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"The world does not suffer from an oversupply of clarity and understanding (to put it mildly)" – how this can be remedied by mathematical thinking, though, is r

"The world does not suffer from an oversupply of clarity and understanding (to put it mildly)" – how this can be remedied by mathematical thinking, though, is rather unclear. Take the USSR with its strong tradition of math education in secondary schools and math research. Despite producing a lot of important results and some painfully beautiful math books, like Gelfand's Linear algebra, it has more or less zero effect on the wider society or even wider intellectual discourse.

hyperparameter 3y ago
> Despite producing a lot of important results and some painfully beautiful math books, like Gelfand's Linear algebra, it has more or less zero effect on the wider society or even wider intellectual discourse. In Computer Science we have Adelson-Velsky and Landis's self-balanced binary trees, and many other results, as well as other results in math and the sciences. In engineering and otherwise the USSR launched the first satellite, person in space, sent the first probes to the moon and other planets, and pushed the US into space. The civil rights moment in the US was often accused of being communist because - a lot of it was communist, and supported by the USSR, at least in the days of Paul Robeson and the Scottsboro Boys and Martin Luther King at the Highland Folk school (billboards through the South had a picture of King there "King at communist training school"). Actually if you watch the Nightline of Mandela coming to the US, half the speakers accused him of being a USSR-aligned communist. The USSR contributed to the anti-colonial struggles around the world - from China to Cuba to Vietnam, and contributed to it in other countries like India. Plus it did most of the fighting in WWII for the US and UK to defeat Germany (of course nowadays the US and UK flipped it to Germany against Russia). The USSR also helped push a blue collar working class proletariat into a kind of middle class. This began being rolled back even when the USSR still existed but was weak, and is still being rolled back.
- mmmmmmtoes 3y ago
  [dead]
- rcxdude 3y ago
  > Plus it did most of the fighting in WWII for the US and UK to defeat Germany (of course nowadays the US and UK flipped it to Germany against Russia). That's quite a spin on history. The USSR (already an imperialist power) and germany secretly divvied up eastern europe between themselves before Germany started the war, and it was only Germany's betrayal of that deal which led to the USSR actually joining the fight against Germany, with the US and UK finding it a convenient way to wear down a shared foe to provide them with some of their industrial capacity. You make it sound like this was some kind of puppet mastery by the US and UK (which to be clear, are not saints either, but decidedly on the right side in WWII) as opposed to two imperialist powers seeking to conquer others by force fighting amongst themselves.
  - hyperparameter 3y ago
    That's some spin of the UK side of things. When the USSR was looking in vain for an alliance with France or the UK, France and the UK instead made a pact with Germany, handing Czechoslovakia to Germany. Insofar as the UK and imperialist powers seeking to conquer others by force - Scotland, Ireland, India, Hong Kong and the Opium Wars, Australia, Iraq, Africa from Egypt down to South Africa, I can go on...
    - mmmmmmtoes 3y ago
      [dead]
effed3 3y ago
but you can think it in the other direction.. Even in a sociey so closed and constrained (to simplify a lot), math and art, literature, ideas, lived, fighted and sometimes flourished, history time still flowing
Ar-Curunir 3y ago
This is such a completely US-centric comment. Go talk to folks in India or China or Vietnam or Europe or Africa, and you'll find that the USSR had much larger cultural and societal impact.
- macleginn 3y ago
  For the record I was born in USSR and never lived in the US. More to the point, my comment was about the USSR-internal discourse and how it was (not) shaped by mathematicians in any meaningful way – not a pronouncement on what good Soviet engineers did abroad or, more largely, on the practical usefulness of mathematics.
julianeon 3y ago
Less than zero? Harsh. Rather than going through the list of USSR scientists & mathematicians who made titanic contributions, I'm just going to throw one unexpected name out there: Max Levchin. He is arguably the brains, and the irreducible core, of the movement that led ultimately to PayPal, the PayPal mafia, and every other startup & cultural influence that resulted from that. He has described having a strong math & science background as being important to him, and it was obviously at the very core of PayPal - like I said, the one irreducible piece of that was Levchin's math-based contributions. Arguably without Levchin there is no Elon Musk, no Peter Thiel, no Reid Hoffman, not as names that we recognize, the list goes on... And if that doesn't count as influence in the larger society, I don't know what does.

hyperparameter 3y ago

> Despite producing a lot of important results and some painfully beautiful math books, like Gelfand's Linear algebra, it has more or less zero effect on the wider society or even wider intellectual discourse. In Computer Science we have Adelson-Velsky and Landis's self-balanced binary trees, and many other results, as well as other results in math and the sciences. In engineering and otherwise the USSR launched the first satellite, person in space, sent the first probes to the moon and other planets, and pushed the US into space. The civil rights moment in the US was often accused of being communist because - a lot of it was communist, and supported by the USSR, at least in the days of Paul Robeson and the Scottsboro Boys and Martin Luther King at the Highland Folk school (billboards through the South had a picture of King there "King at communist training school"). Actually if you watch the Nightline of Mandela coming to the US, half the speakers accused him of being a USSR-aligned communist. The USSR contributed to the anti-colonial struggles around the world - from China to Cuba to Vietnam, and contributed to it in other countries like India. Plus it did most of the fighting in WWII for the US and UK to defeat Germany (of course nowadays the US and UK flipped it to Germany against Russia). The USSR also helped push a blue collar working class proletariat into a kind of middle class. This began being rolled back even when the USSR still existed but was weak, and is still being rolled back.

mmmmmmtoes 3y ago
[dead]
rcxdude 3y ago
> Plus it did most of the fighting in WWII for the US and UK to defeat Germany (of course nowadays the US and UK flipped it to Germany against Russia). That's quite a spin on history. The USSR (already an imperialist power) and germany secretly divvied up eastern europe between themselves before Germany started the war, and it was only Germany's betrayal of that deal which led to the USSR actually joining the fight against Germany, with the US and UK finding it a convenient way to wear down a shared foe to provide them with some of their industrial capacity. You make it sound like this was some kind of puppet mastery by the US and UK (which to be clear, are not saints either, but decidedly on the right side in WWII) as opposed to two imperialist powers seeking to conquer others by force fighting amongst themselves.
- hyperparameter 3y ago
  That's some spin of the UK side of things. When the USSR was looking in vain for an alliance with France or the UK, France and the UK instead made a pact with Germany, handing Czechoslovakia to Germany. Insofar as the UK and imperialist powers seeking to conquer others by force - Scotland, Ireland, India, Hong Kong and the Opium Wars, Australia, Iraq, Africa from Egypt down to South Africa, I can go on...
  - mmmmmmtoes 3y ago
    [dead]

effed3 3y ago

but you can think it in the other direction.. Even in a sociey so closed and constrained (to simplify a lot), math and art, literature, ideas, lived, fighted and sometimes flourished, history time still flowing

Ar-Curunir 3y ago

This is such a completely US-centric comment. Go talk to folks in India or China or Vietnam or Europe or Africa, and you'll find that the USSR had much larger cultural and societal impact.

macleginn 3y ago
For the record I was born in USSR and never lived in the US. More to the point, my comment was about the USSR-internal discourse and how it was (not) shaped by mathematicians in any meaningful way – not a pronouncement on what good Soviet engineers did abroad or, more largely, on the practical usefulness of mathematics.

julianeon 3y ago

Less than zero? Harsh. Rather than going through the list of USSR scientists & mathematicians who made titanic contributions, I'm just going to throw one unexpected name out there: Max Levchin. He is arguably the brains, and the irreducible core, of the movement that led ultimately to PayPal, the PayPal mafia, and every other startup & cultural influence that resulted from that. He has described having a strong math & science background as being important to him, and it was obviously at the very core of PayPal - like I said, the one irreducible piece of that was Levchin's math-based contributions. Arguably without Levchin there is no Elon Musk, no Peter Thiel, no Reid Hoffman, not as names that we recognize, the list goes on... And if that doesn't count as influence in the larger society, I don't know what does.