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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

It makes sense that if you measure success by the same yardstick that drives education, the more highly educated will win. The Physics Olympiad is testing basically the same skills that a typical high-school physics education in China teaches. Naturally they'd do well at it.

The question is whether those skills are what makes a successful physicist. And I'd guess that they're only a small subset of the skills necessary for original research. Yeah, they're a necessary condition, but they're very far from a sufficient one - and perhaps some of the time spent on drill would be better off directed towards working on those other skills like creativity.

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I come from India, a country that does really well in the IPhO and the IChO. Most finalists coming from here treat these olympiads as training for entrance examinations.

It is no surprise that Indians do not show this stellar a performance in the IMO: the math sections of entrance examinations have little in common with IMO problems (exclusively multiple-choice, heavy on calculus; no Euclidean geometry and number theory).

The IOI situation is quite embarrassing. I've been invited to the national training camp. Most of my fellow competitors don't know jack about algorithms. They aren't even aware of some basic STL functions. Some wrote an O(n^2) sorting algorithm in the qualifying rounds, others memorized a quicksort implementation. But they seem to be good problem solvers, or perhaps a little mathematically-inclined; one of the problems for qualifying involved coming up with a recurrence in two variables and then optimizing the program with DP. Nevertheless, people should expect a lot more from a large country recognized as an "IT hub".

Thank you for responding nostrademons.

I'll answer your second point as concisely as possible. First, I don't intend to demean creativity; in fact, I intend - at the moment, of course - to pursue a career in the philosophy of science. And philosophy, I hope we all agree, holds creativity and originality at its epicenter.

I merely state, as you do, that mastering the basic skills of physics is a "necessary condition" to becoming a great physicist. I, however, put a reasonable threshold of 10,000 hours on this mastery.

I intend to defend the position that these 10,000 of practice should be worked through as quickly as possible and as early as possible; alike how the Chinese high school system works. I think this is a reasonable position to take.

Note: I don't intend to comment on the positives/negatives Chinese education past this high school, i.e., university.

> I intend to defend the position that these 10,000 of practice should be worked through as quickly as possible and as early as possible; alike how the Chinese high school system works. I think this is a reasonable position to take.

That's actually the part I have a problem with...

I was a physics major for most of college. There were 3 of us (Rachel, Nathaniel, and myself) in my entering class that entered with a full year of AP credits, i.e. we had studied & practiced a lot beforehand and came in with good skills. We all had big ambitions: Rachel wanted to be a researcher for NASA at JPL, Nathaniel and I wanted to be hotshot theoretical physicists that made fundamental contributions to knowledge.

Rachel dropped the major at the beginning of her sophomore year. She graduated with a geology/music double major, wanted to work for USGS for a while, actually worked there and discovered it wasn't all that great, and is now happily doing a Ph.D in geology.

I dropped the major midway through sophomore year, picked it up again junior year, and dropped it for good in my last semester. I graduated with a degree in CS, worked for a startup, founded a startup, and am now happily working for Google.

Nathaniel finished the major, went to grad school, took a sabbatical from grad school where he worked in a bakery, and is now back in grad school. He plans to finish his physics Ph.D, but now wants to be a baker after receiving it.

Meanwhile, the folks who are successfully doing physics Ph.Ds often came in with no prior experience.

The problem with the Chinese system is it leaves no room for being wrong about your direction. When I was 18, I was certain I wanted to be a theoretical physicist. When I was 24, I was certain I wanted to do startups. In neither case would I have guessed that I'd end up at a gigantic software company.

> it leaves no room for being wrong

Precisely and concisely the problem. Now, I am particularly interested in some discussion (somewhere else) on how or whether a "best of both worlds" is possible. Knowing that there are education specialists in both cultures, I can only think that 1. it is unsolvable and everything is compromise, 2. there are fundamental cultural incompatibilities, or 3. the specialists are clueless.

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