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US Wins Math Olympiad For First Time In 21 Years
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. won the International Mathematical Olympiad for the first time in 21 years. Gender diversity is brought up in this NPR article because the eight team members on the U.S. team were all male, but they made a point to mention that of the top 12 people participating in the U.S. Math Olympiad, 2 are female, which is better than last year when there were no females in the top 12. "I will say that it's not really a super-great spectator sport, in the sense that if you are watching them, it will look like they are thinking," Po-Shen Loh, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and head coach for Team USA says. "Although I will assure you that inside their heads, if you could spectate, that would be quite a sport."
Why has Slashdot been so focused on counting genitalia lately? Every day there's some story about how there are too many penises, or not enough vaginas, involved with some industry or activity. I mean, earlier today we had a shitty submission about the penis and vagina accountants not liking the numbers they're working with, which I thought would mean no more penis and vagina counting submissions for the rest of the day. But nope! I was wrong! Now we have this submission, which although it mentions mathematics briefly, is far more focused on counting penises and vaginas.
But by the content of their character ?
Really I am sure the diversity police would have been in heaven, if the team had quotas and lost. It's for the greater good after all.
...is mentioned here the first time at ./ since 1997 (birth of ./), here are the winners since:
2014, 2013, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2006, 2005, 2004, v2, 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997: China
2007, 1999: Russia
2015: U.S.A.
2012: South Korea
2003: Bulgaria
1998: Iran
There are 2 types of people in the world - those who understand decimal and those who don't.
Diversity can go only so far. There are no women playing in the NFL and no men in the LPGA.
In this world you're supposed earn your way to the top. Let people be who the hell they want to be.
And I would have said the same thing if the math team were all females.
"So not by the color of their skin."
"Why is Slashdot so focused on counting penises?"
"Leftie vs. Rightie pitching."
"Diversity can go only so far. There are no women playing in the NFL and no men in the LPGA."
*DOUBLE FACEPALM*
The point, as so many have so persistently failed to grasp, is not simply that there are no female competitors on the US team. It's not simply that the top mathematics students overwhelmingly tend to be male. These are all true, but the point is not that this happens because males are intrinsically better at math. The point is that there is NO EVIDENCE to suggest that the brains of females are any less capable of developing mathematical proficiency and talent in this age group (or any age group, for that matter). Pointing to the existing disparity as evidence is a fallacy: once, not too long ago, there were no black baseball players.
Instead, the point is that there exists a systematic, cultural, and longstanding bias against encouraging and fostering scientific and mathematical proficiency in female students, and the purpose of bringing this up in the context of the IMO is to again remind Western countries such as the US, that this imbalance exists not because women just "happen" to be worse at math, but because women are DISCOURAGED from doing math and continue to be discouraged. And to be absolutely clear about this:
1. That does not necessarily mean that men are treated preferentially (in the sense of being given an easier time in STEM fields), but rather that women who attempt to persist in STEM paths tend to face a higher likelihood of varying degrees of sexism and sex discrimination from both peers and instructors that would not happen if they were male. Sometimes it is subtle, sometimes it is overt, but always, it is treatment that would not have happened if they were male.
2. This cultural attitude against women expressing interest in mathematics and science is not exclusive to men. In fact, it is very often women oppressing other women through peer pressure--in particular, the desire to conform to standards of behavior and personal interests that are more aligned with traditionally "feminine" pursuits. If you are a female teenager interested in math who had the remarkable fortune of not having had your parents ever ask you "why would you want to be a math major? Wouldn't that be too hard," or teachers who didn't think that "girls just don't seem to have the persistence and capability to do the kind of abstract thinking required for mathematics," you would no doubt find that your fellow female friends would almost invariably NOT want to be mathematicians or scientists. And that is also a form of bias that perpetuates the lack of females in mathematics.
The way a lot of guys react to gender inequality really fails to understand the basic problem. When someone calls out institutionalized sexism, that is not an indictment of individual male behavior. It is an attempt to call to attention a structural problem that is being perpetuated by continued obstinacy on the part of people (both male and female) who don't want to take the time to think about what it might be like to be in someone else's shoes for a change.
it's most websites these days... they've been hijacked by a radical feminist SJW agenda and everything - EVERYTHING - must be, one way or another, about women.
i'm all for equality. who in their right mind is NOT? but if people are selected based on merit and women don't make it in, what is the story?
nobody is seeking to exclude women by policy. so if they don't cut it or if enough of them simply aren't interested, whose problem is that?
i know that this unpleasant movement won't last... it can't... it's too hypocritical and vitriolic. but man, the faster this brand of feminism ceases to be in public discourse, the better all of humanity will be.
I think that a lot of the problem in the work place is not institutionalized sexism, but the problem of high profile incidents that make people be worried about hiring female staff. Take the whole incident where the one woman put two guys on blast for making a stupid joke about the word "Dongle" at a tech conference. When you see high profile cases like that come up, naturally people in an already male dominated field are going to be more defensive and not as open to having females with them in the field for fear of being put on blast in public. Combine that with the worry and fear of sexual harassment lawsuits that can be filed pretty much on a whim and can be a death sentence for someone's career, it creates a barrier for women. I work in a place right now where I've been told to be EXTREMELY careful about the wording I use around the female employees. Our workplace will sooner fire me than hear my side of the story so that they don't get a law suit. And its happened here before. Twice. I thank god I work after hours support and I don't have to deal with the regular staff.
entry level evolutionary psychology answers that question.
Women are psychologically uncomfortable with competing with men.
Argue with a women about something that your mutual power or status in the group. Women statistically shut off in these contests. Where as men statistically don't back down even if they have a good chance of getting pasted.
This goes back to our evolutionary roots in that men genetically DIE if they do not obtain status sufficient to obtain breeding rights where as women really just have to play it safe and they pass on their genes.
This encourages men to compete because if they do not compete they lose status, do not get breeding rights, and genetically die. And women both don't need to bother with that, their genetic priorities have nothing to do with their status or contests with males, and challenging males historically was dangerous because they could kill you if you threatened them with genetic death.
Thus in any competitive environment involving males, women do not feel comfortable or even motivated.
The idea from current education theory which has actually contributed to women doing better in a lot of subjects is to remote the competitive environment from subjects. Make things cooperative, turn the emotional intensity down a bit, and try to mellow things out.
This works really well for getting girls to feel comfortable.
The problem if you care is that in male evolutionary psychology, things that are not competed for are not worth anything. The male mind as programmed at a very deep level that it has to obtain status. If status is not being offered in something then it is probably pointless. If not only does it not offer status but it is hard and consumes a lot of time/energy/resources... then from an evolutionary perspective the male mind is programmed to see the entire thing as a threat to his genetic survival. He MUST obtain status and wasting a lot of his time doing something that doesn't get him what he needs means he'll have less time later to focus on that.
Thus you can't really educate girls and boys in the same school without shutting one of the sexes off... statistically.
If you have competition then the girls will shut off. If you don't then the boys will shut off.
This is basic and very very well understood and supported science at this point.
The problem is that its all political because there is this notion... which comes out of marxist theory... that people can be changed by their environments. I don't mean that in the way that you educate someone but I mean TOTALLY changed. As in your human nature can be entirely overridden and in fact the argument from a lot of people is that ALL human nature is a social construct.
So... gender itself is a social construct. A core belief of modern feminism is that there is NO difference between men and women mentally and psychologically. It is entirely a product of cultural and social conditioning. The theory from these people is that if you treat a girl like a boy you can make her identical to the boy mentally and psychologically. Indifferent to all the science that contradicts that.
Boys and girls are neurologically different. The brain structure can be told apart by neurologists rather easily. And psychologically boys and girls aver VERY different beasts.
The problem is that in many cases "science" is not politically correct. The left likes to think it is the party of science and reason. It is only that when science and reason either is convenient for the ideology or does not contradict it. But whenever it does... as science does in this case... they're as likely to be pigheaded on the subject as any bible thumping creationist.
And sadly while we recognize creationists for being what they are and largely exclude them from influencing the education system. We do not exclude marxist ideologues from influencing our education system.
Here some cute pink cheeked marxist dupe is going to contradict me. I welcome it. Come at me.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I was recently having a discussion about someone related to IQ tests (there was an interesting poll (who knew) on Slashdot a while ago) and was discussing Raven's Matrices as an example of a test that I thought was unbiased as it was free of any cultural context and had been reduced to abstraction, but a friend shared a study (PDF link)with me that pointed out that the test did have a built-in gender bias due to reliance on spacial analysis, which men do perform better at.
Given that spacial rotations, manipulation, etc. are an important part of many mathematical fields, it doesn't surprise me that men tend to perform better on average. Also, this does not say that all men are better at math or that women cannot be brilliant mathematicians, merely that if you look at the number of elite mathematicians, that more of them will be male because they are biologically predisposed to be stronger at some of the aspects that make an individual better at math.
Also, you should account for a person's own internalization of their abilities and how it affects their behavior. If women tend not to be as good at math from an early age, many of them will take a disinterested approach to it. This is hardly unique to women as children and people of all ages and genders exhibit this behavior. Because there are areas where women tend to perform better than men (along with any other brain wiring differences that produce different effects in people) they may be more drawn to other areas of study and focus there time there.
The problem is that there is evidence to suggest that men and women are different, but there are some who will not accept that argument. I don't know whether that is because the fall prey to some of the same illogical reason that you point to above and assume that it means women can't do something or if it's just a simple matter of people treating their belief as an article of faith that must be true and therefor anything to the contrary must be false.
While there's certainly no lack of sexism in the world, it's a lot harder to accept that there's some kind of pervasive institutional problem when you have no reason to suspect that you should see roughly equal number of men and women among the ranks of the top mathematicians. Also, given that women earn ~45% of B.S. degree's in mathematics in the U.S. it makes the claims of institutional sexism (at least in this area) even harder to believe. Interestingly enough, women early ~70% of the B.S. degrees in English and foreign languages. Perhaps that is related to the scientific evidence that shows that females perform better than males in terms of verbal abilities.
I don't think you'll find many people who are against providing equal opportunity (or as much as we reasonably can) to everyone, but you can't get there with bad arguments. You end up fighting a problem that doesn't exist or attempting to use a solution that isn't going to work. I think that people are just tired of dealing with other people who don't care to look at the science or will reject it because it doesn't mesh with their existing views. It's a bit like trying to argue with someone who believes in young-earth creationism.
Fuck off fascist. We're wise to your bullshit now. You don't give a fuck about women or their welfare. We know this is a political power play and we know the devastation your kind will wreak on our professions and hobbies if we let you in the door.
This story has been politicized. What should have been a celebration of the United States' winning victory in the Olympiad, and the evidence of year of math outreach paying off, has instead been turned into yet another attempt to kick mud into the faces of math nerds across the country for a crime they never committed. The math community has been pushing math outreach and education for women for YEARS!! DECADES NOW.
You are a liar and a closet cultural reactionary. Girls are encouraged to take an interest in and study math and those efforts were fucking paying off long before you and your SJW Stormtroopers decided to launch your blitzkreig on us.
You internet Nazis have turned women in tech into a third rail topic!!. Years of progress are being undone by your hysteria, stereotyping, shaming tactics, and culture war baiting. You are a cancer on STEM. We cannot even celebrate the MATHEMATICS OLYMPIAD!! without you people smearing your gender wars and identity politics all over a day for nerds, boys and girls both, who just want to geek out and be left alone.
This story summary is beyond disgusting. Beyond offensive. Nothing is sacred on Slashdot anymore. Everything we have, everything we built to be above the rotten stereotypes of mainstream society is being sucked down into septic culture wars by these mendacious hipster fakes!! Math is for everyone. It's above this petty politicization. Slashdot should be above this. But you bastards shitting it all up. Damn you! Damn you all to Hell!!!
A core belief of modern feminism is that there is NO difference between men and women mentally and psychologically.
Unfortunately, you're right, and while men and women should have equal rights and equal treatment it will never mean that men and women are somehow completely the same. Biology alone should tell us that and pretending otherwise is naive at best.
I find it ironic that people who tell us to celebrate diversity exclude gender diversity. There is nothing wrong with the idea that men and women are different and why shouldn't we celebrate and enjoy that diversity too?
Apparently, easy math is easier for some than for others. I always tell kids they can check a subtraction by reversing it with an addition. 1984 + 21 = 2005. Oops, something went wrong! If you do the problem again, you'll find your mistake. 2015 - 21 = 1994.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Its not just the US. Australia has a lot of data from national standardised testing, notably NAPLAN.
Girls consistent score slightly higher on average in most subjects. I don't think this means any failure or conspiracy in our schools, as it is well know that boys develop later. The difference is very obvious in early school years. If it is considered "a problem that needs fixing", you could set the start age for girls a bit earlier, say six months, and the scores could be equalised. Or you could just accept the "diversity".
However maths is a special case. Unlike all other areas, boys are a bit in front on average. More interestingly, the standard deviation is substantially larger, so there are more boys at both the bottom and top of scores. The higher the score band, the greater the disparity in numbers. (And again - only in maths) So it is no surprise if >90% of the olympiad-level students are male. If it was equal, something would be seriously wrong in the selection process.
Data can be seen here: http://reports.acara.edu.au/Ho...
Select domain:numeracy and subgroup:sex
Note the M/F numbers in the first ("exempt") and last columns.
Project that as a normal distribution, and it will predict that the Maths Olympiad is a sausage-fest. Mathematically.
They were there to keep spirits up back at the hotel?
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
You offer NO PROOF for your claim. In fact there is poor anecdotal evidence it is about the gender since it's consistently all male. There is no proof this is caused by "society peer pressure".
Personal opinion (with only anecdotal evidence) is that males are more motivated by math and as such get their talent developed further. I know several boys from my youth (myself included) that went absolutely bananas with math (and computers), studying more just for hobby and personal joy. I've known several girls that were very talented in math, but without the passion. It was just one school topic.
> The point is that there is NO EVIDENCE to suggest that the brains of females are any less capable of developing mathematical proficiency and talent
If you want to be literal: no, for that precise point there might be no hard evidence, but there is enough evidence that females don't actually develop it, and that's what counts. I might have all the talent to become the world's #1 short distance runner, but I am not.
I've never met a Russian that knew anything about Byzantium.
You met me for one :)
In truth, though, "Third Rome" is part of the history textbooks. I don't know how it is presented today, but back when I studied history in school it was fairly neutral, but certainly featured quite prominently, largely because it was an important part of the founding myth of the first czars after post-Mongol reunification.
Also, pretty much any devout Eastern Orthodox Russian will know quite a lot about Byzantium for the simple reason that it's where the Russian church tradition originates - even many words for various associated concepts are basically transliterated Greek words. And most of the recognized Fathers of the Church, martyrs and saints are also from that period, and as religious people study their lives, they also learn about the history of that period, at least to the extent relevant to their goal (which includes some customs, government system etc).
There's one other related thing that was appropriated from Byzantium wholesale, and often presented as one of the key features of the "genuine Russian" (as opposed to Western democracy) sociopolitical arrangement by those with a religious bent - symphonia. It meshes very well with the authoritarian state backed by religious ideology that Putin has been building over the past few years, so it has a resurgence of popularity lately.
As to the notion that they're pure after having the Soviets run their world... It is to laugh, is it not?
The traditional Orthodox approach to that was to claim that Soviet rule was basically a kind of divine collective punishment for abandoning "Third Rome", divinely instituted autocracy etc. From that perspective, the rejection of communist ideology after the dissolution of the USSR and the revival of the Church were repentance, and, consequently, the present arrangement derives directly from Imperial Russia (and through it from Muscovy, Byzantium and Rome), skipping the Soviet period altogether.
Of late, though, this is a much less popular view, because it also glosses over WW2, the important part of the USSR/Russia (to most today this is synonymous) national mythology. Especially so as it goes along well with the overall messianic idea of Third Rome - you know, that whole "save the world from pure evil" thing. Consequently, there have been some, shall we say, creative reinterpretations. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here's a few: 1 2 3. Basically, Stalin is presented as a return to the theocratic-autocratic tradition after the "satanic" rule of the Bolsheviks, with emphasis on his revival of the Church, the return of conservative social mores (e.g. making homosexuality and abortions illegal again), and victory over external foes - all divinely inspired, of course.
In fact, there's now an entire new category of WW2 myths that seek to imbue it with a religious context - for example, there's one about the Battle of Moscow, which claims that when at some point defeat was practically inevitable, Stalin ordered a specific highly venerated Orthodox icon of Mary to be loaded on a plane, and that plane circled Moscow - and after that, the German advance was stopped and ultimately repulsed.
If this all sounds like a very dangerous concoction, that's because it is. Stalinists and Orthodox fanatics were both dangerous each in their own way, but at least they used to fight each other. Now they have mostly found common ground and a common enemy - individual freedom, liberalism in general, and most everything else associated with the Western civilization today.
As to origin, most of the Russians I talked to traced themselves back to Steppe people of the Russian planes rather than old Byzantium.
In terms of ethnic descent, this is definitely the case. Not just steppes, though, but also forests. Most of what is Central and Northern European part of Russia today was one giant forest ~1000 years ago, with small settlements along the rivers living off the trade with passing ships selling fur, amber and other similar goods for export. Mostly Slavonic, but also a significant Finno-Ugric component.
The Byzantium "descent" is more spiritual in nature, through the acceptance Orthodoxy. Though there's also a partial blood claim specifically for the past ruling dynasties, because several rulers have married Byzantine princesses (most notably, Vladimir the Great, who forcibly converted the entire country to Greek Christianity, stipulated his marriage to the daughter of then-current Eastern Roman Emperor as one of his conditions, acceptance of which was forced basically at swordpoint). But for most people, it's about being the largest Eastern Orthodox country in the world.
Here's a question for you, how serious are the Russians' about the Orthodox church? I would have thought that atheism would have been still very strong in Russia. But the way you're talking about it, it sounds like the country is being stirred into a religious fervor. That I had not heard.
After the collapse of the USSR, there was a fairly significant religious revival movement that was primarily anti-communist in nature. Restoring the old traditions and all that. Most people didn't really become seriously religious, though, being more of a token Christians - you know, baptizing their kids and celebrating the prominent religious holidays (save for "inconvenient" ones like Lent), and occasionally attending Church services, but not really capable of articulating the theology well, and overall treating it more as a part of national identity. Government has contributed to the revival somewhat by transferring some of the original Church property that was confiscated from it under communists back, and in some cases funding new construction efforts, but otherwise not really stepping in. Atheism also remained pretty significant, though - more so than in, say, US today.
However, in the past decade or so, there has been a steady rise in government support of Orthodoxy as preferential religion, and clear attempts to make it into some kind of national ideology. Schools now have "the fundamentals of Orthodox culture" as a class, though it's still opt-in in theory (in practice it varies on the school, and some places put a strong social pressure on students to opt in). Most government-sponsored patriotic organizations for youth etc also emphasize religion. Blasphemy laws have been effectively introduced under the guise of "protecting the religious sentiment". There are still quite a few atheists, but the trend is clearly against them. I see a lot more religious kids online, and even my own generation (I'm 30) seems to be more outwardly religious now than we used to be in our 20s.
This all has accelerated especially with the whole Crimea/Ukraine thing going on - state TV channels during Maidan went to great lengths to point out that many protesters were affiliated with Catholic (often Eastern Rite) or Protestant churches, for example. And the ideological basis for the insurgents in Donbass is heavily rooted in religion and geopolitical messianism - they really think that they're fighting Satan there.
Also, why is the Catholic Pope impure in the eyes of this third rome argument? I don't quite understand that.
It's an Orthodox thing in general. Catholics are considered heretics, originally because they have changed the Nicene Creed slightly - look up "Filioque" if you are interested in theological details - causing the Great Schism between the Western church in Rome, and the Eastern churches associated wi
Instead, the point is that there exists a systematic, cultural, and longstanding bias against encouraging and fostering scientific and mathematical proficiency in female students
Fuck you. Prove it. I am sick of this shit. When I went to school way way way back in the mists of time, girls were encouraged over boys. My own son dealt with this shit too... and yet girls are STILL not at the top of the heap.
Stop abusing boys. You can not force girls to be on top of the heap... and this is nature: There will be a heap. Deal with it asshole. All you are doing is creating misogyny.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
How it relates to Marxism is irrelevant. The idea stands or falls on its own merits, regardless of who said what. If you have reasons against it, state them. Saying that Marx said it, therefore it's false, is an irrelevant ad hominem.
You'd do better by scanning your posts for mentions of Marxism and replacing them by reasons instead of name-calling.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes