> Yet another possibility is that Romania has an undersampled ethnic group that overperforms, but whose schools aren’t tested very well. The only group this might be is Romanian Jews and using them as an explanation is problematic for two reasons. The first is that there are too few to realistically explain Romanian Olympiad performance. The second is that we know the identities of Olympiad participants from Romania, and they don’t seem to be Jewish.
This struck me as…odd…before I even saw the parent comment.
This one is not odd and was worth mentioning before rejecting. Just look at American IMO team of 2024, in which most team members have Asian ancestry - some ethnic groups may indeed perform better than others. Picking Jews for this matter wasn’t unreasonable if you know the history of Eastern Europe.
The general vibe of this magazine: support mainstreaming of eugenics ideas (and now eigenicists), the ubermensch / great man theory of history, and other ideas that we’ve largely shied away from for the last 75 years.
This struck me as…odd…before I even saw the parent comment.