The Truth about Chinese ""Science""

Bob Dylan Roof Sunday 10 Apr 2016

Perelman was derivative of WASP mathematician of power, Richard Hamilton. The Ethnic Old Boys Network tried to get Perelman to take credit and perpetuate the EINSTEIN! nerd myth of creativity.

Jews BTFO yet again by a Chad.

perkunos Sunday 10 Apr 2016

Credit where it is due; Perelman turned down the Fields medal in part because Hamilton did most of the work.

Bronze Age Pervert Monday 11 Apr 2016

Any idea why Hamilton wasn't offered these prizes, given that even the Han ants admitted he did more than 50% for it?

Bob Dylan Roof Monday 11 Apr 2016

The Fields Medal committee is secret, and so is the executive committee that appoints the prize committee. I imagine it is like other academic awards and professional certifications: a make-work badge of exclusivity that lends itself to nepotism and other anti-meritocratic forces. The last thing a "committee" type would want is to give an award to a shredded PUA WASP bro mathematician who rides horses.

stigletz Monday 11 Apr 2016

A barrel chested Hamilton dismounts from his clydesdale, arriving at the Friendship Hotel with two beautiful women on either arm. He is tall, slender, and handsome. With a polite smile he greets a visibly nervous Yau, tonight's host, and proceeds to sit down at his desk.

He solves the Poincaré.

Amid deafening applause Perelmen snorts, pushing impatiently through the crowd of onlookers towards the exit. Yau mumbles something to himself, his face flushed in the humiliation.

perkunos Monday 11 Apr 2016

Simple: Hamilton was well over the age of 40. Fields medal is for 40 and under, which Perleman was.

Thoughts Thursday 14 Apr 2016

It's not just the Chinese, but:

* The Japanese (to a lesser degree, but still).

* The Swedish

* Africans, but especially sub-Saharan types

And many others. What I don't like about the Chinese is not their mediocrity (which is overwhelmingly obvious and does not require any explanation) but their extreme arrogance combined with despicably slovenly conduct, lack of hygiene, etc. -- and the tendency of others to overrate them.

If they would just shut the fuck up about being the "oldest civilization" (such lies), then I wouldn't be so miffed about it. Instead, they talk about how they are the oldest, "most civilized" race.. with possibly only the "Jews" as being second after them.

Also:

Conventional history of science is mostly bullshit. How many people know that William Shockley actually pioneered postwar operations research, and independently developed a fission bomb and nuclear reactor outside of the Manhattan Project? Instead, you hear about his "invention" of the transistor (which is a stretch, since that covers neither the point-contact nor the metal oxide semiconductor, and it was some other Bell materials science engineers that enabled the crystal growth technique to make Shockley's junction transistor), because there was a Nobel Prize for it (which actually discredits the reliability of such prizes), and his late-in-life opinions about eugenics.

Ron Maimon had a good post about this:

I don't think [the Soviet system] was a good system, I am not an advocate. But it had good scientists and engineers (equal to the US), an excellent education system (the best I think), reasonable heavy-industry (although out of date by the end in everything except oil), and you didn't worry about dying of homelessness (but on the other hand, you did worry about getting arrested for speaking, and this is just as terrible).

The main problem with the USSR was the lack of innovation. The terrible leadership was a symptom of a much larger disease in the system, which made the whole economy and politics basically frozen in time. You couldn't do ANYTHING, it was a nightmare to start anything new, you would need to rub elbows with lots of people, and the only thing that ever got done (outside of science and engineering--- where they were world leaders) was copying the West badly, always about eight to ten years behind. Yugoslavia was ahead in this regard, as Yugoslavian industry was managed locally, you can read Dilas for criticism of the USSR system from a Yugoslavian viewpoint somewhat more libertarian than Tito's.

The lesson of the USSR for me is that you can't have a "vanguard" deciding things for other people, the only proper way to do socialism is not by top-down imposition, but bottom-up, by voluntary association, without anyone coercing others. Since I don't believe in coercion, I am not going to coerce you to agree on this. I do agree with you that the problems in the USSR were deep rooted in the system itself. If you want to see what the "good socialism" looks like, look at Linux development, which is similar to open science.

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The Nobel committee is not how you evaluate the level of the science, that's a political judgement. You need to look at the published papers themselves.
In physics, which is the only field I am qualified to judge, the USSR was arguably the best, and if not the best, it was a close second to the US, in any case it is a very tight race. If you ignore the 1960s, where you have Landau's school leading the research on He4 and Superconductivity (although the Americans had Feynman's theory and BCS theory, just to be fair), and just go to the 1970s and 1980s, the Russians were first with Gribov's Reggeon perturbation theory, Polyakov's conformal bootstrap, inflation theory, they had the remarkable Gribov domains, the Shifman Vainshtein Zakharov QCD sum rules, the BPZ revolution in critical phenomena, the Polyakov string, 2d gravity, incredible stuff. It is highly technical (so highly technical that it is not appreciated by non-specialists), and it wasn't flashy enough to get the attention of the Nobel committee, which was somewhat biased against the USSR, not by conspiracy, but just due to Sweden being a Western nation. Soviet science was rather insular due to travel restrictions and no-need for publicity by their scientists. But everyone who reads the technical literature of the 1960s-1980s knows that the USSR was the powerhouse, and you couldn't get by without JETP in your library. It's not just physics of course, they were strong in most technical and engineering fields, with the exception of biological engineering, where they were somewhat behind.

But the US folks were much better in computational stuff, like Renormalization group theory, and Western Europeans and Californians developed string theory, so it's not like the US was slacking off. Like the space race, it was a tight, tight race, that benefited all of humanity. Just the Russians, in my opinion, produced more sophisticated baroque work. Compare the BPZ paper (a masterpiece) with, say, great American papers like those of Edward Witten. They are both great, but the Russians are more "out there" and more technically dense, the ideas come from outer space and it's HARD stuff, I mean, hard for even specialists. It's a total judgement call, and I'm not going to argue this for too long, because it's silly, but there is no doubt that Russia had the strongest or at least second strongest physics in the world in the 1980s (it's gone to hell since the collapse).

Although the Russians were somewhat ahead of the US in analytical tools like dispersion relations and conformal theory, in parts of condensed matter physics, in analytical tools for high energy physics, the Americans were definitely ahead in computational physics, other parts of condensed matter physics like sophisticated materials science, and in string theory. You don't understand what a beautiful thing Soviet physics is, it is like the lost Greek science of the Hellenistic period. It's a pity it is gone, looking at it makes you cry.

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You don't understand why the USSR had the largest oil production in the world. It's not like it had a large amount of oil in 1945. This worried Stalin, as he knew the West would control the Middle-East oil. So in 1950, he set up an all-union conference on the origin and exploration of petroleum. This was like a Soviet "Manhattan project", it was enormous, and by 1955, Kudryavtsev had proposed the abiogenic hypothesis as a plausible theory.

By 1975, the USSR had demonstrated the basic principles of abiogenic petroleum, and rejected the voodoo Westerners use to dig for oil, opting instead to dig extremely deep boreholes in a grid, all over Siberia. The deepest holes in the world are a byproduct of this exploration. They found a ton of oil by digging where Westerners won't simply because the Western science failed to discover that petroleum is abiogenic (we're catching up now, due to the internet).

This is in every way a failure of Western science, and it can be attributed to Capitalism. The oil scientists are working for large oil companies, and they are not able to reevaluate the fundamentals of their field, no matter how much the data disagrees with their theory.

The modern kleptocracy has no relation to the USSR oil exploration, which was just fine in Soviet times, actually, much healthier than it is now. The state-run oil and gas industry was perfectly competitive with the West, actually, because they understood oil much better, they took the West to lunch.
As I said, I am not a fan of Soviet communism, just being fair to their successes. This was one of them.

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You can assert all you like, but the unequalled contributions of Russia to physics are mostly freely downloadable online today, and you just make yourself look foolish. There is no dispute that the best physics papers of the 1970s and 1980s are Russian, this is true just by citation counting (SVZ and BPZ are some of the heaviest cited papers of the era, along with the American Weinberg paper for the standard model). The Nobel committee is not my problem, they have been out of touch for decades. That's why the Dirac medal was established, and if you look at the Dirac medalists, the Russians are fairly recognized (and Europeans too, especially Italians, who are also regularly slighted by the Swedes).

President Camacho Thursday 14 Apr 2016

Guys, Thoughts has a wide range of knowledge on this stuff.

For those interested in more detail on Soviet/20th century technology I would recommend the thread: http://salo-forum.com/index.php?threads/zoviet-civilization.2169/

Thoughts Friday 15 Apr 2016

The poster I quoted above makes a distinction between leading in "engineering" vs. technology "innovation", and this makes sense (to a limit). The second refers to product innovation, which usually does not imply advanced engineering, but is linked to it in the long term (it explains the Soviet / Russian lag in microelectronics since the 1960s). It also, of course, has greater economic *consequence*, because it covers most goods that actually circulate in the national economy. Whereas all the super-advanced engineering might be stuck in just a few end-products like atomic submarines, spaceships, and bombs. But of course, to "lead" in advanced engineering also usually means product innovation within those heavy industries: completely new military devices, configurations, fabrication processes, etc.

The historical record says that, large firms that do large-scale engineering are not innovative except in wartime. You can measure innovation by surface specifications, and many have done so: for example the American development of ICBM components, like mechanical and laser gyroscopes, was not innovative since WW2 compared to (say) the development of personal computing. The former just had incremental improvements at a snail's pace, with no new product categories, device categories, or anything. Of course, it's harder to innovate with large-scale products like ICBMs.

If you look at Russia's development of aviation, the space program, what I think made it more "innovative" in the above sense was the competition between medium-sized firms and different design bureaus. It was ironically the USA that depended on larger, top-down level bureaucracies that worked incredibly well for a short period (WW2, NASA during the 1960s space race, Bell Labs before it was broken up), but collapsed afterwards into bureaucratic scams as the modern F-22, F-35 projects.. and the space shuttle.

There was this book by Burton H. Kline that established empirically that medium-sized firms were more innovative.. I believe it was called "Dynamic Economics" or some such.

Thoughts Tuesday 19 Apr 2016

Nelson Van Alden Broseph

I'm actually interested in this sub-topic.

If we speak of general tendencies, Jews are definitely not good at visuo-spatial anything. Consider: the lack of major Jewish design inventions (especially comparable to, say, the modern computing architecture of Zuse or Aiken), the lack of Israeli inventions, the general lack of Jewish contributions to more visual areas of mathematics like differential topology, differential geometry, etc. In every European country, they consistently tested below the average in spatial IQ, usually 10 points or more below (forget the source for this), can't do things like flip a glove around inside their heads. A few big exceptions in mathematics and physics were there, though, far before Perelman. You had Minkowski (the geometry of numbers), Einstein (though a "fuzzy" kind of visualization), Feynman (he took lots of hallucinogenic drugs during his "creative" period), Gromov (much more original and important than Perelman, by general consensus, though he didn't get the Fields Medal because he kept a low profile -- ceased publication for a long period to escape the Soviet Union), and Perelman himself. And I'm actually not so sure about that last one (more below).

Ironically, the Jewish contributions that most impress me are a more stereotypically "Jewish" kind: that is, based on visualizing 2d arrays of symbols and stacking them up on each other, and not 3d objects. Hence, von Neumann's contributions to spectral theory, Paul Cohen's devices ("forcing" in set theory), and some of what Grothendieck did, like using representation theory to distinguish between two structures even if those structures are isomorphic groups, say (because the equivalence of categories is different, despite the isomorphism), Kazhdan, Gelfand, G.A. Margulis, etc.

I'd say algebraic topology, for example, does not actually require that much "visual", especially 3d thinking, beyond a pretty basic sort. It's been mostly drowned under the huge algebraic machinery of exact sequences for simplicial homology and the like. (Geometric topology, though, is another story.)

Random example: to prove that if I take a compact n-manifold, and I take the homology H_i of its "boundary" dM defined in a topologically rigorous way, then the homology of the boundary dM is the same as the homology of a S_n-1 sphere. You might think the proof would use excision, or something visual that involves decomposing and shifting the sphere around, but in fact I just use the long exact sequence for the pair (M, dM), and then notice (by looking at the algebra) that I can also use Poincare / Lefschetz duality to force the result out of several possibilities. What you "visualize" are not the objects, but different levels of the architecture of algebraic topology itself (which consists of lots of isomorphisms and nice maps -- at the bottom level, the maps consist of the long exact sequence for homology/cohomology, then tapering upwards, into more special isomorphisms like Poincare duality or Lefschetz duality). I "visualize" little arrows and symbols, and see how they decompose in an abstract way into other bunches of arrows, symbols, and rules for how they behave, which is how it should be because mathematics is formal and proofs can be checked by a computer (even complicated homology proofs, e.g. by the Coq program that uses Univalent Type Theory -- that link, by the way is highly recommended). Insofar as you directly "decompose" and re-assemble shapes, that can be kept at a *very* straightforward and trivial level.

Take a random example of point-set (not algebraic or differential) topology (and this problem that I pose below has has the merit that no solution exists online): Let's say I want to prove that for any set X that is the union of two sets A, B (both of which are open), and I take any compact subset K inside X, then K can be decomposed as the union of two compact sets K1, K2 so that K1 is inside A, and K2 is inside B. As a first approximation, you distinguish some abstract sets, subsets and "point" or dots inside each, and then attempt to prove it directly by construction: then you see that this is too strong a statement, so you prove it apagogically / by contradiction instead (by supposing at various stages that it is not possible). Even here, there's nothing really spatial since it is in 2d and consists of abstract dots.

So it's possible to think in topology in a "symbolic", not mechanically visual way. The idea introduced by Hamilton (Ricci flow) is geometric-leaning, but Perelman introduced the idea of "entropy" which, by the way, was not his original idea. "Entropy"-like ideas were first introduced into *rigorous* mathematics by Kolmogorov with his notion of metric entropy (this was then used to solve a very long-standing problem, I think about Bernoulli shifts). And mathematicians have been looking for analogues to Shannon's entropy (to give isomorphism invariants) even before Kolmogorov -- if memory serves, von Neumann posed the problem (it was Kolmogorov who actually succeeded in the particular construction).

Oddly, the only severely visually retarded mathematicians that I know of were all Jewish. That included Laurent Schwartz (Fields Medalist), who made contributions to geometry without being able to visualize anything as complicated as a triangle -- in fact he was so visually retarded (by his own account -- see his memoir), that he could not drive a car nor navigate in any city without memorizing a sequence of street intersection names. Apparently, he said he could translate everything to formal notation and then translate it back. (See his memoirs: he was also a Trotskyist and communist).

On the other hand, if you look at notable Chinese mathematicians, like Chern, Yau, and Terence Tao, and a few promising grad students that I met in Bezerkeley, notice how Chern and Yau both worked in differential geometry, and their contributions did require (as it seemed anyway to me) some kind of spatial thinking to it. On the other hand, they do lack the higher levels of abstraction that one finds in modern algebra. I can't find a single leading figure in (say) representation theory, or category theory, that comes from East Asia. BUT. The Japanese have a very similar visuo-spatial vs. verbal IQ imbalance as the Chinese do, but if we consider notable Japanese mathematicians (Kodaira, Shimura, and some others in probability theory like Ito), and they happen to be broader.

The Truth about Chinese ""Science""

10 posts