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If you want to understand how human potential was wasted in old world, Ramanujan belongs to a caste in India that is only caste that is supposed to be educated

• maeil 2y ago
  In the New World, the Ramanujans' lives are spent optimizing high-frequency trading, ads or video recommendation algorithms. This is arguably even worse for society than them not being discovered altogethrt.
  • fragmede 2y ago
    Arguably. Assuming that's actually where they end up, they earn lots of money and they get to choose what they want to do with it. We should force them to be mathematicians if they didn't want to be? The other version in the West is he moves to rural Montana and sends bombs through the mail.
    • ImHereToVote 2y ago
      Those bombs might have done more good than his potential math career. Considering we just had our first AI millionaire. Perhaps there is hope for humanity to wake up.
    • sealeck 2y ago
      > The other version in the West is he moves to rural Montana and sends bombs through the mail. There might be a middle ground between the two?
      • BobaFloutist 2y ago
        I think they're talking about specifically the Unabomber, who was known to be a math genius too.
        • sealeck 2y ago
          I'm aware of that.
    • mandmandam 2y ago
      > Assuming that's actually where they end up, they earn lots of money and they get to choose what they want to do with it. We should force them to be mathematicians if they didn't want to be? I think that if you tried you could imagine a world where Ramanujans are both supported and respected with nice lives, while also contributing to the future of the species rather than helping dig our own grave. > The other version in the West is he moves to rural Montana and sends bombs through the mail. Why in the world would those be the only two options?? What a profoundly strange thing to say.
      • fragmede 2y ago
        You mean a world where someone like Terence Tao gets to be a professor of mathematics at UCLA, where he holds the James and Carol Collins Chair in the College of Letters and Sciences? That brilliant geniuses have chosen corporate America and to not go into academia is yours and mine and the world's loss, but a defining feature of the Western world is that they get to make that choice for themselves.
        • mandmandam 2y ago
          > a defining feature of the Western world is that they get to make that choice for themselves. ... As if people outside the West have no self-determination? Pretty questionable, on multiple levels. And another indication of absurdly binary thinking/rhetoric. Good luck with that.
  • HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
    People like Ramanujan are on a different planet compared to your everyday PhD working stiffs. There's smart (PhD), there's genius (Einstein, Feynman, von Neumann), and then there are freaks of nature like Ramanujan.
    • Der_Einzige 2y ago
      I'm an atheist, but why not take Ramanujan at his word when he says that god(s) gives him his equations? I for one would ask him what we could do to make it easier for him to listen to the voice of god(s) rather than say "well akshually..."
      • HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
        Well, he's dead, so there's that ... I'm not sure there's much you can do to help someone at this level, other than perhaps take away outside distractions. It's not remotely clear how Ramanujan's mind worked, or whether he really knew himself. He seems to have been a lot more highly functioning than an idiot savant, but still operating at a level that is hard to comprehend. Was this an expression of humility or devotion by Ramanujan, or was he just expressing his own lack of understanding of how his mind worked?
        • regularfry 2y ago
          There's a parallel there to Feynman, if you squint a bit. He seems to have been synaesthetic in a way that let him use the sensory part of his brain as a maths coprocessor, and he didn't understand it himself.
          • HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
            Feymann seems more understandable. He wanted to understand everything from first principles and derive it all himself, and spent a lifetime doing so, building himself up. He developed a huge repertoire of insights and mathematical tricks/approaches that could be brought to bear on whatever he put his mind to... It seems like he trained his mind to become what it was. The end result was of course incredible, and he would instantly or within hours see solutions to problems that colleagues had been stuck on for months. Feynmann, like von Neumann, also seems more approachable/understandable in that he wasn't just operating at genius level, but was also a regular fun loving guy (strip clubs, bongo drums, safe hacking and all). Von Neumann and some of his Hungarian peers were famously referred to as "The Martians", but it's really Ramanujan who seems like the alien.
• thwori23423423 2y ago
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  • aguaviva 2y ago
    Unsuprisingly, avowed Nazis like this ... like in Ukraine are great friends of the Western establishment. Who are you referring to, specifically?
    • ImHereToVote 2y ago
      https://www.defenddemocracy.press/ukraines-nazis-who-are-they-why-are-they-so-influential-and-why-have-media-ignored-them/ https://www.defenddemocracy.press/ukraines-nazis-who-are-the...
      • aguaviva 2y ago
        Except the groups the article refers to are quite marginal, have no influence in government, are a certainly not "great friends of the Western establishment". Basically a propaganda piece, designed to push your buttons. And not surprisingly, published originally in RT.
        • ImHereToVote 2y ago
          https://thehill.com/policy/defense/380483-congress-bans-arms-to-controversial-ukrainian-militia-linked-to-neo-nazis/ https://thehill.com/policy/defense/380483-congress-bans-arms...
          • aguaviva 2y ago
            No one has time to follow your random links. If you can't put what you have to say about a topic in your own words -- then you don't have anything to say.
            • ImHereToVote 2y ago
• elgenie 2y ago
  Ramanujan himself survived childhood smallpox and died at just 32 from what's thought to be complications from an earlier bout with dysentery. But he had lucked out in that he was born male in an urban setting in a high caste, with access to education, textbooks, and the language of the imperial core, and managed to make it to adulthood at all. “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” ~ Stephen Jay Gould
  • scotty79 2y ago
    If we individual makeup was so irrelevant we wouldn't have just had me Ramanujan so far. Although I agree that Einstein is probably very unremarkable and was mostly the right (genius) person in the right place at the right time in history of science to marry together things other people figured out and sprinkle some unique framing onto that.
    • BobaFloutist 2y ago
      It's not that individual makeup is so irrelevant, it's that if we assume (potential) Einsteins and Ramanujans follow a normal distribution (or really any random distribution), then the fact that so many people in the world live in situations where any genius will simply never be noticed means we are necessarily missing out on the vast majority of them.
• uncharted9 2y ago
  This is such a common and dangerous rhetoric, which has been repeated millions of times in India today, that people are willing to believe that one community has wickedly tried to subjugate everyone by denying them the right to education. But this is completely false. The early government records of British India themselves attempt to record detailed demographic records of the communities that studied in the early 'modern' schools. And no, the Brahmins didn't have a monopoly. This is similar to another popular narrative that no girl received an education until some sympathetic Englishman in partnership with a local woman allowed girls to go to school. What a load of BS.
• Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  This is why education and opportunities should be available for all, regardless of social / economic status. I reaped the benefits from that in the Netherlands where the government paid for most of my education (bachelor equivalent) and consequent professional life (white collar / middle class), instead of staying in my parents' / ancestors' "class" (blue collar / working class). But people in the upper classes don't like that, so they're telling working class people that people even worse off are after their jobs.
• ykrishnan 2y ago
  > ...only caste that is supposed to be educated... Tall claim.
  • 1024core 2y ago
    People in the West love to attribute everything in India to caste.
• deleted 2y ago
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• gen_greyface 2y ago
  caste system in india is an evil that persists even today, and is a complex topic. majority of the indian-origin users on hackernews or people in the IT community are very likely upper castes. see [1] If you are interested to learn more about the caste system in india it is recommended to get your facts from multiple sources. start from [2] [1] https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674987883 https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674987883 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India
  • cubefox 2y ago
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    • gen_greyface 2y ago
      I fail to see why this is being pointed out? > People from a higher caste tend to have higher IQ, >> People from a higher caste tend to have better access to resources, also a >Mankind Quarterly, a known fringe Far-right Racist publication. for fellow readers see [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mankind_Quarterly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mankind_Quarterly
      • cubefox 2y ago
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        • gen_greyface 2y ago
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          • cubefox 2y ago
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  • nnain 2y ago
    Unfortunately, India's poorest still don't get govt benefits due for them: A few gobble up all the caste-based reservation from the govt. I have seen many people who have made a career out of talking about caste all the time. I know more than 3 people in the US, who talk about caste all the time (as in that's their job now) but grew up in very privileged families.
• deleted 2y ago
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• btree_001 2y ago
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  • hackernewds 2y ago
    Not to mention Ramanujan grew up in a colonial British era, and to attribute his genius and success (instead of the oppression and difficulties) him and his environment struggled with due to British colonialism is utterly rich! Ramanujan succeeded in spite of it, not because of the favors of the British. Imagine how many Ramanujans were ignored due to 200 years of British colonial rule in India, wherein caste system developed and thrived*
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  • gen_greyface 2y ago
    The cited book has no information on how the surveys themselves were conducted. The book is an overall romanticization of pre-colonial india, and frequently indulges in nostalgia. The following books have a good overview of education&caste in india. A. L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India Gail Omvedt, Understanding Caste
    • cscurmudgeon 2y ago
      Do these books fix the day issue? How do they do it?
    • btree_001 2y ago
      > The cited book has no information on how the surveys themselves were conducted. These are not surveys. These are actual full data from the erstwhile British Administration’s revenue records with the data collected by each Provincial head and the District administration revenue collectors and officials at that time. The modus operandi of the data collection is also detailed in the book.