

America has lost its curiosity - chacha102
http://chacha102.com/2009/02/19/lost-curiousity/

======
TomOfTTB
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.

~~~
mixmax
_"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.

~~~
smanek
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.

~~~
mixmax
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).

You do have Feymnann though ;-)

~~~
smanek
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.

~~~
rw
> 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.

Is this just because of the Manhattan Project?

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

~~~
mixmax
Not really, it's called statistics.

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

~~~
mixmax
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.

------
queensnake
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).

------
jodrellblank
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.

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

