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The Soviet Science System
- mojuba 12y agoInteresting article and some interesting insights into how marxism-leninism actually played well with the scientific method. There was another pathology, as the author calls it, in the Soviet scientific system: pretty much like what it did to genetic science, some ignorant officials essentially outlawed computer science, or what was called cybernetics back then. I don't know much about the motivations and how exactly banning cybernetics was in line with marxism-leninism, but needless to say what a fatal mistake it was. Bringing back computer science later, I think in the 1970s didn't help much: the Soviets were already light years behind in the area. All the Soviet computer scientists and engineers could do at the time was to steal and copy. If anyone here remembers ДВК - that was an almost exact copy of PDP-11 and its OS. (My God, I think I can even remember its smell now.) Bottom line being, all arguments regarding political and economic systems aside, you can't trust one person or a single "ideologized" organization on anything, ever. There should always be alternatives and eventual consensus. Kind of obvious today, isn't it.
- tedks 12y ago>you can't trust one person or a single "ideologized" organization on anything, ever All organizations are ideologized; if you can't see the ideology, that just means you agree with it.
- jszymborski 12y agoI think he was going for the argument that your decisions should come from the integration and evaluation of different ideologies, rather than any one single ideology. Then again, if you follow that too closely, it might become dogmatic itself :P so iunno. Epistemology is hard.
- tedks 12y agoBut decisions only come from ideology in a tertiary sense. Goals are the central contribution of any ideology. What criteria are you basing your decisions on? That is your ideology, and you can't just elide it; your goals come from somewhere and not all goals are interchangable.
- walterbell 12y ago> All organizations are ideologized; if you can't see the ideology, that just means you agree with it. Ditto for technology.
- jkot 12y agoThere are intersting talks about reverse engineering intel processors under microscope. We also reversed ram, floppy and some hdds. Cybernetics was considered western science, and most scientists had west connection. Good example is Antonin Svoboda. He ran away from Czechoslovakia before nazis invaded, hiding antiaircraft missile computer plans in frame of bicycle. Then he returned, build Czech Cybernetic Institute, become director and emigrated when soviets invaded. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton%C3%ADn_Svoboda http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton%C3%ADn_Svoboda
- AnonNo15 12y agoActually the reverse happened in 70s - instead of pursuing indigenous R&D, it was decided to clone Western hardware and software instead. This really crippled Soviet computer science and engineering. In 50s-60s Soviet computers were not that far behind, but late it was harder and harder to compete with West simply because of economy scale disadvantage. Unlike nukes and space exploration, computer technology was not receiving the funding to maintain parity. Therefore it was decided that copying and cloning Western tech would be cheaper then trying to compete in yet another high-tech industry.
- agumonkey 12y agoInteresting how facing competition, following the others (between nations, or even companies) ideas is rarely a worthy plan for long term. It's depriving your brains of real pressure to invent.
- gambiting 12y agoAnd of course things were harmed by the party politics. A Polish engineer invented a computer which is now considered to be few years ahead of its time, and was ready to enter production,but then it was shut down because of a direct order from the party,as it would conflict with the party-backed Elwro company. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-202 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-202 Edit: of course Poland was never part of the Soviet Union,but the political system was heavily influenced by orders from Russia.
- pvg 12y agoI think almost all new branches of 20th century Western-originating science suffered some degree of unhelpful ideological scrutiny at one point or another although most of these cases were not as damaging or as well-known as Lysenkoism. The pure science itself perhaps had the capability to catch up and recover but the centrally planned, often military-dominated industrial system was profoundly awful at actually managing industry and innovating. Much of Soviet industry remained woefully behind its Western counterparts - in capacity, precision, quality assurance, material science, you name it. One can reasonably argue that a great deal of Soviet engineering design ingenuity in a number of fields was driven by the constraints of what they could realistically produce.
- duckingtest 12y agoCybernetics were wrong because they began as efficiency optimization in the economy. It was wrong because it necessarily assumed shadow prices, which is incompatible with labor theory of value. The upper echelons were really that dumb. There's a book about the whole optimization debacle, "The Red Plenty" by Francis Spufford.
- bildung 12y agoCybernetics were wrong because they began as efficiency optimization in the economy. It was wrong because it necessarily assumed shadow prices, which is incompatible with labor theory of value. No, it conflicted with party dogma, not with the labor theory of value. In what way do you think the existence of shadow prices conflict with LTV?
- fit2rule 12y agoEven consensus is repressive, though. Sometimes you need an alternative to consensus: ideologized personality.
- jpfr 12y agoBut if you teach a whole nation a powerful philosophy of science, some of them might find it useful. Vladimir A. Fock (1898-1974) reported that his engagement with the ideology enabled him to devise a new set of harmonic coordinates for general relativity. Yakov I. Frenkel (1894-1952) developed his notion of “holes” and “collective excitations” in condensed-matter physics through extensive reflection on contemporary Soviet political thought. Yeah. Right. You ever wondered why people suddenly agree with the political system they live in, when otherwise said system would send them on extra holidays in a Gulag for comitting thought-crimes?
- walterbell 12y agoAt least one Gulag scientist influenced TRIZ, which influenced Western industry, http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genrich_Altshuller http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genrich_Altshuller
- avmich 12y agoWell, Korolev also spent some months in GULAG. But I believe the point in article was not that people in system were "suddenly" agreeing with system - rather that system's concepts lead them to some discoveries.
- jkot 12y agoStalinism was the worst dissaster which happened to Russia since the napoleonic wars or even mongols. It is also responsible for one of the bigest genocide of all times (slavic peasants). I really have hard time to grasp why articles even debating this ideology are here.
- hga 12y agoBecause "Commies Are Cool" (see the cult of Che), and their supporters imagine themselves as becoming commissars, not anonymous bodies in ditches.
- avmich 12y agoUnfortunately yes, to some extent. Propaganda is a serious force, as latest events in Russia and Ukraine are showing.
- throwaway344 12y agoI think that the interest here on HN would be similar for education in a long-lasting fascist (or whatever kind of brutal) state's scientific system. I really don't see the interest here as a moral statement on communism, but rather as just interest.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y agoAnd the morality of the sort of political system the US has (I'd say "capitalism" but that's a little simplistic), is also not being judged when we examine the US scientific approach.
- m0skit0 12y agoWithout Stalinism the USSR would have probably lost WW2, which in turn means Hitler would not have been defeated. Sad but true.
- s_q_b 12y agoMeh, who knows what would have happened. If the Russian Revolution had played out differently, Russia could have become a socialist country more like modern European states, still broken the back of the Germans on the Eastern front, helped defeat Hitler, and we might have had a half century of free trade and economic growth. Accurately evaluating alternative history is next to impossible.
- alricb 12y agoIf you look at science and technology/engineering as a unified field, you can see that not everything conforms to the "American" model: the military is arguably just as important to American science/technology as it was to Soviet science (the Manhattan Project, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Air Force owned forging presses, ARPANet, the DoE, Boeing, the Dodge Brothers plant to manufacture recoil cylinders, etc.)
- s_q_b 12y agoDon't forget the Valley's own government-sponsored roots: Navy money funded the Federal Telegraph Corporation and later Moffet Field, which begat Eitel-McCullough, a wartime manufacturer of radios and vacuum tubes. Varian Associates, another wartime manufacturer, was instrumental in getting Stanford Industrial Park built, where HP was founded. NACA (later NASA) brought Lockheed to the area, and worked hand-in-glove with Fairchild as its only supplier of the transistors needed in the Space Race for years, which firmly centered the semiconductor revolution in the area. Of course, this is to say nothing of the Federal research dollars which still constitute a massive portion of university research funding, including at Stanford itself. And of course, to add to the countless examples outside the Bay area, there's the National Laboratory system. If you look closely, the American and Soviet science systems don't appear all that different. The chief difference is that the Soviets preferred to keep everything under direct governmental control, while the United States prefers to use government contracts and grants to drive scientific progress through the private sector and university system. That, and there's significantly less chance of being thrown in prison for espousing political views in the modern US.
- avmich 12y agoYou forgot separation of research and teaching.
- darkmighty 12y agoThere's also the (former) elephant in the room that was Bell Labs: the huge R&D lab was owned by Ma Bell, essentially a government endorsed monopoly. I think it's safe to say Bell Labs represented a large portion of the whole of US's technical and scientific output in the 20th century (reminder: they invented the transistor, information theory, lasers, radio astronomy, UNIX, ... ; it's mindblowing).
- fiatmoney 12y agoIf you're interested in this topic, the quasi-novel Red Plenty is fantastic. Its primary characters are members of the Soviet scientific community, particularly the nascent computer scientists of the 60s-70s.
- throwaway344 12y agoI totally agree with the recommedation of Red Plenty. It's really a lucid set of stories about the Soviet system. I can't say I really knew a lot going into it, but it doesn't fall into the trap of saying "damn commies" every few pages. The scene with the Gosplan planner trying to solve the problem of allocation of resources is a particularly damning indictment of central planning.
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- alricb 12y agoSide note: "Tsar Peter I (also known as “the Great,” although the appropriateness of that moniker is one of the most debated questions of Russian history)" I don't think very many people dispute Peter's moniker, except for total haters. Even if you think his influence was on the whole negative, you have to admit that it was very, very large and that the changes he made were profound (though they may have been continuations of movements started by his predecessors). He may not have been great in the sense of having a positive influence, but he was great like the Great Barrier Reef.