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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   31340 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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Currnetly you have cases where people who score a literal zero in exams can teach math

I know this isn't the main thrust of your post, but it reminded me of a blog post that was trending on Hacker News sometime this past week. It basically describes the author's disillusionment with the academic "industry" in Romania after an influx of EU funding to increase the number of PhDs in the late aughts.

I'm becoming more convinced that creating an actual education system (one that creates highly skilled intellectual workers) is nontrivial and probably rare throughout history, and it's far too easy to create systems that LARP or cargo-cult education instead of actually performing education. Authoritarian regimes seem to have a knack for creating systems of alternative science that are more palatable to their dear leaders and their cronies than whatever "mainstream" science they are supplanting. It's almost as if the deck is stacked against humans and scientific progress is an unnatural status quo that we've lucked into because of certain post-enlightenment conditions?

This is also me positing nurture over nature - that humans have quite a bit of potential but the difference between a real education system and one that LARPs as an education system is staggering in terms of the intellect of the people it produces. There's a bit of big fish little pond / little fish big pond in there as well (speaking from firsthand experience).

It's interesting that you mention the soviet union; the soviet academy had some serious missteps but also made enormous progress in mathematics and massively outperformed its lackluster economy in other areas.

One of the nice things about hard sciences like math and physics (and, if I had to guess, one of the reasons the Soviets performed so well in it - aside, of course, from having a good pool of genuine talent) is that you can run standardized objective tests for it pretty easily...and you can maintain oversight of it pretty easily, I would guess, relative to softer sciences.

I'm not suggesting that you can't test for things like literacy (and in fact communist regimes are actually very good at producing a literate population, too) but at the end of the day if the Politburo demands you go to the moon or be shot, well, okay, even the Politburo can figure out if you went to the moon or not. Whereas if the Politburo demands good literature you can hand them a pamphlet denouncing the latest object of the Politburo's denunciation and even if it's quite bad by what standard, the Politburo isn't a literature department, and even if it's obviously bad can they condemn a condemnation of the thing they wanted condemned?

And I suspect you can get a very similar dynamic under non-totalitarian regimes in the West (including not just governments but of course things like universities and the like).

One of the nice things about hard sciences like math and physics (and, if I had to guess, one of the reasons the Soviets performed so well in it - aside, of course, from having a good pool of genuine talent) is that you can run standardized objective tests for it pretty easily...and you can maintain oversight of it pretty easily, I would guess, relative to softer sciences.

Biology is somewhat softer than physics, but not enough that the totalitarian system that did Lysenkoism or lied about the death of Laika couldn't have done Arische Physik if it wanted to. The CPSU leadership made a deliberate decision to give physicists in general, and nuclear physicists in particular, a level of intellectual freedom it denied to everyone else.

That and a handful of soft sciences; military history and theory was uncensored, for example.

To be fair the very recent history of getting your shit pushed in right after you purged your generals probably had a lot to do with it.

I think it's an anomaly, selecting generals on political loyalty (among other things) is quite widespread.

My point isn't that a totalitarian system couldn't have decided to do fake physics. My point is that if you, Supreme Dictator For Life decide to do real physics it's probably just a bit easier to stick your head in from time to time and figure out if they are doing real or fake physics, because you can see if people are landing on the moon and making ballistic missiles that hit their targets and so forth.

The softer the discipline, the harder it becomes for people without specialized training to articulate the problems with the discipline when it goes off the rails (for instance you don't need literary training to complain about modern literature, but it helps – whereas if someone's rocket misses the moon, it missed the moon and you don't need to understand rocket science at all to notice that.)

Now, arguably today physics has advanced to the point where it's less tangible at the cutting edges! But I think you see my suggestion.

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