15 ms·

Jewish Problems

115 points by victorhn 14y ago

pav3l 14y ago
I'm assuming this is a follow-up on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4752047 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4752047 Wow, that is crazy!! Even though i have 2 math degrees and am doing applied math and stats for a living, there is a very good chance I'd fail such an exam if I took it now!
- WalterGR 14y ago
  Just to add some context, the HN submission above is for an article entitled, "The Fifth problem: math and anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union" The URL of the submission is http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-Fifth-problem--math---anti-Semitism-in-the-Soviet-Union-7446 http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-Fifth-problem--...
pessimizer 14y ago
repost: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3096793 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3096793 [202 comments]
nacker 14y ago
I think America will soon be having a Holocaust problem. http://www.infowars.com/poll-nearly-one-third-of-americans-would-accept-tsa-body-cavity-search-in-order-to-fly/ http://www.infowars.com/poll-nearly-one-third-of-americans-w...
- agf 14y ago
  What exactly does that have to do with math or intolerance?
  - nacker 14y ago
    Actually, nothing. I just posted it because I am in shock after reading it. Feel free to downvote, or, I'll just delete it. Are you one of the "nearly one third"? EDIT: To be fair though, it does have a Jewish connection - cattle trains?
    - dbecker 14y ago
      If you read something and find it compelling, submit it as a new story rather than tacking it on to an unrelated comment thread.
    - agf 14y ago
      No, I'm not of the "nearly one third". I think the privacy implications of the current TSA procedures are not anywhere near the most problematic privacy issues in our society, but an escalation of that type would be beyond what I would accept. I am, however, Jewish, and was originally a math major in college, so I do have a particular interest in this story and would appreciate it if the conversation could stay on topic. The "cattle train" connection is pretty contrived. One is voluntary travel, the other involuntary. One is certainly a breech of dignity, rationality, and privacy, but the other was often deadly, and is at a completely different level of dehumanization.
  - idle_processor 14y ago
    Going out on a limb and guessing he means unquestioningly bending over—in this case, rather literally—for authority figures in the face of unreasonable demands. IMO, Philip Zombardo's studies (most famously, the Stanford prison experiment[0]) suggest this is nothing new. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
- dobro 14y ago
  Well, Hitler was inspired by the american concentration camps for native americans to build his own concentration camps for Jews: “Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination – by starvation and uneven combat – of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.” (“Adolph Hitler” by John Toland, p 202) Plus, there were two to three times more native americans that were killed by European invaders in the US region, than Jews that died in the holocaust. So, the US already has HAD a holocaust problem in the past. (One would call dropping two bombs to 250,000 civilians and evaporating them, a holocaust itself, by the very definition of the term)
  - rayiner 14y ago
    The US's extermination of American Indians was brilliant and cunning. If you study the historical record, one thing you become aware of is that the colonists didn't originally have the advantage. They had guns, but that wasn't so much of an edge that the Indians couldn't have wiped out the colonists with their superior numbers. Even at the time of the American Revolution, you see treaties with the Delaware Indians that are incredibly deferential, asking for their permission to cross Indian territory to fight the British. The exterimination proceeded slowly over almost 100 years. We would make treaties, at first deferential then increasingly aggressive, to placate the Indians while slowly moving them off desirable land. American numbers grew while Indian numbers dwindled, until we got to the state that exists now, with them isolated to tiny little pockets of land.
    - dobro 14y ago
      Exactly as you described it. I had the privilege to discuss the issue with the late Russell Means ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Means http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Means ) a few years ago. What's disgusting is that the abuse continues to this very day. First they were decimated, then they were forced into "reformation camps" to break their spirit, and then casino licenses and the like were thrown to them as a bone (and to corrupt and silence the more tempted or gullible with the easy money). The government and various interested parties even try to take some of their supposedly "sovereign" reservation lands from them and/or poison them to get profitable minerals such as Uranium.
- dubfan 14y ago
  Ah, an Infowars article. Always a credible source.
  - macchina 14y ago
    wow, they commissioned a survey. Pretty interesting actually. http://static.prisonplanet.com/p/images/november2012/poll.doc http://static.prisonplanet.com/p/images/november2012/poll.do...
shmerl 14y ago
Number 17 doesn't look to be extraordinary, it actually was commonly given in Moscow State University (on math and computer science departments) until recently, when oral examinations were removed altogether. In general such discrimination against Jews in Moscow State University was commonplace until the beginning of 1990s, and is gone since then.
- cema 14y ago
  Until 1989, to be precise. Incidentally, during Perestroika the society was changing at such a high rate that what was hard to imagine just three months before was becoming routine. Now looking back 20+ years it is so difficult to reconstruct the timeline.
  - shmerl 14y ago
    Well, I know when Perestroika started, but I gave it a bit of a margin, since I can't say for sure when precisely it affected this discrimination. It's known to be gone for sure in the 1990s. Could be, it started in 1989.
    - cema 14y ago
      I remember it well -- many of my friends and myself were affected, so we kept a close eye on that, and the memory is still alive.
mynameishere 14y ago
It's just affirmative action. This sort of thing happens in every multicultural country, especially when one group apparently does better financially than the others. http://www.amazon.com/Affirmative-Action-Around-World-Empirical/dp/0300107757 http://www.amazon.com/Affirmative-Action-Around-World-Empiri... The Russians came up with an unusually crass method for this, but guess what? Jews and other whites and East Asians all are, to some degree, kept from elite institutions today because of our more subtle system.
- DaniFong 14y ago
  Affirmative action? Are you mad? Perhaps you're unaware of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Jewish_pogroms_in_the_Russian_Empire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Jewish_pogroms_in_the_Russ... Affirmative action is not the same thing as making it artificially harder for a discriminated minority!
  - jonnathanson 14y ago
    I think what he was trying to say is that this is affirmative action for gentiles. In other words, Russia made it easier for non-Jews by virtue of giving them easier entrance exams. I still think "affirmative action" is a clumsy and not entirely correct way of describing what he's trying to articulate. But he's not trying to be as provocative as he comes across. At least I don't think (?) he is?
    - goldfeld 14y ago
      Just because you have a name for non-Jews doesn't make it a cohesive group and most importantly nowhere near a minority. It's insane to say discriminating against a minority is like affirmative action for everyone else. So if I don't like Bob I could phrase it that it's not that I don't like him--I do!-- it's just that I like everyone else better (including other people I dislike). And for someone to fall for that would be ridiculous.
      - taejo 14y ago
Sniffnoy 14y ago
When linking to arXiv, please link to the abstract, not directly to the PDF.
- shmerl 14y ago
  Here you go: http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556 http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556
qdpb 14y ago
To see problems that incoming students of MSU math department need to solve now, you can check out: http://www.math.msu.su/admission/exams-write.html http://www.math.msu.su/admission/exams-write.html E.g. http://www.math.msu.su/admission/MATWRITE/w2001j~1.gif http://www.math.msu.su/admission/MATWRITE/w2001j~1.gif does not seem much easier than "jewish" problems; and my understanding is that math department of MSU attempts to admit brilliant people who deliberately prepare to solve problems of this kind.
- shmerl 14y ago
  Here authors also filtered problems which have relatively "simple" solution (which is hard to find). The problems used to fail students included those with extremely hard (or non existent) solutions. Andrei Sakharov once commented, that he reviewed those kind of math problems, and was perplexed by their complexity.
charlesjshort 14y ago
Jews invented racial discrimination. Let a gentile apply to a Jewish school, even if his father is Jewish and he practices Judaism they will turn him down if his mother is not ethnically Jewish.
- eli_gottlieb 14y ago
  You actually can't see the difference between religious law being used to discriminate among applicants to a private, parochial, religious K-12 school and discrimination at a public, state-funded institution based on inescapable racial identities recorded by the government at birth?
  - charlesjshort 14y ago
    If you've been subject to the discrimination it probably feels the same. public/private whatever you call them, they are all just groups of people, and exclusionary judgment based on a couple generations of dna, well I think THAT should be reserved for haShem only. Live by the sword die by the sword, reciprocity, lex talionis, karma, ... almost always catches up.
    - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
      I think you shouldn't go around referring to Hashem when you blatantly don't know His laws. Jews face judgment, not karma.
khmel 14y ago
Guys, I studied in Moscow Institute of Pysics and technology, top technical university in the former USSR - I had in my class people who won International Olympiads in physics, math, chemistry, computer science. Those problems are average or below - you could meet them on math entrance exams to economics specialization. Problems are of the level of district\city math olympiads. I'm sure that jewish people as well as any other applicants with good math background solved them without big problems.
- cema 14y ago
  I see. Please take a look at a partial collection of references at http://kerosinka.livejournal.com/1633.html http://kerosinka.livejournal.com/1633.html -- it contains memoirs, discussions, and some bibliography.
  - khmel 14y ago
    I believe, issue was not the final numbers - % of Jewish people/Jewish population was the highest compare to other nations in the USSR. Number of Jewish professors, academics and billionaries with academic background is amazing. I understand why USSR did that. Government sponsored education. Number of places in best universities was very limited, it was nation's genome and capital. People who supposed to develop new weapons and economy. Soviet government did not trust Jewish people - as we see from the history, Jewish people were often the first who left the country in case of problems. It was hard to imagine that they will become Soviet patriots. That's why USSR came up with artificial barriers in order to give more places in universities to more potentionally patriotic students. USSR wanted to save its intelligent capital investment and feel more save. The problem was the rude way how artificial barrier was created by USSR. Instead of organizing super-complex writing exams for Jewish people, or making ideological interviews they tried to eliminate them with fake oral exams. See below how US handles the same issue with asian students (reposted from user continuations). http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2011/04.. http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2011/04.... "Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and researcher Alexandria Walton Radford examined data on students applying to college in 1997 and found what looks like different standards for different racial groups. They calculated that Asian-Americans needed nearly perfect SAT scores of 1550 to have the same chance of being accepted at a top private university as whites who scored 1410 and African-Americans who got 1100. Whites were three times, Hispanics six times, and blacks more than 15 times as likely to be accepted at a US university as Asian-Americans." In Russia a minority like Jews are asked special questions in admission tests to make it harder for them to get in, while in America a minority like Asians are hit with a penalty of 450 points in SAT to make it harder (15 times harder) for them to get in. There's no difference.

115 points by victorhn 14y ago

pav3l 14y ago

I'm assuming this is a follow-up on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4752047 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4752047 Wow, that is crazy!! Even though i have 2 math degrees and am doing applied math and stats for a living, there is a very good chance I'd fail such an exam if I took it now!

WalterGR 14y ago
Just to add some context, the HN submission above is for an article entitled, "The Fifth problem: math and anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union" The URL of the submission is http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-Fifth-problem--math---anti-Semitism-in-the-Soviet-Union-7446 http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-Fifth-problem--...

pessimizer 14y ago

repost: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3096793 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3096793 [202 comments]

nacker 14y ago

I think America will soon be having a Holocaust problem. http://www.infowars.com/poll-nearly-one-third-of-americans-would-accept-tsa-body-cavity-search-in-order-to-fly/ http://www.infowars.com/poll-nearly-one-third-of-americans-w...

agf 14y ago
What exactly does that have to do with math or intolerance?
- nacker 14y ago
  Actually, nothing. I just posted it because I am in shock after reading it. Feel free to downvote, or, I'll just delete it. Are you one of the "nearly one third"? EDIT: To be fair though, it does have a Jewish connection - cattle trains?
  - dbecker 14y ago
    If you read something and find it compelling, submit it as a new story rather than tacking it on to an unrelated comment thread.
  - agf 14y ago
    No, I'm not of the "nearly one third". I think the privacy implications of the current TSA procedures are not anywhere near the most problematic privacy issues in our society, but an escalation of that type would be beyond what I would accept. I am, however, Jewish, and was originally a math major in college, so I do have a particular interest in this story and would appreciate it if the conversation could stay on topic. The "cattle train" connection is pretty contrived. One is voluntary travel, the other involuntary. One is certainly a breech of dignity, rationality, and privacy, but the other was often deadly, and is at a completely different level of dehumanization.
- idle_processor 14y ago
  Going out on a limb and guessing he means unquestioningly bending over—in this case, rather literally—for authority figures in the face of unreasonable demands. IMO, Philip Zombardo's studies (most famously, the Stanford prison experiment[0]) suggest this is nothing new. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
dobro 14y ago
Well, Hitler was inspired by the american concentration camps for native americans to build his own concentration camps for Jews: “Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination – by starvation and uneven combat – of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.” (“Adolph Hitler” by John Toland, p 202) Plus, there were two to three times more native americans that were killed by European invaders in the US region, than Jews that died in the holocaust. So, the US already has HAD a holocaust problem in the past. (One would call dropping two bombs to 250,000 civilians and evaporating them, a holocaust itself, by the very definition of the term)
- rayiner 14y ago
  The US's extermination of American Indians was brilliant and cunning. If you study the historical record, one thing you become aware of is that the colonists didn't originally have the advantage. They had guns, but that wasn't so much of an edge that the Indians couldn't have wiped out the colonists with their superior numbers. Even at the time of the American Revolution, you see treaties with the Delaware Indians that are incredibly deferential, asking for their permission to cross Indian territory to fight the British. The exterimination proceeded slowly over almost 100 years. We would make treaties, at first deferential then increasingly aggressive, to placate the Indians while slowly moving them off desirable land. American numbers grew while Indian numbers dwindled, until we got to the state that exists now, with them isolated to tiny little pockets of land.
  - dobro 14y ago
    Exactly as you described it. I had the privilege to discuss the issue with the late Russell Means ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Means http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Means ) a few years ago. What's disgusting is that the abuse continues to this very day. First they were decimated, then they were forced into "reformation camps" to break their spirit, and then casino licenses and the like were thrown to them as a bone (and to corrupt and silence the more tempted or gullible with the easy money). The government and various interested parties even try to take some of their supposedly "sovereign" reservation lands from them and/or poison them to get profitable minerals such as Uranium.
dubfan 14y ago
Ah, an Infowars article. Always a credible source.
- macchina 14y ago
  wow, they commissioned a survey. Pretty interesting actually. http://static.prisonplanet.com/p/images/november2012/poll.doc http://static.prisonplanet.com/p/images/november2012/poll.do...

shmerl 14y ago

Number 17 doesn't look to be extraordinary, it actually was commonly given in Moscow State University (on math and computer science departments) until recently, when oral examinations were removed altogether. In general such discrimination against Jews in Moscow State University was commonplace until the beginning of 1990s, and is gone since then.

cema 14y ago
Until 1989, to be precise. Incidentally, during Perestroika the society was changing at such a high rate that what was hard to imagine just three months before was becoming routine. Now looking back 20+ years it is so difficult to reconstruct the timeline.
- shmerl 14y ago
  Well, I know when Perestroika started, but I gave it a bit of a margin, since I can't say for sure when precisely it affected this discrimination. It's known to be gone for sure in the 1990s. Could be, it started in 1989.
  - cema 14y ago
    I remember it well -- many of my friends and myself were affected, so we kept a close eye on that, and the memory is still alive.

mynameishere 14y ago

It's just affirmative action. This sort of thing happens in every multicultural country, especially when one group apparently does better financially than the others. http://www.amazon.com/Affirmative-Action-Around-World-Empirical/dp/0300107757 http://www.amazon.com/Affirmative-Action-Around-World-Empiri... The Russians came up with an unusually crass method for this, but guess what? Jews and other whites and East Asians all are, to some degree, kept from elite institutions today because of our more subtle system.

DaniFong 14y ago
Affirmative action? Are you mad? Perhaps you're unaware of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Jewish_pogroms_in_the_Russian_Empire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Jewish_pogroms_in_the_Russ... Affirmative action is not the same thing as making it artificially harder for a discriminated minority!
- jonnathanson 14y ago
  I think what he was trying to say is that this is affirmative action for gentiles. In other words, Russia made it easier for non-Jews by virtue of giving them easier entrance exams. I still think "affirmative action" is a clumsy and not entirely correct way of describing what he's trying to articulate. But he's not trying to be as provocative as he comes across. At least I don't think (?) he is?
  - goldfeld 14y ago
    Just because you have a name for non-Jews doesn't make it a cohesive group and most importantly nowhere near a minority. It's insane to say discriminating against a minority is like affirmative action for everyone else. So if I don't like Bob I could phrase it that it's not that I don't like him--I do!-- it's just that I like everyone else better (including other people I dislike). And for someone to fall for that would be ridiculous.
    - taejo 14y ago

Sniffnoy 14y ago

When linking to arXiv, please link to the abstract, not directly to the PDF.

shmerl 14y ago
Here you go: http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556 http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556

qdpb 14y ago

To see problems that incoming students of MSU math department need to solve now, you can check out: http://www.math.msu.su/admission/exams-write.html http://www.math.msu.su/admission/exams-write.html E.g. http://www.math.msu.su/admission/MATWRITE/w2001j~1.gif http://www.math.msu.su/admission/MATWRITE/w2001j~1.gif does not seem much easier than "jewish" problems; and my understanding is that math department of MSU attempts to admit brilliant people who deliberately prepare to solve problems of this kind.

shmerl 14y ago
Here authors also filtered problems which have relatively "simple" solution (which is hard to find). The problems used to fail students included those with extremely hard (or non existent) solutions. Andrei Sakharov once commented, that he reviewed those kind of math problems, and was perplexed by their complexity.

charlesjshort 14y ago

Jews invented racial discrimination. Let a gentile apply to a Jewish school, even if his father is Jewish and he practices Judaism they will turn him down if his mother is not ethnically Jewish.

eli_gottlieb 14y ago
You actually can't see the difference between religious law being used to discriminate among applicants to a private, parochial, religious K-12 school and discrimination at a public, state-funded institution based on inescapable racial identities recorded by the government at birth?
- charlesjshort 14y ago
  If you've been subject to the discrimination it probably feels the same. public/private whatever you call them, they are all just groups of people, and exclusionary judgment based on a couple generations of dna, well I think THAT should be reserved for haShem only. Live by the sword die by the sword, reciprocity, lex talionis, karma, ... almost always catches up.
  - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
    I think you shouldn't go around referring to Hashem when you blatantly don't know His laws. Jews face judgment, not karma.

khmel 14y ago

Guys, I studied in Moscow Institute of Pysics and technology, top technical university in the former USSR - I had in my class people who won International Olympiads in physics, math, chemistry, computer science. Those problems are average or below - you could meet them on math entrance exams to economics specialization. Problems are of the level of district\city math olympiads. I'm sure that jewish people as well as any other applicants with good math background solved them without big problems.

cema 14y ago
I see. Please take a look at a partial collection of references at http://kerosinka.livejournal.com/1633.html http://kerosinka.livejournal.com/1633.html -- it contains memoirs, discussions, and some bibliography.
- khmel 14y ago
  I believe, issue was not the final numbers - % of Jewish people/Jewish population was the highest compare to other nations in the USSR. Number of Jewish professors, academics and billionaries with academic background is amazing. I understand why USSR did that. Government sponsored education. Number of places in best universities was very limited, it was nation's genome and capital. People who supposed to develop new weapons and economy. Soviet government did not trust Jewish people - as we see from the history, Jewish people were often the first who left the country in case of problems. It was hard to imagine that they will become Soviet patriots. That's why USSR came up with artificial barriers in order to give more places in universities to more potentionally patriotic students. USSR wanted to save its intelligent capital investment and feel more save. The problem was the rude way how artificial barrier was created by USSR. Instead of organizing super-complex writing exams for Jewish people, or making ideological interviews they tried to eliminate them with fake oral exams. See below how US handles the same issue with asian students (reposted from user continuations). http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2011/04.. http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2011/04.... "Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and researcher Alexandria Walton Radford examined data on students applying to college in 1997 and found what looks like different standards for different racial groups. They calculated that Asian-Americans needed nearly perfect SAT scores of 1550 to have the same chance of being accepted at a top private university as whites who scored 1410 and African-Americans who got 1100. Whites were three times, Hispanics six times, and blacks more than 15 times as likely to be accepted at a US university as Asian-Americans." In Russia a minority like Jews are asked special questions in admission tests to make it harder for them to get in, while in America a minority like Asians are hit with a penalty of 450 points in SAT to make it harder (15 times harder) for them to get in. There's no difference.