Something this low quality shouldn’t even be on HN. It’s basically a combination of lies, misconceptions and personal opinion. A few points...
1. His Thomas Friendman example from "The World is Flat" uses a control group of one 5th grade teacher. If you can get more anecdotal than that I don’t know how
2. George W. Bush, for his many flaws, did push the space program extensively. He even tried to set a "Kennedy-esque" date for us to reach Mars.
3. If you look at science majors as a whole enrollment is still going up. Yes, traditional engineering has lost some of its appeal but whole new fields of study have opened up in bio-engineering
So basically all his factual points are lies and all his opinions are just that...opinions. On the other side you have a world that is still driven largely by American products and American innovations.
"a world that is still driven largely by American products and American innovations." - it does seem like America is losing the edge though. Cars and mobile are examples of this, Europe and Asia is way ahead of the US.
How are Asia and Europe ahead of America on cars and phones?
Off the top of my head, the iPhone, Google Android, the Tesla Roadster, and Green Freedom are all American.
What really worries me is the LHC (European). I would argue that Newtonian mechanics gave rise to the industrial revolution, that Relativistic Physics gave us the Space Age and Nuclear Age, and that Quantum Mechanics brought the Information Age (I'd be happy to provide details, if you're interested).
I'm worried that America will be playing catchup in whatever new era comes out of the next major physics breakthrough.
I think the US auto bailout adequately explains why Americans are behind in the automotive industry. The Tesla is really more a showcase than a usable vehicle. In many parts of Europe electric cars are quite normal, where I live the local park authority only drives electrical cars.
You have a point with the Iphone and android, but carrierwise the US is way behind both Europe and Asia. Where I live (in Europe) texting has been a mainstream technology for ten years, and most of my friends only have 3g wireless internet. Cabled internet is old school.
Oh, and with the physics you mention: Newton (newtonian mechanics) was English, Einstein (relativity) was German, Niels Bohr was Danish, Heisenberg was German, Erwin Schrodinger was Austrian, Paul Dirac was British, Max Planck was German, and Ludwig Bolzmann was Austrian. (all of them pioneers of quantum mechanics, along with Einstein).
Makes sense about the cars. I'm just happy we're doing cutting edge stuff again that could, hopefully, start to pay off in a few decades.
As for the physics stuff: don't you think that Newton was a reason that the Industrial Revolution took off in England first?
As for the Quantum/Relativistic physicists: they were quite distributed, but I would argue that during the important years (i.e., the few decades immediately following their theoretical breakthroughs), they were more concentrated in the United States than anywhere else. It takes at least a few decades, usually, to find applications (e.g, lasers or transistors) for theory.
> As for the Quantum/Relativistic physicists: they were quite distributed, but I would argue that during the important years (i.e., the few decades immediately following their theoretical breakthroughs), they were more concentrated in the United States than anywhere else.
I agree with the arguments below but wanted to add one point. No one is saying the U.S. is ahead in every single industry. There are clearly areas where other countries lead and quite frankly I wouldn't want it any other way.
I would like to make my point clear for this, I am saying that kids today aren't curious in the making of products and the technology and mathematics behind them. If you didn't get that, I'm sorry for wasting 2 minutes of your time.
I just agree with Tom that you didn't make it very well. You had absolutely no data to back up your claims - just a handful of anecdotes (some of which were simply false).
For example, do you have any evidence to back up your claim that NASA can't find enough qualified scientists? Because I work at a DoD research lab (well, a contractor) that has no problem hiring scientists (we have multiple scientists interviewing every month, for positions in a very narrow field). Frankly, all the data I've seen says that America is graduating far too many PhDs for the number of positions available.
The key mechanism of technological advancement is abstraction. I am fairly good at the type of math that is important today, but I'd probably fare poorly in a high school math class 50 years ago. It just isn't that important, or useful, for me to be able to quickly compute an arbitrary trig function or take a complex derivative by hand. In principle, I know how to do both these things (well, I could probably derive the half angle/angle addition formulas and most of the derivative rules, although I don't actually remember them), but why would I bother when I can just abstract away irrelevant details and focus on the important stuff? And I'm sure students 50 years had lost other skills that earlier generations had deemed important.
Instead, I get to specialize - which increases my (and the world's) productivity. Nobody can truly understand how anything works these days. Even fully understanding a simple pocket calculator would require more knowledge in Metallurgy, Quantum Physics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Applied Math than anyone has.
It's just like how you build black boxes when programming. I don't know (or care about) the implementation details of Python's hash tables, Haskell's type inference, Java's garbage collector, or the web service library my coworker wrote. I have a vague, high level understanding of how they all work. But, if I ever want to get something useful done at some point I just have to take it on faith that they work.
Yes and no. Specialization is good for productivity on paper - but it breaks down horribly in practice. In programming, you may need to extend or re-write your framework or even web server's logic to scale your websites. In real-time trading systems and HPC programming, you need to have a good grasp of compiler and even kernel memory management to achieve low latency.
The analogy extends beyond programming to engineering/science in general. The field of molecular biology was formulated by quantum physicists interested in applying their experimental techniques in Biology. The new emerging field of Bioinformatics was conceived by statisticians and computer scientists to apply data mining techniques to genome data. Genome sequencing itself, is a blend of EE (taken from silicon waffer design) and molecular biology.
My opinion is that if everyone relegates to their own "tower," and aren't curious to drill deep into the bits of the other fields. There will only be incremental improvement to the existing towers, and no new towers. Hence the original author's point: kids are satisfied with interacting with technology on a superficial level (many in fact have a high level understanding of how cellphones work, cell phone gets signal from wireless tower), but they aren't curious enough to dig deep into the bits (program an Android game).
Just to chime in that's exactly what I was getting at. HN and the community it represents likes to think of itself as a place for rational discussion and inherent in that is accepting the belief that anything could be true. Including your assertion.
My issue with your article was that your justifications were shallow while at the same time being accusatory.
I agree that it's complex. My point was more that to make sense of a complex system, as this certainly is, statistics are an essential tool. As you hint at averages don't tell the whole story, but they do give a rough overview.
Outliers, clusters, standard deviations, etc. make good tools too, unfortunately few people understand how to use them correctly - me included. This is probably why graphs are so common: they convey a lot of information in a way that most people can understand.
If there is truth to this I'd say that it'd be because everyone's time is filled, and so much else is competing for our attention. There's no room to let your mind make itself up, look for its own missing pieces (of understanding).
One thing Thomas mentioned in the book is that in order to build greater advancements, we first have to understand everything that happens with our current systems.
He is wrong. Firstly, because it implies that we could individually learn everything about a system that took many people to develop, and secondly because it implies those people from years ago could have learned all about that system and more - that they were vastly underachieving and that we wont.
We must be able to stand on the shoulders of giants, not just be taller than them.
If we can’t compete with intelligence, then the only thing we can compete with is wages, meaning they will go down
Or compete on other factors such as service level, locality, linguistics, friendliness, value added services, mediation, or any one of the dozens of other factors that go into making a business subjectively better than its competitors.
1. His Thomas Friendman example from "The World is Flat" uses a control group of one 5th grade teacher. If you can get more anecdotal than that I don’t know how
2. George W. Bush, for his many flaws, did push the space program extensively. He even tried to set a "Kennedy-esque" date for us to reach Mars.
3. If you look at science majors as a whole enrollment is still going up. Yes, traditional engineering has lost some of its appeal but whole new fields of study have opened up in bio-engineering
So basically all his factual points are lies and all his opinions are just that...opinions. On the other side you have a world that is still driven largely by American products and American innovations.