Jewish Problems

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1110.1556v2.pdf

by victorhn • 14 years ago

115 69 14 years ago

pav3l• 14 years ago

I'm assuming this is a follow-up on 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• 14 years 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--...

pessimizer• 14 years ago

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

nacker2• 14 years ago

I think America will soon be having a Holocaust problem.

http://www.infowars.com/poll-nearly-one-third-of-americans-w...

agf2• 14 years ago

What exactly does that have to do with math or intolerance?

nacker2• 14 years 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?

idle_processor• 14 years 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

dobro3• 14 years 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)

rayiner2• 14 years 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.

dubfan• 14 years ago

Ah, an Infowars article. Always a credible source.

macchina• 14 years ago

wow, they commissioned a survey. Pretty interesting actually.

http://static.prisonplanet.com/p/images/november2012/poll.do...

shmerl10• 14 years 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.

cema3• 14 years 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.

shmerl10• 14 years 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.

mynameishere• 14 years 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-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• 14 years ago

Affirmative action? Are you mad?

Perhaps you're unaware of these:

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• 14 years 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?

_delirium• 14 years ago

It sounds less like a serious attempt to understand this episode in history, and more like a way to score a quick point about 21st-century American politics.

htf• 14 years ago

> Affirmative action is not the same thing as making it artificially harder for a discriminated minority!

It is practically the same. When it comes to limited entrance, you can't make it easier for a certain group without making it harder for the rest.

continuations2• 14 years ago

It is exactly like affirmative action:

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.

jarek-foksa• 14 years ago

The term "affirmative action" is so easy to manipulate that it could be used to cover any form of discrimination. I guess Soviets would describe their discriminatory policy as an affirmative action to increase the social and ethnic diversity of the class of intellectuals, or something between those lines.

shmerl10• 14 years ago

Don't call semi-officially government sanctioned antisemitism with stupid euphemisms. It's plain insulting.

ucee0548• 14 years ago

Don't conflate prejudice with anti-semitism. It's plain insulting.

jvm• 14 years ago

I can't believe this troll comment is the top comment.

> Our team of the best eight Soviet students, during the month we had the problems, solved only half of them.

Those questions weren't hard. They were impossible. The point was simply to not allow any undesirables to pass. Higher standards for Asians might be bullshit but it's not the same as literally keeping all Asians out regardless of skill.

pandaman2• 14 years ago

The entrance math exam in MSU is not pass/fail but graded. There are two math exams (at least in the "math department", I imagine she meant either Mech-Mat or VMK), written and oral. Written exam consists of 6 problems with the passing mark 3 and maximum 5 (you only need to solve 5 correctly, 5th and 6th problems are the hardest and usually allow a choice between an algebra and a geometry problem, giving the time limit it's hard to solve both). Oral test is administered by drawing a random "ticket" with two general questions from the school program (e.g. "What are properties of a triangle?") and the problems the person conducting the test can choose based on the answers and the result of the written test. Answering two "ticket" questions correctly gives you the passing grade (3) already. So there is no way anybody could be failed by any number of the problems given during the oral test if they managed to answer the "ticket". At the worst case one could be dropped to 3 at the oral test, giving total of 8 for the both math tests and that's a pretty good mark. Total test score of 13 (you need to get 5 for the third marked test, written Physics and pass unmarked written Russian) is guaranteed admission. 12 - is a good chance of admission and, depending on the year, even 11 can get you in.

However there is a shortcut - under some conditions (either being a subject of one of Soviet "AA" incentives or being a winner of a math Olympiad), 4 or 5 for the first test (written math) gives automatic admission. 9 for the both math tests is also automatic and unconditional admission.

So the way the hard questions in the oral test come up is usually when you get 4 for the written test. If you could not solve 5th or 6th problem in the written test you are at the average level and giving you 5 (and automatically admitting you) in the oral test would defeat the whole purpose of the shortcut rule to secure admission for the exceptional students. So you have to get 4 or, really, 3 and such a question is to ensure that.

I don't know about anti-semitism, maybe there was some yet I have seen plenty of Jews both among students and faculty so, evidentially, they have not been entirely kept out. Yet I have seen a lot of people (of all origins) complaining about entrance exam being "too hard" and them being persecuted for various reasons. The reality is that pretty much every year from 70s to late 90s there had been several candidates for each student place so some people had to fail the test.

Sniffnoy• 14 years ago

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

shmerl10• 14 years ago

Here you go: http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556

qdpb• 14 years 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

E.g. 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.

shmerl10• 14 years 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.

charlesjshort2• 14 years 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_gottlieb5• 14 years 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?

charlesjshort2• 14 years 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.

khmel2• 14 years 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.

cema3• 14 years ago

I see. Please take a look at a partial collection of references at http://kerosinka.livejournal.com/1633.html -- it contains memoirs, discussions, and some bibliography.

khmel2• 14 years 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.... "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.

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