Hacker News Reader

Comment by bor3dnrd | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile in the west we're lead by the weakest who merely got good grades but never built a thing of their own. People who caved time and again for money and sold our infrastructure off undermining our own learning and growth as individuals and a collective

The winners in our system are just the ones who get everyone else to kowtow and do the work, leaving leadership ignorant and inexperienced but lauded for some reason

It's a weird reverential system where figments of imagination still earn great amounts of deference; figment of out imagination being the American civil religion and hierarchy of figureheads who don't even know you exist; why would they care?

How reliant this culture is on bowing to figureheads painted on walls while talking like it isn't is a bizarre cognitive dissonance that should be studied for centuries

View on HN

> by the weakest who merely got good grades

Like who? Trump?

> The winners in our system are just the ones who get everyone else to kowtow

In soviet system, connections were literally everything. Not merit, not achievement, but who you know, who is your friends, who trades favors with you.

I mean that's just a lie. Kolmogorov didn't achieve international recognition through party connections, he received it because of his genius and accomplishments.

Kolmogorov graduated from university in 1925. The culture of post-revolutionary Soviet Russia in the early 1920s and of USSR during Brezhnev's "developed socialism" in the 1970s were so different as to be entirely incomparable.

The overall pattern over time: vastly less brutality and political violence, less insane unpredictability, more corruption and cronyism and cynicism, and much fewer paths for truly talented people to rise to the top.

I agree they're incomparable, but you compared them nonetheless.

Andrey Kolmogorov made his name in mathematics, which is a field where politics don't matter at all. That's a ridiculous example, and completely unlike 99.99% of the Soviet well-to-do.

Wrong again. Want to try for three?

https://www.nytimes.com/1948/09/27/archives/pure-mathematics...

> In soviet system, connections were literally everything

Seems like every system is like that then and not just the soviets.

I know it is off topic but I am interested in the soviet constructivist mathematics and somehow their political system fascinates me.

Afaik, that was the big thing that people living there commented on. And one of the big changes after fall of communism - eventually not everything depends on who you know and connections.

It is not equally bad in every system.

> Like who? Trump?

Can’t be. Didn’t he graduate near the bottom of the class? And I think W also had mediocre grades. Eisenhower was in the lower half of his West Point class as well. There are probably numerous other examples of successful American politicians who were poor students. Just recently Gavin Newsome got into a bit of trouble touting his low SATs in front of a mostly black audience. There’s a longstanding anti-intellectual streak in the U.S. that politicians have been pandering to for ages.

> In soviet system, connections were literally everything.

Wow, perhaps we were never so different after all

>Meanwhile in the west we're lead by the weakest who merely got good grades but never built a thing of their own.

That's a spicy take on the political legacy of the professional managerial class. /s

(Yes I know you meant politicians and politics adjacent high level bureaucrats, academia and industry)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com