America has lost its curiosity

http://chacha102.com/2009/02/19/lost-curiousity/

by chacha102 • 17 years ago

9 18 17 years ago

TomOfTTB3• 17 years ago

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.

chacha102• 17 years ago

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.

smanek3• 17 years ago

I think Tom (and I) got your point.

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.

mixmax4• 17 years ago

"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.

smanek3• 17 years ago

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.

TomOfTTB3• 17 years ago

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.

ivankirigin2• 17 years ago

America is 300M people. Generalizations on that scale are really hard.

mixmax4• 17 years ago

Not really, it's called statistics.

ivankirigin2• 17 years ago

What, like an average American? Or a median? Or looking at the outliers and why they are there? This is complex.

jodrellblank• 17 years ago

Did you mean curiosity?

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.

queensnake• 17 years ago

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).

zach• 17 years ago

I'm sorry, I tl;dr'd at the mention of Thomas Friedman. What did the point end up being?

America has lost its curiosity

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