y ago
In my experience you need a ton of people with practical thinking skills, good work ethic and some hands-on training. So you don't think STEM education is important? It seems like you left that out of the list intentionally, but not sure. If so, also consider not whether it is important to the fabs, but whether it is important to kids who eventually want and need jobs. You probably will be able to kill fabs with the nerds in the engineering/science pipeline, but you are then excluding 95% of the current student base.
- zwieback 4y ago
  Sorry, I was unclear. I think STEM is very important but I don't think we need to force everyone into it. I think there are enough STEM-interested kids that will choose this route, if you start with the assumption "STEM is so important we have to make sure everyone gets some" then you have to answer the question how to make it accessible to everyone. I'm in favor of outreach programs and picking out top performers but I don't think forcing a minimum level of STEMness across all students is wise.
  - WillPostForFood 4y ago
    I don't think we need to force everyone into it. 100% agree! We need myriad education options for myriad types of students. But the legit critique of the "equity approach", as is happening in the Bay Area, is that it is you they aren't allowing students to advance in STEM (especially M), even students want to. It is not forcing a minimum level, it is capping max level at a relatively low/mid spot.

roncesvalles 4y ago

The problem is largely cultural instead of political. It just isn't "cool" in American culture to be good at school. How do you fix that?

deleted 4y ago
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zabzonk 4y ago

> In 2014, the city of San Francisco decided to try to improve equity in math education by barring kids from taking algebra in 8th grade i honestly thought this had to be satire - it seems it wasn't.

i-use-nixos-btw 4y ago
Who could possibly have thought that it was a good idea? It makes absolutely no sense.
- zabzonk 4y ago
  it is like not teaching geography. now, i kind of can get behind this thought, as whenever i went into a geography lesson at school, there would be a clunk which was my head falling on the desk into deep slumber - teacher: "somebody wake up hicks", except this was long pre "alien", much less "aliens". but people should have the chance of being taught these things, or indeed anything. to deny them of this is flatly wrong.
- 908B64B197 4y ago
  It's genius. Kids are failing? Lower the bar! Suddenly everyone has "improved". The bureaucrats are happy, the unions are happy, even the parents who don't care about education are happy! Makes it easier to push for the next part of the bureaucrat's agenda [0] [1] : CRT laced math and computer science education. [0] https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11... [1] https://criticallyconsciouscomputing.org/ https://criticallyconsciouscomputing.org/

paulpauper 4y ago

The bar for gifted and other enrichment is set so low, it's not going to do much. The push for egalitarianism and inclusion means lowering of standards. It used to be an IQ of at least 125 or so was needed to be accepted for gifted programs. Even then, only a small % of gifted kids actually study math, and of those ,even a smaller % get good enough to become competent engineers. Sorta like high school sports...only a tiny % become pro level.

ForHackernews 4y ago

https://www.eetimes.com/tsmcs-arizona-culture-clash/ https://www.eetimes.com/tsmcs-arizona-culture-clash/ > they are doing even more than 12-hour days often Running the fabs sounds like a shitty job for chumps. Stick to node.js.

rayiner 4y ago

> At a time when America is desperately trying to re-shore strategic industries like semiconductors, we need a broad workforce with basic numeracy even more than usual. The more we refuse to teach our kids math — not the well-prepared upper crust, but the broad middle of the distribution — the more we’ll be dependent on immigration to run the fabs. Americans need to readjust their attitude toward math. People just say “oh I’m not good at math” because nobody will shame you for not being good at math. It’s not considered a personal flaw. There’s no social pressure for the middle/upper middle part of the workforce to bang their heads against it and get good as they can at math.

dctoedt 4y ago
> People just say “oh I’m not good at math” because nobody will shame you for not being good at math. It’s not considered a personal flaw. My undergrad degree was in math, but neither my wife nor either of our (now-adult) kids think they're any good at it. They smile tolerantly when I sometimes shake my head over their seeming inability to grasp — and their evident lack of interest in — what, to me, are simple mathematical concepts. (Of course, my own higher-math skills have atrophied to nearly nothing after decades of not using them ....)
- rayiner 4y ago
  Mine as well unfortunately. My wife was a German literature major but is very focused on math education for the kids.