> "The nation, it says, must sustain excellence in basic research; foster a scientific workforce more diverse in race, gender, and geography; and support high-quality precollege science and math education. The board also calls for forging closer ties between academia and industry, keeping borders open to promote international partnerships, and promoting ethical research practices."
The reality they don't want to address is the corporatization of many fields of academic science (entire chemistry departments at many schools are now little more than R&D divisions for the major pharmaceutical corporations, for example). This clearly impacts the goal of "excellence in basic research" as that requires social academic norms like the open sharing of research tools and data. Basic research tends not to generate patents until years later, so it becomes a non-priority for the 'academic-industrial partnership' crowd (i.e. the startup types) - and yet the report supports 'forging closer ties between academia and industry'! Industry has plenty of cash, they can set up privately financed Bell Labs 2.0 and reap all the patents without relying on federal agency money, which should go to basic research.
The issue of atrocious public education through high school in the USA, such that often students have to spend one or two years in college on remedial work developing acceptable math and writing skills, can only be addressed by spending more money on education: getting better teachers by increasing salaries, and reducing class sizes by explanding schools, particularly in low-income areas. As far as related diversity issues, note there's been great progress in that area, for example CalTech didn't even accept female students in the 1960s, and today the student population is roughly equivalent gender-wise.
> The issue of atrocious public education through high school in the USA, such that often students have to spend one or two years in college on remedial work developing acceptable math and writing skills...
I want to call this out specifically: it's a real and widespread phenomenon.
You can expect any given student to be strong in some areas and less so in others, so it's perfectly reasonable for the first year, or semester, to have a significant component of "leveling up". However an increasing number of students need this kind of leveling up across the board.
I only have direct exposure to this phenomenon in two cases; one is a "top 5" ranked university, the other is a large "top 25" school. The students appear to emerge just fine, so this implies the admissions department is selecting the right students despite these issues, but at a cost that for many amounts to missing out on a year's worth of university class education because they need remediation in what should have been taught in high school.
Spending more money is certainly not the only way to help the situation. The US already spends a large amount of money per student for elementary and secondary education, and even more in post-secondary education...yet we are going nowhere. I would argue that spending the money that we currently have more efficiently is a better proposition, but government programs are going to be hard pressed to do something in an efficient manner.
> The nation, it says, must sustain excellence in basic research; foster a scientific workforce more diverse in race, gender, and geography; and support high-quality precollege science and math education.
One of the items on the list is not like the others. In fact, I would bet that none of our rivals overtaking us now care about that item, and so far it doesn’t seem to have hampered their research endeavors.
You can bet that but I don't think the evidence bears it out. Certainly in China, Russia and in Europe there are higher percentages of female scientists than in the US and that is through deliberate effort.
Furthermore this effort has helped, not hampered their research output. Just as a trivial example: we wouldn't have had COVID vaccines quickly if not for a female scientist educated in Hungary.
And that's just on one axis of underrepresentation. Anything that broadens the catchment pool of candidate scientists is going to improve value of those who become scientists -- a rule which, when generalized, is a fundamental staple of capitalism.
As far as I can tell the western push for “diversity” is a system of racial, gender, and sexual orientation preferences and not some capitalistic optimal meritocracy. For each person that would have been overlooked that the society gains, how many that would have been as good or better are denied opportunity?
I think you could probably make the case that China, in their own ruthless and meat-grindery way, does try to foster a race + geographically diverse labor pool by normalizing minorities into the Han workforce by whatever means necessary (exterminating local languages, exterminating religions, sterilizing women so they can join the labor force, etc).
I don't think it's even remotely ethical, but from their perspective they are actually making strides on that front.
we are behind in a lot of areas, i am starting to wonder if it's because of our barrier to entry (college fees). i've also been told that we don't teach math in the most intuitive way in k-12. a lot of professors say they have to reteach math to students. many colleges and universities have dropped asking for testing scores from high school realizing they will have to reteach them anyways, kind of interesting to see but kinda sad that we have let our education system
slip this far
If they would stop with the hardcore requirements (memorization of equations, paper-and-pen only, no open books, etc) with mathematics when we could be successful with this subject. Technology advanced so much that mathematics learning is extremely behind with the advancement. We have Khan Academy, Mathway, etc. We have great resources online for us to figure out the mathematics. But nooooo, they believe we will use trigonometry, calculus and paper&pen in the real world which rarely happens (ok maybe once in a lifetime). The last time I used my calculus in the real world is actually my undergraduate year.
I have used calculus and trigonometry regularly throughout my entire career. It is the foundation of everything I work on and I would never have been successful without it.
My apologies if my comment wasn't that clear. What I mean that the paper and pen is the primary requirements. We have the technologies that would calculate for us, those are the tools that we have available for us to use. But Educational Institutions disagreed with that and prefers us to use the paper&pen. So they would prefers to put us so much stress because we have to memorize them for the test instead of the available tools we could have use for it. The last time I used the paper&pen was in my undergrad. I use mathematics in Excel, Mathway, Search bars/launcher (Spotlight, Wox, Alfred, etc), Google. Those are the tools that I use frequent because it eliminate 99% human errors. They could taught us how to use the tools effectively, not forcing us to do the memorization and likely to fail the course.
Fortunately, universities are noticing the issues with students struggle to pass Mathematics because there are lot of pathway that have higher mathematics requirements whereas it shouldn't be in the first place. Some fields have higher mathematics requirements when it is barely used in the field. They should stop at Algebra 1 (I believe that is arithmetic algebra) as a minimum for all degrees. If the pathway have a strong mathematics use, then go for whatever they requires for the degree. OR they could, you know, teach us how to use the tools online effectively instead of forcing us to go off the books. My field is in language and cultural studies which use minimal of mathematics.
Desirable difficulty is adding difficulty to a problem that improves learning effectiveness and durability. So I wouldn't remove the 'hardcore' requirement without reasons.
Calculus and trigonometry is potentially a problem of not being able to find situations to use it, or when there' situation that do use it, one does not recognize the problem. This is known as learning transfer.
Any electrical engineer needs trigonometry, calculous[1], and a lot more of those things (in the complex plane, no less) as absolute basics. The computers you are working on would not exist without electrical engineering.
In software it's less common because software engineers tend to work with discrete structures, but there is quite a bunch of solid math behind that as well. You won't get very far without at least basic understanding of exponential functions and logarithms for example. Once your work involves signal processing (and be it "just" audio or video), you are solidly back to needing trigonometry, calculous, and all of that in the complex plane.
In Germany, calculous is taught in the equivalent of high school, by the way. In university, you then learn building up algebra, calculous etc. from scratch (i.e. from axioms), and into the complex plane. (As far as I remember you learn complex numbers in high school, but don't extend calculous into it.)
[1] calculus/calculous, take a pick, they're both valid spellings.
We train a huge proportion of scientists only to send them into the private sector to a)develop finance algorithms, b) targeted ad software, etc, because the science jobs just aren't there for even a third of them. Give them good paying science jobs at Universities and they'd stay.
Why would you need scientists at Universities that do nothing when you have Musk with his private corporations? I thought he alone can solve any technical problem after a little bit of hard working.
That is a portion of the problem, but there are many other factors. I believe the cost of tuition has become a large factor lately. Also, the quest for knowledge has been replaced with a quest for a degree purely for monetary gain and status.
I know you have to use available metrics, but I find it hard to consider number of patents a metric that describes the number of patents.
In some countries, like the US, it is typical for a patent to have many claims; in others, such as Japan, it's common to have one or a small number of claims, and to file several patents where in the US there would be a consolidated one.
Additionally, patents are really only useful in a few fields (notably pharmaceuticals) where in others (e.g. computing) they are mostly a waste of time.
I dare say that most of the papers being published would better serve to advance scientific knowledge if they were used as kindling to provide heat to primary school students.
> I dare say that most of the papers being published would better serve to advance scientific knowledge if they were used as kindling to provide heat to primary school students.
Reading blatantly anti-intellectual statements like these are very appalling in HN, and I dare say this attitude has been exponentially increasing in the last couple years. I was essentially unheard-of back when I first signed up here.
Will you be able to explain us why you're of this opinion, so it has at least more substance?
I don't know if their argument of "quality over quantity" can be interpreted as anti-intellectual necessarily. If anything, I think that can be seen as pro-intellectual and against stats/funding-chasing.
Same with assuming that prestigious schools are more likely to produce amazing research. I have found the absolute worst papers from otherwise respectable ivies. A case of someone buying their PhD, I assume.
This. Journals aren't science. They aren't even good for science. They create the wrong incentives for scientific publishing and are a primary driver of the replication crisis.
Open forums with science publishing for the sake of science should be the direction of travel, but we see a trajectory towards gatekeeping infected by corporate profiteering.
Aside from that, focusing on quantity of papers published has incentivized publication of papers that don't significantly increase the store of useful knowledge to humanity, and function as a bit of a haystack to obscure actual useful results
Additionally the 'publish more papers' culture creates other moral hazards, like: 1. Cabals of reviewers who work to help publish each other without regard to the validity of the papers published. 2. Making authors who work for a long time on tougher science have a worse scholastic reputation than those who work to publish a large volume of insignificant papers. 3. Incentivizing p-hacking and alteration of paper scope to salvage insignificant/negative findings.
As a practicing scientist I can't say I disagree with the original statement. Most publications are the bare minimum to get past peer-review to add another line on the author's CV. This is incentivized by academia and the whole "publish-or-perish" attitude so early-stage researchers are expected to pump out a certain number of publications otherwise they'll be out of a career in 3 years.
Does the company that produces crap software eventually produce good software by sheer volume over the company that takes its time and tries to release quality software?
The Chinese consider the US’s current diversity self-flagellation to be very much one of their strategic advantages[1]. The paper is from the US point of view, but it’s the best I have on the Chinese one.
I think it’s blindingly obvious that unity is superior to division, and a society ordered toward unity will be more vigorous and persist longer than one ordered toward diversity. Fortunately, I don’t have to convince anyone. A grand natural experiment has been running for the past six decades. I predict that within our lifetime the USA will not be a functioning world power. It does concern me what’s going to happen to all the nukes when the country is torn apart by its own internal contradictions.
There is good science being conducted in China, but there is a high proportion of faked, nonsensical, or just clueless papers coming from that country as well..so much so that I often hesitate to cite relevant papers coming from China if they were not published with co-authors from non-Chinese institutions.
> China has overtaken the United States as the world’s leader in several key scientific metrics, including the overall number of papers published and patents awarded.
Considering how meaningless "number of papers/patents published" is on its own, and ESPECIALLY how meaningless it is coming from a country like China that has perfected the art of bullshitting/padding stats...this article is next to worthless.
I don't know what's a worse explanation, that the author is naive enough to believe that's a useful metric, or that they intentionally used that metric to instill fear.
Probably the second one - 25 years ago you didn't see Papers from China, 15 years ago you saw some that were not very good, and now you see many good ones.
Well we've been flushing standards of competence down the toilet in the pursuit of various political aims. I guess now we're at the suprised pikachu face phase of our journey.
>poor students of color ... Asian students on standardized tests ... inexperienced science and math teachers.
This isn't terribly new in the U.S. Depending on the school district and state laws, the qualifications of 'science teachers' may be minimal. (In some places, STEM teachers who are also coaches are likely to be preferred.) Partly because of the big difference in pay, partly because some school admins aren't motivated to care. Then the 'teaching to the test' crutch came along. Ay-yi. Understandable exodus of quality.
Not terribly new: 50 years ago (and a few months) a friend of mine rearranged his 11th grade schedule to switch chemistry sections. The wrestling coach teaching the one he left, in reviewing the metric system with the students, had defined "milligram" as "one million grams." I trust it was a mere slip of the tongue, but it did not build confidence.
On the other hand, my recollection is that coaches taught Algebra I, Plane Geometry, and Trig without causing any scandals.
Exactly this. I don't understand how people can believe pre-college education in the United States has fallen off a cliff. It has always been generally awful and very slowly improving. SAT scores have been steadily rising in all cohorts, even as more people have taken it.
The US benefited in the post-war period by draining Europe of its top scientific talent, which catapulted it to the top by a wide margin. There is no reason to expect that level of dominance to persist.
The Webb telescope is a direct collaboration between 14 countries of which the US is one, with further input from many other countries through the European Space Agency, NASA, and the Canadian Space Agency. To call it a US project does a huge disservice to many scientists and engineers around the world.
The Webb was in development for more than a decade. Given that the article is discussing high school and first year college students, there’s going to be a latency period. I’d guess by the mid-2030s the effects will start to properly manifest, with concomitant hits to research output. Also don’t forget that even with its horrendous STEM situation, America has been the global hegemon for 70 years. One could argue that science education has been worse than the OECD average for half of that time, but being the global hegemon has meant that international students have filled the gap. With the rise of China, education and migration to America will no longer be the status quo for many Asians. America’s loss is China’s gain, something that looks to be a recurring theme of this century.
This article misses the point. It is partly America’s obsession with STEM diversity (and the resulting lack of purely meritocratic advancement) that has created this current crisis. The Chinese certainly don’t delude themselves into thinking that gender or racial diversity are important for much of anything - access to Chinese university or employment is meritocratic. It’s true that China is not as racially heterogeneous as the US, but that fact doesn’t support the inference that you can’t compare the two. The fact remains that the world’s rising superpower is not concerned with diversity, human rights, or many of the other virtue signalling calling cards that are heavily prioritised in America and couched as sine qua nons of national success. Perhaps it’s time for America to grapple with which of either its superpower status or human rights record is more important to it. Prima facie it increasingly can’t have both.
“The nation, it says, must sustain excellence in basic research; foster a scientific workforce more diverse in race, gender, and geography; and support high-quality precollege science and math education. The board also calls for forging closer ties between academia and industry, keeping borders open to promote international partnerships, and promoting ethical research practices.”
Race, gender, and geographical diversity, and ethical research practice have nothing to do with advancing America’s research prowess. See: Nazi Germany and Jim Crow America, neither of which were concerned with diversity or ethics in research. And open borders is different of course from simply saying that America should have a robust visa system for qualified candidates. American bureaucrats seem to think that if they can only tick off all the buzzwords, GDP will rise and American innovation will soar.
If one or more identifiable groups are underperforming and dragging progress, smart governments understand this is a problem to be solved instead of ignored. China gets many things wrong, but they are not wrong about this, as you presume.
I wasn’t attempting to criticise China’s treatment of minority groups. Perhaps ironically, while I find their particular methods of propaganda and pearl clutching to be painfully obnoxious, I respect their treatment of the Uighurs and I can understand why they are working so hard to preserve their cultural and racial homogeneity.
If anything my remarks were more a criticism of the US, which is apparently willing to sacrifice itself on the altar of diversity and political correctness. My own view is that racial and ethnic groups (and genders, to a lesser extent) differ inter se in their average member’s cognitive capabilities and proclivities. China seems to accept that, while America’s obsession for 3 decades has been to prove that such racial determinism isn’t true. The legacy of that attempted proof is failure and a declining superpower.
My point was that China, like all other governments who have thought about it, knows your view is wrong and has policies based on the fact that your view is wrong, which I linked to.
Your view goes against what Angrist has observed in Chicago, where black and white students at the charter schools he studied performed equally well on standardized tests after a few years of schooling (both better than matched public school cohorts), not to mention what Koreans have demonstrated, going from very poor education to arguably the best in the world. Good policy has been shown to make at least two standard deviations of difference in intelligence. Even mediocre policy, as in the US's case has significantly closed the gap between different groups in measured intelligence, with the gap between black and white Americans decreasing by one third between 1972 and 2002, so your claim that it's a failure is bizarre.
As far as I can tell you’re simply wrong, but I’m happy to see evidence to the contrary.
As to the racial gap, I don’t doubt that gains have been made and that large gains could continue to be made with improvements in childhood nutrition, education, stimulation, etc. That, to me, is more a function of just how large the initial gap was than it is a suggestion that intellectual equality at the population level can be achieved. To piggyback off your comment about the Koreans, they very quickly indeed caught up to (and surpassed, in some respects) the Japanese and Chinese. Blacks have never surpassed intellectually either white or Asian populations, nor are they close to doing so anywhere (to my knowledge, but I’m happy to be proved wrong). That is so notwithstanding that societies have spent (in some cases) 70 years trying to do with blacks what took the Koreans less than a generation. At some point a rational society would make decisions based on the data - humans are not intellectually comparable racially.
The early Asian-American populations were treated no better than African slaves, yet 150 years later the outcomes couldn’t be more different. At some point, blaming it on slavery, or Jim Crow laws, or white devil racism just tires the listener because of the plethora of obvious counter examples where chronic horrible mistreatment didn’t set an entire race back 20,000 years and render their collective IQ 1-1.5 standard deviations lower than the rest of the world (besides Australian aborigines): see, for example, the Jews up to 1945, or the American Chinese and Japanese up to ~1950.
> As far as I can tell you’re simply wrong, but I’m happy to see evidence to the contrary.
I posted three links to the contrary in my first comment showing that not only does the CCP think as the US does on this issue, but they implement largely the same policy to try to fix it, with affirmative action implemented before the corresponding US policy.
> That, to me, is more a function of just how large the initial gap was than it is a suggestion that intellectual equality at the population level can be achieved.
That large gap was not genetic but environmental, as the closing of the gap demonstrates.
> Blacks have never surpassed intellectually either white or Asian populations, nor are they close to doing so anywhere
I just told you that they closed the gap entirely in the charter schools Angrist studied. Educating blacks better than whites would be racist.
> The early Asian-American populations were treated no better than African slaves, yet 150 years later the outcomes couldn’t be more different
The descendants of those early Asian-American immigrants are still largely poor (and poorly educated). Similarly refugee Asian immigrants test poorly, with poor Hmong performing worse than poor blacks on standardized tests. More recent Asian immigrants got here through visas for highly educated workers, and their children are unsurprisingly also highly educated after their parents drill into them that the only reason they're here is due to education.
The Jews in Europe, though suffering immense oppression, benefited educationally from a Christian ban on modern finance (any interest was considered sinful usury), which the scholars of the Talmud deemed acceptable as long as the loan was to non-Jews. This, together with the emphasis on studying the Talmud throughout history meant that European Jews always valued education, both as a means of making money and for religious observance. American blacks were prevented from learning to read during slavery, and in the Jim Crow era, they were prevented from getting jobs that could use an education, so a culture of education would have been detrimental to develop. Now that they can benefit from education, we observe a steady closing of the education gap.
The links you provided relate to China’s PR releases about female Chinese scientists and researchers. Whether they’re true or not (that is, China’s actual intentions and thoughts about gender equality), I submit that the Chinese are highly xenophobic, racist, and insular. That is a positivist statement and I make no negative normative claim about it - as I said, if anything I can understand why the Chinese are that way, and it appears to be paying off. The fact is, China is one of the most racially homogenous countries on earth. I’m not even sure how a China committed to racial diversity would differ from how it looks now, except that it would allow immigration from other countries (which it almost invariably does not, currently).
As to blacks, the latest data I saw (a few weeks ago) showed that blacks had fallen even further behind whites and Hispanics during the pandemic in terms of education. I suppose you will reply by saying that’s because it’s reported at the population level instead of in a study, and that it isn’t a fair comparison. The logic would be that if blacks are already disadvantaged, then the pandemic would affect them even more.
I will do some research before I say anything else.
> The links you provided relate to China’s PR releases about female Chinese scientists
The third link is about affirmative action for minority groups, which has been CCP policy longer than it has been US policy. In China, people aren't allowed to complain about it.
> blacks had fallen even further behind whites and Hispanics during the pandemic in terms of education.
It only makes sense that those whose parents are less educated will suffer more when kept out of school, with school being a driving factor in closing the education gap.
Children of recent African immigrants don't have this problem, but while recent skilled Asian immigrants outnumber descendants of unskilled Asian immigrants, the same is not true for African-Americans. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-10-13/it-isn...
This is not surprising and will continue to get worse. The Chinese pump out far more scientists than us, and the small amount of the ones we have in comparison are handicapped by thought policing in the new age of political correctness. Not to mention how you need to publish papers that appease to certain powers that be to get any funding for anything. We pay teachers like shit, and there are no incentives for more teachers to be created. Colleges are way too expensive, discriminating against Asian's for example, and are now removing merit-based testing. Our obsession with diversity and forced equality of outcomes. I could go on. We're pretty screwed.
It's surreal that the "I'm being censored" hysteria among the privileged class has caused people to sincerely believe that there is more thought policing in the US than in China.
This wasn't clear from my rambling above, but I don't think we are thought policed more than people in China, not at all. They are certainly limited in what they can do in other ways. But us having to appease to mobs or change scientific findings to not upset some subset of emotional people on Twitter is not progress, it's yet another cut in a death by a thousand cuts spiral we are in right now as a country. It would be nice to not have that added to the pile.
Twitter is not a platform for science. If you believe useful scientific findings are being hindered by what people are writing in 280 character missives, I have a hard time believing you understand how science happens. What matters is funding, and what drives funding is the government, which has largely military objectives, and industry, which has largely profit objectives. Nobody gets research funding from Twitter.
This is a very poor attempt at a strawman, nobody thinks that Twitter is where scientific research is funded or conducted. Its role in the process is that of the stick, not the carrot. When people, including scientists, make statements or publish results that challenge certain political narratives, users on Twitter will harass, boycott and/or dox that person, their family, and their employer, leading to a climate of fear and the inability to have open and honest discussion on a number of topics.
This is a gross misunderstanding of my comment. Once more, do you believe that Twitter is hindering actual useful scientific findings? Of course not. The people who are funding useful research demand that the results be accurate. They are paying for it.
Governments can save a lot of money if it turns out climate change has no anthropogenic cause. On the other hand, if it does have an anthropogenic cause, they can save a lot of money if they understand that and take action. It doesn't matter what the Twitter mobs say.
I have no idea why you're so fixated on Twitter. The people you're responding to are obviously saying that K-12 education, college admissions, and as a result, science is being politicized.
The people I am responding to are fixated on Twitter. If you want to change the subject, I'm happy to oblige.
K-12 education is being politicized in as far as believing climate science was politicized.
If you think that college admissions are being politicized, you must have no idea how graduate school admissions work. It has not changed in decades. Whether changes to undergraduate admissions has an effect on scientific output is a statement that requires evidence. Until I see evidence, I consider the alternate hypothesis that increasing admission rates in communities that have few college graduates could decrease crime and increase general academic achievement and scientific progress to be just as likely.
My goodness, are you always so argumentative with people who have no interest in arguing with you? Please proceed to shout into the wind further though if it makes you happy.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadThe reality they don't want to address is the corporatization of many fields of academic science (entire chemistry departments at many schools are now little more than R&D divisions for the major pharmaceutical corporations, for example). This clearly impacts the goal of "excellence in basic research" as that requires social academic norms like the open sharing of research tools and data. Basic research tends not to generate patents until years later, so it becomes a non-priority for the 'academic-industrial partnership' crowd (i.e. the startup types) - and yet the report supports 'forging closer ties between academia and industry'! Industry has plenty of cash, they can set up privately financed Bell Labs 2.0 and reap all the patents without relying on federal agency money, which should go to basic research.
The issue of atrocious public education through high school in the USA, such that often students have to spend one or two years in college on remedial work developing acceptable math and writing skills, can only be addressed by spending more money on education: getting better teachers by increasing salaries, and reducing class sizes by explanding schools, particularly in low-income areas. As far as related diversity issues, note there's been great progress in that area, for example CalTech didn't even accept female students in the 1960s, and today the student population is roughly equivalent gender-wise.
I want to call this out specifically: it's a real and widespread phenomenon.
You can expect any given student to be strong in some areas and less so in others, so it's perfectly reasonable for the first year, or semester, to have a significant component of "leveling up". However an increasing number of students need this kind of leveling up across the board.
I only have direct exposure to this phenomenon in two cases; one is a "top 5" ranked university, the other is a large "top 25" school. The students appear to emerge just fine, so this implies the admissions department is selecting the right students despite these issues, but at a cost that for many amounts to missing out on a year's worth of university class education because they need remediation in what should have been taught in high school.
One of the items on the list is not like the others. In fact, I would bet that none of our rivals overtaking us now care about that item, and so far it doesn’t seem to have hampered their research endeavors.
Furthermore this effort has helped, not hampered their research output. Just as a trivial example: we wouldn't have had COVID vaccines quickly if not for a female scientist educated in Hungary.
And that's just on one axis of underrepresentation. Anything that broadens the catchment pool of candidate scientists is going to improve value of those who become scientists -- a rule which, when generalized, is a fundamental staple of capitalism.
https://eprints.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/id/eprint/4753/6/symplect...
I don't think it's even remotely ethical, but from their perspective they are actually making strides on that front.
Fortunately, universities are noticing the issues with students struggle to pass Mathematics because there are lot of pathway that have higher mathematics requirements whereas it shouldn't be in the first place. Some fields have higher mathematics requirements when it is barely used in the field. They should stop at Algebra 1 (I believe that is arithmetic algebra) as a minimum for all degrees. If the pathway have a strong mathematics use, then go for whatever they requires for the degree. OR they could, you know, teach us how to use the tools online effectively instead of forcing us to go off the books. My field is in language and cultural studies which use minimal of mathematics.
Calculus and trigonometry is potentially a problem of not being able to find situations to use it, or when there' situation that do use it, one does not recognize the problem. This is known as learning transfer.
In software it's less common because software engineers tend to work with discrete structures, but there is quite a bunch of solid math behind that as well. You won't get very far without at least basic understanding of exponential functions and logarithms for example. Once your work involves signal processing (and be it "just" audio or video), you are solidly back to needing trigonometry, calculous, and all of that in the complex plane.
In Germany, calculous is taught in the equivalent of high school, by the way. In university, you then learn building up algebra, calculous etc. from scratch (i.e. from axioms), and into the complex plane. (As far as I remember you learn complex numbers in high school, but don't extend calculous into it.)
[1] calculus/calculous, take a pick, they're both valid spellings.
Not surprised at all at this result.
In some countries, like the US, it is typical for a patent to have many claims; in others, such as Japan, it's common to have one or a small number of claims, and to file several patents where in the US there would be a consolidated one.
Additionally, patents are really only useful in a few fields (notably pharmaceuticals) where in others (e.g. computing) they are mostly a waste of time.
I dare say that most of the papers being published would better serve to advance scientific knowledge if they were used as kindling to provide heat to primary school students.
Reading blatantly anti-intellectual statements like these are very appalling in HN, and I dare say this attitude has been exponentially increasing in the last couple years. I was essentially unheard-of back when I first signed up here.
Will you be able to explain us why you're of this opinion, so it has at least more substance?
Open forums with science publishing for the sake of science should be the direction of travel, but we see a trajectory towards gatekeeping infected by corporate profiteering.
Aside from that, focusing on quantity of papers published has incentivized publication of papers that don't significantly increase the store of useful knowledge to humanity, and function as a bit of a haystack to obscure actual useful results
Additionally the 'publish more papers' culture creates other moral hazards, like: 1. Cabals of reviewers who work to help publish each other without regard to the validity of the papers published. 2. Making authors who work for a long time on tougher science have a worse scholastic reputation than those who work to publish a large volume of insignificant papers. 3. Incentivizing p-hacking and alteration of paper scope to salvage insignificant/negative findings.
I think it’s blindingly obvious that unity is superior to division, and a society ordered toward unity will be more vigorous and persist longer than one ordered toward diversity. Fortunately, I don’t have to convince anyone. A grand natural experiment has been running for the past six decades. I predict that within our lifetime the USA will not be a functioning world power. It does concern me what’s going to happen to all the nukes when the country is torn apart by its own internal contradictions.
[1] https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/selection/2013-anonymous...
Considering how meaningless "number of papers/patents published" is on its own, and ESPECIALLY how meaningless it is coming from a country like China that has perfected the art of bullshitting/padding stats...this article is next to worthless.
I don't know what's a worse explanation, that the author is naive enough to believe that's a useful metric, or that they intentionally used that metric to instill fear.
This isn't terribly new in the U.S. Depending on the school district and state laws, the qualifications of 'science teachers' may be minimal. (In some places, STEM teachers who are also coaches are likely to be preferred.) Partly because of the big difference in pay, partly because some school admins aren't motivated to care. Then the 'teaching to the test' crutch came along. Ay-yi. Understandable exodus of quality.
On the other hand, my recollection is that coaches taught Algebra I, Plane Geometry, and Trig without causing any scandals.
[Edit: corrected the spelling of "wrestling".]
The US benefited in the post-war period by draining Europe of its top scientific talent, which catapulted it to the top by a wide margin. There is no reason to expect that level of dominance to persist.
https://webbtelescope.org/about
“The nation, it says, must sustain excellence in basic research; foster a scientific workforce more diverse in race, gender, and geography; and support high-quality precollege science and math education. The board also calls for forging closer ties between academia and industry, keeping borders open to promote international partnerships, and promoting ethical research practices.”
Race, gender, and geographical diversity, and ethical research practice have nothing to do with advancing America’s research prowess. See: Nazi Germany and Jim Crow America, neither of which were concerned with diversity or ethics in research. And open borders is different of course from simply saying that America should have a robust visa system for qualified candidates. American bureaucrats seem to think that if they can only tick off all the buzzwords, GDP will rise and American innovation will soar.
https://www.universityworldnews.com/post-mobile.php?story=20...
https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3141834/gender...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action_in_China
If anything my remarks were more a criticism of the US, which is apparently willing to sacrifice itself on the altar of diversity and political correctness. My own view is that racial and ethnic groups (and genders, to a lesser extent) differ inter se in their average member’s cognitive capabilities and proclivities. China seems to accept that, while America’s obsession for 3 decades has been to prove that such racial determinism isn’t true. The legacy of that attempted proof is failure and a declining superpower.
Your view goes against what Angrist has observed in Chicago, where black and white students at the charter schools he studied performed equally well on standardized tests after a few years of schooling (both better than matched public school cohorts), not to mention what Koreans have demonstrated, going from very poor education to arguably the best in the world. Good policy has been shown to make at least two standard deviations of difference in intelligence. Even mediocre policy, as in the US's case has significantly closed the gap between different groups in measured intelligence, with the gap between black and white Americans decreasing by one third between 1972 and 2002, so your claim that it's a failure is bizarre.
https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/selection/2013-anonymous...
As far as I can tell you’re simply wrong, but I’m happy to see evidence to the contrary.
As to the racial gap, I don’t doubt that gains have been made and that large gains could continue to be made with improvements in childhood nutrition, education, stimulation, etc. That, to me, is more a function of just how large the initial gap was than it is a suggestion that intellectual equality at the population level can be achieved. To piggyback off your comment about the Koreans, they very quickly indeed caught up to (and surpassed, in some respects) the Japanese and Chinese. Blacks have never surpassed intellectually either white or Asian populations, nor are they close to doing so anywhere (to my knowledge, but I’m happy to be proved wrong). That is so notwithstanding that societies have spent (in some cases) 70 years trying to do with blacks what took the Koreans less than a generation. At some point a rational society would make decisions based on the data - humans are not intellectually comparable racially.
The early Asian-American populations were treated no better than African slaves, yet 150 years later the outcomes couldn’t be more different. At some point, blaming it on slavery, or Jim Crow laws, or white devil racism just tires the listener because of the plethora of obvious counter examples where chronic horrible mistreatment didn’t set an entire race back 20,000 years and render their collective IQ 1-1.5 standard deviations lower than the rest of the world (besides Australian aborigines): see, for example, the Jews up to 1945, or the American Chinese and Japanese up to ~1950.
I posted three links to the contrary in my first comment showing that not only does the CCP think as the US does on this issue, but they implement largely the same policy to try to fix it, with affirmative action implemented before the corresponding US policy.
> That, to me, is more a function of just how large the initial gap was than it is a suggestion that intellectual equality at the population level can be achieved.
That large gap was not genetic but environmental, as the closing of the gap demonstrates.
> Blacks have never surpassed intellectually either white or Asian populations, nor are they close to doing so anywhere
I just told you that they closed the gap entirely in the charter schools Angrist studied. Educating blacks better than whites would be racist.
> The early Asian-American populations were treated no better than African slaves, yet 150 years later the outcomes couldn’t be more different
The descendants of those early Asian-American immigrants are still largely poor (and poorly educated). Similarly refugee Asian immigrants test poorly, with poor Hmong performing worse than poor blacks on standardized tests. More recent Asian immigrants got here through visas for highly educated workers, and their children are unsurprisingly also highly educated after their parents drill into them that the only reason they're here is due to education.
The Jews in Europe, though suffering immense oppression, benefited educationally from a Christian ban on modern finance (any interest was considered sinful usury), which the scholars of the Talmud deemed acceptable as long as the loan was to non-Jews. This, together with the emphasis on studying the Talmud throughout history meant that European Jews always valued education, both as a means of making money and for religious observance. American blacks were prevented from learning to read during slavery, and in the Jim Crow era, they were prevented from getting jobs that could use an education, so a culture of education would have been detrimental to develop. Now that they can benefit from education, we observe a steady closing of the education gap.
As to blacks, the latest data I saw (a few weeks ago) showed that blacks had fallen even further behind whites and Hispanics during the pandemic in terms of education. I suppose you will reply by saying that’s because it’s reported at the population level instead of in a study, and that it isn’t a fair comparison. The logic would be that if blacks are already disadvantaged, then the pandemic would affect them even more.
I will do some research before I say anything else.
The third link is about affirmative action for minority groups, which has been CCP policy longer than it has been US policy. In China, people aren't allowed to complain about it.
> blacks had fallen even further behind whites and Hispanics during the pandemic in terms of education.
It only makes sense that those whose parents are less educated will suffer more when kept out of school, with school being a driving factor in closing the education gap.
Children of recent African immigrants don't have this problem, but while recent skilled Asian immigrants outnumber descendants of unskilled Asian immigrants, the same is not true for African-Americans. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-10-13/it-isn...
Governments can save a lot of money if it turns out climate change has no anthropogenic cause. On the other hand, if it does have an anthropogenic cause, they can save a lot of money if they understand that and take action. It doesn't matter what the Twitter mobs say.
K-12 education is being politicized in as far as believing climate science was politicized.
If you think that college admissions are being politicized, you must have no idea how graduate school admissions work. It has not changed in decades. Whether changes to undergraduate admissions has an effect on scientific output is a statement that requires evidence. Until I see evidence, I consider the alternate hypothesis that increasing admission rates in communities that have few college graduates could decrease crime and increase general academic achievement and scientific progress to be just as likely.
Concerning social matters, people are far more likely to get bored than angry.