Long-time readers will know that I am a fan of The Nature Index for tracking global scientometrics. Unlike raw numbers of articles published, it automatically adjusts for quality, since only submissions to elite journals are counted.
In my previous longread on the subject, I presented a per capita map of the Nature Index FC (fractional count). However, while it illustrated the dominance of just a few rich, high IQ countries to scientific development, even it could not do justice to the sheer geographic lopsidedness of the world’s distribution of cognitive talent that is devoted to science production.
While the final tables for the 2019 indices are still being compiled, Nature Index has released a database of the world’s top 500 cities by scientific output for 2017. You can open the map directly from your browser here.
If our world was a civilization game, almost all the world’s “beakers” would accrue to just a few metropolises and university towns in Western Europe, North America, and East Asia.
There are small if distinguishable clusters in India, Moscow, and SE Brazil, but otherwise the world outside those “core” areas is a scientific desert.
The leading US scientific centers are New York (1.980), Boston (1,809), SF Bay Area (1,676), and Baltimore-Washington (1,296), with Los Angeles and Chicago considerably behind (~800 each).
Otherwise, as per stereotypes, there’s much less happening in “flyover country”, with most other notable clusters being in the 200-300 range.
Beijing (2,142) was even as of 2017 already the world’s single biggest scientific cluster, overshadowing all other competitors in East Asia – Tokyo (1,194), Seoul (725), Osaka (680) – not to mention China itself.
Curiously, despite its status as China’s premier commercial hub and most “Westernized” city, and its star pupils who ace the PISA tests, Shanghai clocks in at just 1,041 – far below Beijing. Indeed, interior Nanjing (705) and even Wuhan (495), while is heavily populated by xiangxiaren/vatniks – are not that far behind. I can only assume that in Shanghai there’s more vigorous competition for talent from the commercial sector. And despite its status as China’s tech hub, Shenzhen (189) is not impressive at all. I suppose this would be one way in which it’s different from Silicon Valley, which is embedded within America’s third biggest cognitive/scientific cluster. These two patterns are perhaps the only “surprises” I had from the regional breakdown of the data.
As expected, Taipei (189) and Hong Kong (356) clock in modest performances relative to their status (note that Singapore much higher at 596). The result, I suppose, of targeted brain drain.
Although India’s performance is as yet quite modest, what I would note is that its scientific output is very evenly distributed geographically relative to other big countries/blocs. The four biggest clusters – Bangalore, Calcutta, Mumbai, Delhi – are all in the ~100-150 range. My only modest surprise from India is that there is no significant cluster in Kerala, which is the most developed (non-city) Indian state and was the historical focal point of Indian mathematics.
By Europe, we really mean, Western Europe, and by Western Europe, we really mean Paris (938), London (673) and Oxbridge (~500 each), Switzerland, and small German university towns.
The Med is much less remarkable, with Barcelona and Madrid (~275 each) being its only notable clusters
Eastern Europe is a scientific desert, with Moscow (188) – accounting for almost half of Russia’s elite level scientific output – constituting its only significantly noticeable pinprick, if only by dint of the emptiness around it.
There is pretty much nothing in the Balkans.
The Middle East is pretty much just Israel, there being otherwise only two pinpricks.
Tehran (Iran) – despite the sanctions, Iran with its smart fraction even manages to do better than Turkey overall – and most of its output is concentrated in the capital, whereas Turkey’s is split between Ankara and Istanbul.
And Jeddah (Saudi Arabia) – all thanks to KAUST, a lavishly funded institution whose overwhelmingly Western professors were poached with oil money.
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The intellectual elite of China is concentrated in these two institutions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsinghua_University
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peking_University
Both located in the City of the North.
Great analysis.
Of course, definitions matter. Research on how a market trader selling 3 dozen hard boiled eggs a day to people buying lunch in a Zambian market can wash her hands will not show in these figures. Her problem is material. The country is drought stricken so there is no water, not that it would be clean anyway. Alcohol sprays or wipes are totally unaffordable. She must trade or starve so she must be there. The best we’ve managed so far is to recommend rubbing her hands in fire ash with all the problems that brings. That is R&D but it doesn’t get counted.
In rural Zambian schools, having built toilets, the next issue is handwashing. Materials resources are better than for the market trader. An old plastic container can be filled with water, lashed to a wooden frame and tipped to give a little water each time. Crude soap can be made from fat and ash.
A lot of the world is engaged in retooling old methods with modern materials and devices. In developed economies, this would be R&D. In Eastern Europe it is not accounted for as such. It seems so weak compared to Rolls Royce or Johnson and Johson.
What is the heavy lifting? Taking humanity to new heights or a little bit of improvement in a village, rediscovered countless times across the planet?
Kerela School of Mathematics was a very creditable institution which independently developed proto calculus and is the only noteworthy Indian scientific achievement between the Islamic invasion and the establishment of the British Raj however in terms of peak output of Indian civilization it pales in comparison to the super universities of Ancient India Nalanda,Vikramshila, Taxila etc all of which(except Taxila) were located on the gangetic plain and were systematically destroyed by the Muslims.
The places where this university network used to exist almost a millenia ago are dirt poor but students originating from here routinely top various entrance exams to India’s most prestigious universities.
Malyalees make up the bulk of the Indian labour in the GCC and the Kerela state economy survives on remittances from these and some tourism revenue.
Malyalees aren’t known to be very bright.
Forgot to add the Chinese Academy of Sciences is also located in the Northern Capital. It is the world’s largest research organisation, comprising around 60,000 researchers working in 114 institutes and has been consistently ranked among the top research organisations around the world. Ranked the No. 1 research institute in the world by Nature Index in 2019.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Academy_of_Sciences
Is this based on English-language scientific output? How would the “Nature Index” learn what Russians are doing? Chinese institutions may have links with Western universities, and that’s how “Nature Index” discovered that they exist.
It’s like those maps made by medieval European cartographers, portraying “explored universe”. They also had pictures of crazy magical animals on the margins.
Some are very bright. Maybe not the brightest Malayali, but my favourite one.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/Mahathir_2019_%28cropped%29.jpg
Example Pot-in-pot refrigerator.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pot-in-pot_refrigerator
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/92/Tonkrugkühler%2C_Clay_pot_cooler%2C_Canari_Frigo.JPG/800px-Tonkrugkühler%2C_Clay_pot_cooler%2C_Canari_Frigo.JPG
Dumb Polacks?
The problem with Slavs isn’t so much lack of talent as lack of rules and attitude.
Too many Slavs have a slovenly and lazy attitude to everything.
And too many institutions are lax, permissive, corrupt, and ill-organized.
They should look into institutions vs individuals.
Do certain places have more Better Individuals, or do their Better Institutions draw the best individuals from all around?
In the US, it’s obvious that East Coat and West Coast attract the best minds from all over America.
But what about Europe? Are Slavs just dumber… or are Slavs so lacking in trust in their own institutions that they all flocked to centers in France and Germany(and UK) to do research?
As for Beijing beating Shanghai, it could be that Chinese are more respectful of Power and Prestige than Money and Business… at least among the nerds.
Beijing is seen as the political center of China. The Middle City of Middle Kingdom. Shanghai is seen as a city of hustle-bustle. It could be that the best minds of China want to be where the Power and Prestige are. The Confucian legacy.
I have not thought about this. It will be implemened. Three dozen hard boiled eggs will keep better. Also the fruit andd veg from the permaculture gardens planted around the schools andd thus to the parents.
The idea that “Han Chinese” are one people is a myth. Mandarin and Cantonese are as different as French and Spanish, and those are just the two most well known “dialects”, there is a plethora of Chinese “dialects” that would be considered completely different languages in Europe spoken by completely different nationalities.
I would say that China is not really a homogeneous country, but rather a union of broadly related but still culturally and in some cases ethnically distinct people. A comparison would be like if all the Slavic speaking countries become one country and one people, or if all the Latin-derived countries became one country and one people.
The Nature Index – Do we know what is the spilt between Math, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Computer Science and how it differs between countries?
The contrast between France and Germany is quite striking.
I wonder if it represents the disbursement mechanisms of different systems of governance. France being centralized power, and Germany becoming more federalist after the war? And thus disbursing more, through state mechanisms? Seems likely.
If so, it is quite eerie – you can see WW2 on this map. I’d guess German federalism, like American, is something of a joke when it comes to being a check on power. Perhaps, the model has some merit – I don’t know – but it is really quite creepy to see an effect like this, given the choke-hold that WW2 has on the collective psychology of Europeans.
In one sense, it almost seems like a map of graft, since the contrast between Germany and France seems to throw cold water on the idea that these are all organic research centers. I can’t help but think of how it might look if it was overlayed on other things, which might be considered less positive: welfare disbursements, inflow of migrants. Percentage of children who are non-European in the public schools. Or to put it outside the European context – IQ shredding. Many of these are not healthy cities.
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Rplot05.png
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/hanTree.png
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/HanTib.out_htm_4c2de817081d630b.png
But Han-ness is a big tent. Koreans are also Han but not Chinese.
It’s like ‘Germanic’. Germans, Swedes, Norwegians, Danish, Dutch, and etc are Germanic but of different nations. Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Croatians, Russians, and etc are Slavs but of different nations.
Germanic languages are all related, like Romance languages are.
Are Mandarin and Cantonese different dialects or different languages? I hear that Cantonese and Mandarins can READ the same text. That would suggest different dialects, but I must say they sound very different from each other. Mandarin sounds like a lot of shi-shi and Cantonese sounds like a lot of ying-ting. I hear Vietnamese is part of the Chinese linguistic family. In contrast, Korean and Japanese belong to a separate language group though they took a lot of words and characters from Chinese.
One wonders how China might have ended up if it had developed into separate states like in Europe. All attempts to unify Europe failed, and independent kingdoms and states remained. The advantage was more freedom and independence for each locality. There was also more competition among kingdoms that led to technological, military, and scientific breakthroughs.
In contrast, the relative unity of China led to less regional competition and less innovation. Even in Japan, the most dynamic period was during the warring states when various warlords sought superior weapons(often by willing to learn from the West) to gain an upperhand. It’s no wonder why the Tokugawas shut Japan to foreign trade after gaining supremacy. Rival lords might gain access to better weapons from foreigners. Still, it was the foreign threat that finally brought down the Tokugawas. Paradoxically, the Tokugawa success in keeping the foreign threat at bay led to lack of innovation that made it fall under new and improved foreign threat. One wonders what if Tokugawas has chosen to increase trade with the West but only for themselves(while banning it to rival clans). It may have remained in power.
The relative unity of China meant less innovation, but it also meant more peace and stability. In contrast, Europe was destroyed by many wars, especially in 2oth century with WWI and WWII.
But then, the lack of innovation in China meant it fell under power of imperialists, and the ensuing turmoil led to invasions and civil wars in the 19th and 20th centuries that were just as bloody as the wars in Europe.
Oddly enough, the unity of China may owe less to internal dynamics than external forces. After all, China expanded most under foreign occupation, esp under Mongols and then the Manchus. If not for the foreign element, Chinese themselves might have splintered into various independent kingdoms. But under foreign rule, Chinese became one people as subjects.
Even in Europe, the greatest chance of unity came under foreign rule. The various Germanic tribes were most unified as subjects of Rome. The Ottoman-Muslim threat unified Christian Europe.
American domination in Western Europe following WWII led to peace and cooperation among various European nations. Soviet Occupation during the Cold War led to much unity and cooperation among Slavic and Eastern European nations. When small pieces cannot get along, it takes the big foreign power to force the small pieces to get along. Under Soviet rule, Armenians and Azerbaijanis were ostensibly comrades. They soon became enemies after the fall of USSR.
The other way around, Koreans can be Chinese but they can never be Han. The Han in the Han River is not the same as the Han in Han race. An example of Koreans who are Chinese but not Han and never will be are Chaoxianzu (Chinese: 朝鲜族), Joseonjok or Chosŏnjok (Korean: 조선족).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koreans_in_China
How feasible do you think it is to do cutting edge research in just about any sphere of science today without close interaction with the English language literature?
The divisions are Physical Sciences, Chemistry, Life Sciences, and Earth/Environment, in approximately that order by weighing. The Anglos are relatively more loaded towards Life sciences, while the ex-USSR and China are more heavily loaded towards Physical sciences. Anyhow, details here: https://www.natureindex.com/country-outputs/generate/Earth%20&%20Environmental%20Sciences/global/All/score
Why is it surprising? France has been extremely centralized around Paris for centuries, whereas Germany only united ~150 years ago.
Alright, you could be right. I assumed Koreans would be a Han people too because they call their nation ‘Han Gook’, which means a Han nation of gooks.
Did your precious Kierkegaard and Raoult publish their findings in Nature or some other “high impact” journal? How about Perelman? By your own standards, they are retards.
And I am merely confined to the obvious. Russian, Japanese, and even poo-in-the-loo pharmacopeeas are filled with local crap, but every once in a while you have a metformin or a artemisinin, whose value is disregarded as it was not invented in “Boston – Newton – Cambridge”, and their creators did not bother with English journals.
I suppose the Low Countries look quite similar. Maybe, it is France that is the aberration.
No retard, Han Kuk means Han Nation.
No, Han Kuk means Hans cuck.
The following is the work of Spandrell an extremely intelligent and knowledgeable individual.
All place names in Korean, North and South, with the very overt exception of Seoul, are Chinese derived words. That includes the name of the country, the names of all provinces and all cities. Most interesting of course is the name of the country, as that changes the most. Chinese-inspired polities tend to change the name of the state every time the dynasty changed. Modern Republics kinda count as dynasties, a fact which is often a matter of jokes, especially in China. The name of the country thus says a lot about the people who founded the government.
South Korea calls itself 大韓民國, 대한민국, Dae Han Min Guk. The first letter, ‘dae’ in korean, means big. The second, ‘Han’, is a proper name. Min-guk here is literally “common-people’s country”. It’s an early Chinese rendering of the concept of “republic”, and a rather elegant one. So South Korea is, literally “Republic of Great Han”. On everyday speech it is shortened to 韓國,한국 Han Guk, Han Guo in Chinese, Kan Koku in Japanese. “Han-land”, sorta.
What is ‘Han’ though? Note that this Han has nothing to do with the Han of China’s main ethnic group. That one is written 漢. South Korea is 韓. Zoom in, you’ll see they’re different. 漢韓. Tones are different in Chinese. No tones in Korean, so they do pronounce them the same, but such is life in China’s area of linguistic influence.
So anyway, the Chinese letter which is now used by South Koreans to refer to themselves goes back to the Han state in warring-states era China, which was born of the dismembering of the Jin state in 403 BC. The Han state was somewhere between southern Shanxi and northern Henan in today’s China, and while it wasn’t one of the powerful warring states, it did give us the great philosopher Han Fei.
Actually one can track the word back to an even earlier state, or rather a small fief given by the early Zhou Dynasty (1046 BC) to one of the many sons of the Zhou founder (the Warrior King, Wu Wang), which was located in… 韩城, the city of Han, which still exists to this very day, a small mountain town on the west bank of the Yellow River. Shaanxi province. Small towns having the same name for 3,000 years is one of the joys of the Chinese writing system.
So what does a Bronze Age walled town in the middle Yellow River have to do with post-WW2 South Korea? Their names are written exactly the same, 韓國. But that’s about it. Obviously China’s Bronze Age river town has precedence. 3,000 years worth of it. So why did South Korea took its name from it? That’s a bit complicated, and fairly stupid if you ask me. Let me explain.
Korea is one of the countries with the least complicated history on earth. The country adopted Chinese statecraft early on, but Korean dynasties on average last longer than Chinese ones. Chinese states if lucky lasted at most 250 years. While the last two Korean dynasties lasted 500 years each (!). I think that’s a record.
So anyway, as a unified kingdom Korea starts being a thing in 668. The first kingdom was called Silla 新羅 (668-935), ruled by the Kim family, then came Goryeo 高麗 (918-1392),obviously the origin of the Western name, ruled by the Wang family. And then came Joseon 朝鮮 (1392-1897), ruled by the Li family.
As in China, a new dynasty changed the name of the country. So where did those names come from? Silla was the original name of a state in the South-west of the Korean peninsula. It then grew, and a smart alliance with Tang China got him the rest of the peninsula by 668. Nobody knows the origin of the name, nor much at all besides that it was probably pronounced as “Sila” or “Sira” back then. Perhaps it meant something like “big city”, which links to modern Korean “Seoul”.
Silla was replaced by Goryeo, which got its name from the great kingdom of Goguryeo, a kingdom which was born in today’s southern Manchuria in 37 BC, but eventually grew to conquer most of the northern Korean peninsula. They also founded Pyongyang, such as it was. As it happens the little evidence we have of Goguryeo’s language suggests that it’s more related to Japanese than to Korean, but it was a kickass warrior kingdom that everybody remembered fondly. And so when Silla was overthrown, new Wang family dynasty, who claimed descent from them, chose to recover the name for their new state.
So then after a good and eventful 500 years the Goryeo dynasty collapses, and it is replaced by a coup launched by this guy called Yi Seong-gye. The background here is that as the Mongol Yuan dynasty, which ruled both China and Korea, collapsed, the recovered Goryeo dynasty tried to take advantage of the civil war chaos to win more territory from China. Yi Seong-gye was a Goryeo general, and he received the orders to attack Chinese armies. He thought it was a pretty stupid idea, so he came with a better one: he’d make peace with the Chinese armies and go invade the Korean capital instead. So he crossed the Korean Rubicon, and installed himself as new king in 1392.
Then he asked the newly founded Ming dynasty China if they’d recognize him, which of course they did gladly. He was the nice guy who had chosen to ally with them instead of attacking their armies. He then asked the Ming emperor to choose a name, out of a couple ideas, and the Ming First Emperor chose for him 朝鮮 조선 Joseon. Which is the name of a small kingdom, theoretically located around today’s Pyongyang, which had payed fealty to the Zhou Dynasty way back in 1046 BC. So Bronze Age, again. The name was both ancient, Korean, and it symbolized the good relations with big bro China, and so Joseon it was.
So let’s go forward again 500 years (how did Korean dynasties last so long I really have no idea). It’s 1897, and the Joseon Dynasty is still around. Yi Heui is the 26th king in a straight line of Joseon kings. But it’s 1897 already, it’s the apogee of Western Imperialism, and it’s also 2 years after the First Sino-Japanese war. That war was launched by Japan explicitly with the aim of making Korea ‘independent’ from China. And Japan won, so it behooved Korea to take concrete steps to cut its traditional ties with China. Ties which had given it its name back in 1392. It took 2 years to convince the Korean king, who thought like many in Korea thought it was absurd to pretend to be diplomatically equal to China. Those 2 years included a series of coups, the murder of his queen, and an escape to the Russian embassy. But eventually in 1897 the Korean king made his mind. Same dynasty, of course, but new regime. And so new name.
What name to take, though? He couldn’t ask China for one again. And he was still the king of the old dynasty, so he couldn’t use his family heritage or something. He had to choose a new name out of the blue. And so after a while the Korean king, or I guess some of his ministers, came up with some old historical name which could fit the bill.
The original name, Joseon, had come from a Bronze Age Kingdom. Well, “kingdom”, more like some chieftain and a couple hundred serfs. Way later in Korean history, around the first century AD, Chinese historians talk of a series of small chiefdoms in the southern half of the Korean peninsula. Specifically they talked of three: Mahan, Byeonhan and Jinhan. The “han” part of the names was written phonetically, using different Chinese letters which sound like /han/, but eventually, and for no good reason, Chinese historians settled in using the letter 韓, which as I mentioned before refers originally to a fairly old Chinese fiefdom, and later a middle sized kingdom. It also happens to be a common surname. As for why those Korean kingdoms were called ‘something-han’, it’s anyone’s guess. The best scholarly theory seems to be that ‘han’ comes from the same root as Mongolian ‘khan’, i.e. boss.
So anyway, the reasoning here seems to be that the Korean king wanted a new name, he looked at the history books, couldn’t find any name which hadn’t been used before or that had any bad connotation, so eventually settled with this word which was kinda Korean so “anyway let’s get done with this already gentlemen I didn’t want to do this on the first place can I go home now?”. The name chosen was 大韓帝國,대한제국Dae Han Je Guk, “Great Han Empire”. ‘Empire’ being also the formal titles of China and Japan and the time. So, equality, independence.
That was 1897. In 1910 Japan annexed Korea anyway and thought the whole thing was stupid. Under Japanese rule Korea was used by its previous name, Joseon (Chosen in Japanese). North Korea, being communist and down to earth, also calls itself Joseon. Well, the Democratic People’s Republic of Joseon. China calls North Korea Chaoxian, which is the Mandarin pronunciation of Joseon.
South Korea though as a liberal democratic country had to do the virtue signaling thing, so they chose to signal that South Korea was a return to how things were just before the Japanese invaded. Just without the king. So South Korea chose the exact same name chosen back in 1897. Just changed a letter, “emperor” for “people”. So instead of 大韓帝國,대한제국 it’s 大韓民國 대한민국.
And that’s the name today. South Korea has this weird ahistorical name, born of lazy Chinese historiography two millennia ago, but with a rich narrative of independence and victimization. North Korea just keeps the old name of the 1392-1897 dynasty. China and Japan call each country by their chosen names. But of course North and South Korea themselves don’t recognize the other’s right to exist, so they call it by their own chosen names + north or south. South Korea calls North Korea, 北韓 북한 Buk Han “North Han”, while North Korea calls the South 南朝鮮 남조선 Nam Joseon “South Joseon”. China used to follow North Korean usage, not anymore.
Amusingly Taiwan and Hong Kong mostly follow South Korean usage, as good fellow USG vassals.
And yes, the Korean script, “Hangul” is Han-gul, Han letters. In the North is, you guessed it, Joseon-gul.
Long story short: history is fun, languages are different, and the difference allows for different ways of doing what everybody wants to do anyway: fight
https://spandrell.com/2018/06/14/the-past-and-future-of-korea/
It’s interesting how Britain significantly outranks France and Germany, considering I think most people would anecdotally associate France and especially Germany with scientific knowledge and research more so than Britain.
Let me spoil the fun somewhat. Big Pharma corporations complained for years that things published in sensation-oriented journals, like Nature and Science, are rarely reproducible. These journals shoot for the impact. If next year 40 papers reference yours and say that it’s great, you get an impact of forty. If 40 papers reference yours and say that it’s totals BS, you get an impact of 40. So, Nature and Science are like Hollywood: there is no difference between famous and notorious. There is a joke in the US science: “even though it was published in Nature, it might still be true”.
The strange thing is in Britain it’s the Poles who are stereotyped as hard working and diligent and the native British who are lazy and slovenly. Companies preferring “hard working Poles” over “lazy Brits” is practically a cliche here.
I would argue that the way the native British working classes feel disregarded and disrespected by the elites in favour of Eastern European labour was the main driving force behind Brexit.
But you are lazy, hence the Portuguese nurses in UK: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/first-picture-portuguese-nurse-who-21855737
You can vote as much as you want, but there are no English workers in Portugal, Switzerland, or wherever, save for the teens out to prove shit during their gap years.
The main reason the NHS is full of foreign nurses is not because of a lack of British people wanting to train as nurses, but because they find it more cost effective to import trained nurses from poorer countries than fund enough places in British universities to meet the demand.
I’m also skeptical this whole “Portuguese nurse saves Boris” thing isn’t pro-EU propaganda by the establishment, as it now puts Boris and by extension his supporters in a morally difficult position in regards to Brexit.
Anatoly, just how much stronger do you think that Eastern Europe’s performance would have been on this map had it not been for the brain drain that it experienced (including, but not only, of Jews) over the last several decades (as in, from 1945 all of the way up to the present-day)?
Also, what explains Nizhny Novgorod and some other city close to the east of Moscow being relative scientific hubs within Russia? What about the lack of scientific output in St. Petersburg?
By the way, it’s quite interesting just how balanced the scientific output in Israel is. Haifa, Tel Aviv, Rehovot, Jerusalem, and Be’ersheba all have sizable scientific output.
As for flyover country in the US, it might have sizable brainpower but perhaps a sizable amount of its big brains move to greener (and more diverse) pastures on the coast in an attempt to advance their careers:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/FD95OCc8mAzn9wn6X_QoAS7VFoY=/1440×0/smart/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/3U6XVB5PFY52NFY5ROC24USP74.jpg
Interesting history. One thing though before Korea was annexed by Japan the country was spelt Corea. After its annexation by Japan the Japanese didn’t want Corea to list alphabetically in front of Japan so its spelling was changed by Japan from Corea to Korea and the West follow suit.
The Nature index does not have mathematics and computer science divisions. This is rather unfortunate. These two are important areas with very different supporting facilities and investment requirements than the Nature’s divisions. China, a later comer in both, are quite strong due to its strength in supercomputers, communication and AI big data.
Readers might also be interested in the following link [1], which gives ranking of many areas.
In 2018, for example China published 63363 math papers with 25577 citations, whereas US published 41403 with 18830 citations [2].
However, looking at cumulative numbers (from 1996-2018), US still has overwhelming lead with 690747 math papers and 10094819 citations vs China 545567 papers with 3079700 citations [3].
[1] https://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php
[2] https://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php?year=2018&order=ci&ord=desc&area=2600
[3] https://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php?area=2600&order=ci&ord=desc
I just realized that I didn’t look closely enough at St. Petersburg on that map. I just looked at that map again and it looks like St. Petersburg does, in fact, have sizable scientific output–albeit apparently more than three times less than Moscow has.
By the way, just how much more scientific output do you think that a Russian Empire that would have survived up to the present-day would have had, Anatoly? After all, even before WWI, to my knowledge, the Russian Empire was not known for being an extremely massive technological hub to the same extent as Britain, Germany, and the US (in other words, the Anglo-Saxon world) were.
Yes, but you seriously think King Abdullah University produces more cutting edge research than MIPT(Phystech) and Moscow State University combined?
Possibly not. It might depend on whether this data weights different quality research equally.
I definitely agree about the Nature and Science part, but don’t comment often enough to have the ‘agree’ button activated. Never read those journals (unless someone sends me a paper or I find it while doing a literature search).
Anatoly has not discovered the dark side of scientific fraud yet. I sometimes wonder how much there is, but there is quite a lot in places where there is pressure to produce publication numbers that directly correlate to your salary. I think there is a lot more fraud in biomedical science than in physical since there is less money in the latter, but it could be since I have been following a blog on scientific fraud by a former biomedical researcher, and he naturally tends to write more about his field.
Also the Nature82 index is problematic. I only found out about it a year ago during a meeting with the dean who said they really care about it. I then found out that I declined to have my paper transferred to a Nature82 index journal after it was rejected from the best journal in my field, and went instead for one I liked better. Of course, almost all the best journals are in it, but there are some glaring misses, especially as you move down from the big three society flagship journals. Last year I did publish in a Nature82 after a rejection from the best, to make the dean happy. This year however, after a rejection they offered to transfer my paper to a really good journal, one of the best with a huge impact factor and one that I like and much better than those on the index, the only problem was that it was not on the index. I still went for it; screw the index. I keep hearing complaints from people in other fields too about it. Maybe overall, on a large enough scale it will all balance out, but for individuals and small universities it might not be an ideal measure.
Do Nature journals also have a replication crisis like a lot of psychology apparently has right now?
There are plenty of English workers living in Switzerland. There aren’t any in Portugal, because why would you move to work in a much poorer foreign country?
Okay.
On second thought, best stick to things you know, like 4chan memes.
“Science today” doesn’t do cutting edge research.
Science today is the institutionalized equivalent of blogspam, and if anything useful comes out of it, then it’s despite the publication/grant system, not because of it.
Also, another problem with the Nature index and gauging quality, is that you need to know how to publish in these English language journals in order to publish in them. If your scientific culture is not set up for it, you will not publish in the journals. This is the case for Russia actually. I recently had an intern from Russia (and his city is not on the map), but I met him at a conference and he appeared like he knew what he was doing in the lab, so I suggested for him to come here for a few months since the weather was much better.
I checked his record and they publish in really obscure Russian journals. However, the basic scientific training is excellent. He was very knowledgeable about the field, and know how to do everything in the lab. A really excellent intern with zero prior publications in Nature82 journals. If he went through the university system in the US, he would have probably had a few publications where he was the main or co-author, and at least one of them would have been in that index.
So it’s not like it’s impossible to catch up in that index for a country like Russia. It’s a lot easier than for many other countries because the talent is already there. There is just no money in pushing people to publish in these journals, but the system produces very good scientists that go to work in industry or whereever. Probably if Russia became higher income and they did an attract back talent program like China, they would explode on that index in a matter of a decade, because all the people who come back from abroad know the tricks of publishing in these journals (how to write the introduction, letter to the editor, etc…). But this brings up another point, which is when there is too much money and prestige (let’s face it industry always pays more, so often it’s vanity) incentives, it drives fraud.
What’s up with the chinx blocking research on the origins of corona? I thought it was created in a U.S. lab anyway…
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/12/asia/china-coronavirus-research-restrictions-intl-hnk/index.html
So now many European countries are lifting the lock down restrictions this week, it seems to be only the UK that is saying they won’t even consider ending the lock down for weeks yet.
It makes me wonder if this is not a planned destruction of the British economy, to destroy the chances of Brexit being a success.
The Han in Han Chinese is also the name of Han River in China (not the Korean Han River), which flows into the Yangtze river, but in ancient times, it was not known maybe. (I mean, in very ancient times when that river got its name.)
Han Chinese got its name from the Han dynasty, which got its name from that Chinese Han river.
Milky way in ancient China was at times called the Han river of stars.
The term “Han race” is about as descriptive as the term “European race”. The distance between many groups in China is as great as that between different Europeans who speak different languages. Some Chinese “dialects” have almost no mutual intelligibility what so ever when spoken.
I find it odd how Germany is associated with scientific research and engineering far more so than Britain, considering Britain’s research output is significantly higher than theirs.
I suppose it’s because Germany produces far more high tech/high quality consumer products than Britain does so has become widely associated with engineering/science in the minds of the average person. It often seems to be the case that British scientists invent it, other countries go on to actually make money out of it and take the credit for it.
It’s like Britain invented the railways, but who associates Britain with trains nowadays? No one does, if people think “trains” they think countries like France, Japan, Germany, etc.
Considering just the Physical Sciences wouldn’t cardinally change the picture, just slightly bump up the East Europeans and to a lesser extent Chinese and Europeans, and bump down the Anglos.
Sure, it’s possible. Question is – for what purpose?
Modern “science” is very useful for the USA and China because it’s a great driver of “fake GDP”, along with real estate and financialization instruments.
Russia doesn’t set a goal of inflating fake GDP at the moment, so the question of goals and priorities (not means and resources) is the important one here.
In the Yangtze delta, there are dialects that I cannot understand at all. This phenomenon puzzles me because it was usually assumed that some sort of geographic distance would create the distances in languages/dialects but the Yangtze delta is not big geographically and people do business and move around and marry around quite a lot in this part of China. And politically, historically, the Yangtze delta never got much of a division within.
For example, I cannot understand the dialect of Shanghai. But when written down, it is not big deal. This I think speaks of the good side of having not a phonetic written language.
Any idea how Eastern Europe can be fixed?
Reform? More funding for Universities? New laws?
Let’s presuppose that scientific inventions these days don’t make the world that much better (although I disagree with that premise, but let’s let it stand). The kinds of marginal inventions you get from science would be some sort of new polymer, or maybe a new diagnostic cancer test, that does save some people but doesn’t ‘cure’ the cancer for example.
These types of discoveries might happen in a university, but they are hard to commercialize in that setting. More often you need a company with lots of different types of scientists and number crunchers to get something that makes money. The university trains people who can do this kind of research and because companies are always trying to make money, they hire these people in order to try to make new products that they can sell, even if it overall it doesn’t improve life that much. Ideally they pay good salaries to their scientists and set up base close to university towns so that they can collaborate with professors (i.e. get some free research done and the prof gets a paper but the company makes money from the patent) and hire graduates from that place.
The salaries that the scientists and all the others make has a direct impact on the local economy as they eat out at restaurants and buy cars and homes, and ideally the company would also pay taxes. The better internationally recognized research you do, the more such companies set up shop close to your town. If not next to your town, then maybe in the big city in your country and the graduates will go there. This will allow the government of your country to keep lots of smart people in the country by providing them with jobs that they like, and will have a downstream effect on very real GDP. So improving science output is a very smart thing to do, even if we pre-suppose that most of this sciency output is bullshit. It it’s not all bullshit, then that will also be a very nice bonus on top.
So what you are saying is that you are a great worker. Except, being less cost effective, you guys are just asking for loads of money, and, in return, you do less work than a Portuguese. The definition of hard work, incarnated.
It’s not the British underclass and their barely qualified that are good for nothing. No, it’s the Portuguese nurse who is undermining your reputation by vicious devices, such as coming to work on time, and taking sick days when they actually need them..
Well, if you’re looking at the whole world and change from ‘all fields’ to ‘chemistry’ and back, the difference between the US and China/Japan is quite striking.
But it’s not like biomedical science is the only problematic field. There is lots of research fraud in nanoscience too, because it was seen as promising and a lot of money went into it. There are lots of professional bullshit artists in India (and to a lesser extent China, Iran, and US) who copy nanoparticles in photoshop and use them to create new figures. When their photoshop skills are especially bad, they get caught, but not always punished.
“A group of British researchers” has been a meme in Romania from the nineties. All the tabloids were filing their otherwise hard-to-fill pages with “discoveries” from “groups of British researchers”. For example, a group of British researchers has found that drinking coffee makes you more eager to write poetry. You know, “scientific output”.
Example I read last week. A group from Warwick found that mixing cultured cells, albumin and iridium, and shining a light on said mixture kills the cells. I don’t see how much of a novelty is there in the fact that iridium is poisonous. But the press release is titled “Simply shining light on ‘dinosaur metal’ compound kills cancer cells”. It’s not iridium, plebs, it’s “a rare metal which landed in the Gulf of Mexico 66 M years ago”, and therefore “dinosaur metal”. Oh, and it’s not the iridium poison, but “shining light”. And it’s not any cell, but cancer cell. We know that, if there’s something cancers share, is how they sit nicely exposed, so that you can shine light on it. You know, “scientific output”.
The British science establishment and its sycophants measure everything in terms of press releases. It’s even worse than measuring it in papers.
I have some old posts about this. The basic problem is that almost everyone of quality left research c.1990-2000, either abroad or into the commercial sector. You will need at least a couple of decades of good funding to built all that up again – Russia only began doing that just about a couple of years ago.
Who decides which journals are elite? The journals that used to adhere to scientific principles are now SJW propaganda rags…pushing leftist bullshit.
Yeah, you correctly and very thoroughly described the mechanism of “fake GDP”.
And yeah, if you wanted to have lots of “fake GDP” growth (which neither the Russian government nor the Russian populace want) what you outlined would be the way to go.
No, my premise is that we would have more scientific inventions (the phrase ‘scientific inventions’ is a contradiction in terms, but I’ll let it slide) without the international science paper writing industry.
Well, if they allowed me to make suggestions, I would say invest in universities so that they have all the modern equipment, and the profs and staff scientists (it’s very important to have these staff scientists) have a guaranteed middle class income and salaries not less than 60-80% of what they would have earned in industry if they chose that career.
There should be some mechanism to check if the profs are actually still working, but usually once you’re 30 and you worked so hard to get that job, you don’t just stop, although there are cases. There should be some guaranteed money for research that might reflect how the person did on their assessment, but should not be too much so that the prof cannot build a little fiefdom and teach underlings in the same manner. The university must also absolutely not judge the quality by publications and especially not this Nature82 index.
As I said, my Russian intern’s training was excellent and even if they were not doing groundbreaking research, it was technically very good level and would have gotten into a typical society journal in my field. They just never thought of publishing there. This university recently received an injection of money from the government so they had all the new equipment, but the intern was complaining of the usual bureaucracy that is everywhere, where they now try to cut costs and administration keeps growing. Probably should be a mechanism to set the number of administrators to researchers at some number like 1:5 or 1:3 and it’s not allowed to grow bigger.
The most important role of the university is training good scientists. They don’t have to compete in these indexes. And if the scientists have secure jobs and love what they do, and don’t have too much bullshit hanging over them in terms of metrics and performance reviews, I think they’ll come up with interesting ideas. Even if they don’t, they’ll train a lot of workers for the industry anyways and they won’t feel pressured to inflate grades. This intern said a lot of the graduates went to work at a research branch of the local oil company and he was already working there part-time.
There is no might about it…the upper midwest has some of the highest IQs in the country…and it has been that way for decades. If the big brains are moving to the coasts it sure as hell hasn’t helped the average IQs there.
Overall, not a bad summary, but has some errors. For example:
Silla was located in the southeast, not southwest. The southwestern kingdom was called Baekje and was allied with Wa/Yamato (Japan). The Japanese imperial family and several prominent noble families draw ancestry from Baekje refugees. Also, the founder of Silla was of a Goguryeo lineage.
The Samhan polities were not chiefdoms. They were confederacies of chiefdoms, one successor state of which, Gaya (Mimana), was highly influential in founding Yamato Japan.
Though good in the generalities, this account suffers from a Sino-centric orientation.
The journals are not bad in themselves. They’ve been used to disseminate information for a couple of hundred of years. The problem is that probably about 30 years ago, the number of articles and the imagined ‘prestige’ of a journal started being used as a proxy for promotional decisions by bureaucrats who didn’t have time to read the papers and/or couldn’t understand them. Later on it started being used as a proxy by professors who were judging your grant application, because everyone is way more busy these days running mega-groups and going to conferences and grant review panels, so they weren’t going to bother reading your papers (or your actual grant application in detail) anyways and will just look at your publication list.
The fact that the journals use to be prestigious decades ago, does not absolve them for their current inferior status
How do you control for selection bias?
The sad truth is that most British girls do not want to wipe old men’s backsides nowadays, and it is much more attractive to exploit EU freedom of movement to get some waitressing job in Budapest or Vienna.
In regards to the newspapers running the stories of the mostly non-White doctors and nurses having died from Coronavirus, this could be due to the fact that these people often work in areas that are heavily non-White (as opposed to the country, where the doctors and nurses are still overwhelmingly White) and these areas are somewhat disconnected from the mainstream and the people do not heed government advice. As such the rates of infections on these areas must be much higher do to non-compliance as well as high population density, meaning non-White doctored come into contact with CV patients much more. Many of the deceased health workers were also quote old.
For every big brain Midwesterners moving to the coast, there will be dozens of Third World immigrants also moving to the same areas. So it is not surprising that those areas are scientific powerhouses all while being on average dysfunctional.
London currently has some of the best universities in Europe like Imperial, UCL, LSE, as well as London business school, but most of the city is a dump.
Is there a connection between moral decadence, social atomization, and scientific innovation? I mean the countries that allow gay marriage and are the most pozzed, like Silicon Valley, are the most scientifically innovative, so maybe there is a correlation there, that a culture that popularizes allows the proliferation of poz, also tends to foster scientific innovation, and the two are basically linked? I am sure there is a correlation between drag queens per capita and indexes of scientific contributions per capita. Hidebound socially conservative societies may not lead to moral decadence, but their degree of innovation is also lower, that is a tradeoff that is largely fine with me, but I am sure is not OK with the vast majority of this forum.
Excellent point, but those areas will probably not continue to be scientific powerehouses due to the hoards of third world immigrants that will control the government.
US Coasts and Western Europe were innovative before they legalized gay marriage
Not having Drag Queen story time hasn’t negatively affected Chinas scientific output either
Yes, Nature, Science, and Cell families of journals have a huge replication problem. This is not because someone is bad, this is a consequence of a natural law. If you chase high impact (which these journals do), there are only two ways to achieve that. One, go for the sensational stuff. In science, 99% of sensational findings turn out to be BS on closer examination. Two, go for big names: people who publish a lot self-cite a lot, which increases your impact (the # of citations/the # of papers published). Big name people often publish sub-par papers, sometimes even lacking necessary controls, because they have a lot of buddies and admirers who would review their papers favorably. Both of these strategies increase impact while increasing the replication problem at the same time. This is going to be true until impact stops being considered king. Nothing else would help. It’s like having certain professions get disproportionally high salaries, like CEOs, lawyers, or physicians in the US. This inevitably draws greedy scum to these professions, and there is no force that can prevent that. Luckily, people doing basic creative research aren’t paid much, so there is a large fraction of decent people among academic scientists (I mean in real sciences, not BS “studies”).
Lol, I think you’re being a little tough on Saudi Arabia in singling them out for this practice. While they are not known for being deep thinkers, if nothing else there’s also a certain 800-pound gorilla in the room who has been brain draining and drafting talent from the rest of the world for decades, precisely by waving their money around. I hear at one point the gorilla even enslaved scientists from conquered countries in order to raise the tech level.
It would in the vein of HBD be interesting to see how much of the power of the Boston – NYC – SF axis is produced by foreign imports. At a guess, quite a bit by now.
Making any artificial index God and King is detrimental for science. Nature index is not an exception, and cannot be. This is not “sour grapes”: my indices are higher than those of most US peers, not to mention Russian scientists. But in and of itself this does not mean that my science is great.
In reality, the quality of science can be judged 10-30 years after the publication: we remember some (I use their data in teaching grad students) and forget the rest. Say, there were lots of physicists at the time of Newton, but we don’t remember most of them.
In many cases irreproducible results are not the consequence of conscious fraud: just some people go “the experiment worked; the experiment did not work” way. This is totally unscientific, but very human. The temptation is especially strong when your grant funding depends on your publications. Therefore, I try to stick to the experiments where I am prepared to accept and interpret any answer: the nature does not give a hoot what I expect. That’s what I am telling my grad students and post-docs, but I am not sure that it always works.
In every field there are labs whose results reproduce almost always, others with ~50% reproducibility, and some publishing pure BS. The people in the field know it, but you can’t say it out loud.
The Middle East may have trouble transitioning to the knowledge-based economy, when oil runs out. About 2100 for Saudi Arabia. The UAE have an upcoming Mars mission. Here’s how it reads:
I agree. The utility of this research is pretty limited, IMO, when you consider both the larger demographic problems and the low level of loyalty of cosmopolitan scientists.
Funding is never over-abundant, so it must be targeted. Peer-reviewed grans do the targeting not ideally, but better than any other mechanism. It is particularly important to have the grants reviewed by the people who are not feeding at the same trough – human nature being what it is (citing Miss Marple), this is the best way to ensure fairness.
I see serious problems in Russian science. Say, Skolkovo could have been conceived only by clueless bureaucrats: you cannot have a summit without a mountain. Naturally, it flopped, lots of resources wasted. Technically, Russia has grant system, but it appears to be flawed. E.g., I review grants for France, Belgium, Austria, UK, New Zealand, Poland, etc., but I was never asked to review a Russian grant, even though I can do it in English or Russian. This tells me that the system is rigged and whoever runs it does not want a fair assessment.
That would be an interesting test. California is already Hispanic-plurality/Latino-plurality right now. Will it remain a scientific powerhouse several decades from now? The same could, of course, also be asked for the rapidly diversifying Bos-Wash megalopolis.
I suppose that it might also be worth asking whether South African whites would have been much more productive if they would have had their own ethno-state as opposed to being a 10% minority in a heavily black country.
In my anecdotal experience the cliche of hard working Poles and lazy locals is true. Prior to the introduction of Universal Credit, the benefits system severely penalized claimants who took part time, temporary work.
British girls are working as waitresses in Budapest? I very much doubt it.
I don’t anything about this topic.
But is this referring to salaries for already trained scientists, or about diversion of potential human capital of students away from “serious” kind of science?
In the latter, I would imagine, it is a trend increasing each year across 1990-2020, not 1990-2000.
For example, when did professions like becoming a nuclear physicist, lose attraction to the ambitious nerds? Maybe in 1990-2000? Although it was probably still more fashionable for students in 2010, than today. But it’s clear that less scientific studies, like studying computer science, become fashionable more from around 2005-2020. Although becoming fashionable, did not mean the industry has developed brilliantly- but rather that there is oversupply of young people, relative to a small number of jobs with internationally competitive salaries, and then another layer of jobs with only locally competitive salaries, and vast majority of students can only aspire for the second layer kind of jobs.
Not just that. It’s easier for HR to go to the Philipines and hire 20 prescreened nurses in one block from an employment agency than do the paperwork to hire British nurses one by one. It took our local hospital 6 months to process my wife’s application during which time they recruited 20 Filipinas.
In favour of the Russian Empire, I give you Mendeleev. Vavilov was also professionally formed under the Empire. Imperial Russia, like many countries had inventors who paralleled Marconi in wireless or the Wright Brothers in aeroplanes. The key difference being that the credited inventors were the ones who turned invention into viable businesses; much the bigger task.
It is not clear that countries playing catch up like Russia, China or India should spend particularly large amounts on R&D. They do not have the economic base to ask the leading edge questions or use the results. There are exceptions, Russia clearly leads in rocketry. Russia and India have platforms, if antiquated, in nuclear that match any surviving but the lists are not long. Advanced R&D is for economies with nowhere else to go or those left so far behind they need a different level of innovation, like Kenya and mobile phones.
If so then why is Poland the poor country and the UK the rich country that the Poles want to go to?
The only conclusion that can be drawn is that a strong work ethic does not necessarily equate to a high level of success and reward.
Well improve your mood with the Keynesian view of life – nothing is wasted, and perhaps even something benefits from the multiplier effects. That was a construction project – money goes to construction companies, production of cement and paint, and manufacturing of paint brushes, curtains and carpets. It was a publicity project – money goes to journalists writing about it, and producers of paper and ink, and also website hosts, and electricity producing industry that powers the websites hosting stories about it. And – of course most importantly – the project was an opportunity to cut from the budget: money goes to “effective managers”, that patriotically employ cleaners, bodyguards and mistresses, and these mistress will buy diamonds, employing even more bodyguards to guard diamond shops, etc, (although it can be confessed that a minority of expenses like boarding school tuition for children can be “priming the pump” in Switzerland and England, rather than locally – this is a form of international aid).
Eh, not really. It worked as a real estate project. IMO that’s all that could have been hoped for in the situation.
(Not even sarcastic, building a nice academic campus open for use to the less obvious suspects is a decent thing in itself.)
The perception of the English/Anglos in mainland Europe seems to be almost identical to the far-rights’ perception of Jews.
Mainly as a dishonest, scheming race who see manual labour as beneath them and have a higher than average tendency to work in banking and finance. “Perfidious Albion” is what they refer to England is.
I doubt it.
To me…no doubt about it.
Yes, in that sense it was a success: a lot of taxpayer money was stolen by different people in various ways. In that sense Pentagon budget is an even greater success: the amounts of money stolen exceed the whole budget of Russian Federation.
Neither buildings, nor even equipment produces science. The money would have been better spent on building apartments or roads. But useful things do not have the same PR appeal as useless white elephants. What’s more, ignorant hoi polloi readily buys idiotic projects of equally ignorant clueless bureaucrats.
Oil was until a few weeks ago, still a significant earner for the UK. It rotted our industrial sector for 40 years.
Virtue signaling aside, Sub-Saharan Africans don’t even need to do much critical thinking or R&D.
They are failing to use on a mass scale so-called appropriate technology designed for their basic needs by altruistic westerners. This can lift living standards.
300 years Australia was way more primitive than most of Africa. It took British settlers less than 200 years to lift it into the Space Age.
Appropriate technology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appropriate_technology
How Australia shared the moon landing with the world
https://www.smh.com.au/national/how-australia-shared-the-moon-landing-with-the-world-20190717-p5284i.html
Anatoly you forgot Australia’s fertile crescent.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Afm_Kamal_Chowdhury/publication/311092024/figure/fig5/AS:668528789180431@1536401092525/The-eastern-seaboard-of-Australia-ESA-shown-on-the-left-is-roughly-the-area-between.jpg
Just to be clear to others who might be wondering, in my original comment I was referring to this river.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/GDP_history_Since_1950_~_2016.png
Not this river.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0c/Hanshuirivermap.png/800px-Hanshuirivermap.png
Beijing may have on Nature the kind of influence that they have on WHO
In math review, they don’t publish that much
In chemistry, a fiend of mine at CNRS say it’s 80% crap …
And nature in chemistry is more of a vulgarisation review .
I suspect that the wide geographical dispersion of acclaimed scientific research in the UK is because the postgrad/research departments of the less-renowned or relatively young British universities….. are headed by and flooded with Oxbridge and Durham graduates.
Large numbers of Foreign students, willing to pay limitless amounts, enables them to attract the best domestic and international talent for their research, and the relatively small size of the country also a factor
German research seems widely geographically distributed too. It’s France that is unusually centralised, more or less just Paris with practically nothing else in the rest of the country.
Lol What a shocking comment.
You mean like the lack of English or French or German proficiency that still made Russian scientists the most cutting-edge and renowned in the world from the mid 1800’s until the early 20th century?
Americans and Brits are the most insular people on the planet. Armies of Foreign studies wanting to study in their universities ( a product not just of the reputation of the University but of the undeniable dominance of US/Anglo soft power in modern culture and the primacy of English language in business)
Chocolate is positively correlated with Nobel Prizes so perhaps obesity makes strong and smart.
I agree, of course – there’s a lot of fine details. But, at the end of the day, almost nobody of quality even in Russia will go into academia for a salary of $500 per month (or will stay there at any rate). $1,500? More realistic. That is the “base”of the mountain IMO.
The Russian Empire had low literacy rates, so a large chunk of its potential human capital was “inert” (note that there is also a big lag factor, since you typically need a few decades to wrack up accomplishments). But with primary enrollment surpassing 80% by 1913 and projected to become universal by 1925, this would have ceased being a factor by 1950.
The Russian Empire would have become a fully developed country with the GDP per capita of at least Spain by the second half of the 20th century, so I would imagine its performance on something like the Nature Index would have been at least Mediterranean-tier (~Spain, Italy, etc).
No, it is not.
Where did you get this nonsensical idea?
The most important role of a (state funded) university is to provide quality education, creating competent workers for the respective societies’ job market in a cost-effective way.
That the West went batshit crazy with meme degrees, meme jobs and meme “science” and went on to shove it down our collective throats doesn’t make it right.
Lets look at it from a different perspective – what is the added value and ROI (for tax payers/state) for the vast majority of “scientists” and scientific output today?
People drooling over science papers and science output are delusional.
The actual cutting edge science work is not published, because it is either a corporate competitive advantage which can be monetized, or a secret (military or emerging) technology.
My favourite example: the number of scientific papers and studies published in prestigious journals on ultra-rare syndroms, genetic, auto-immune diseases and other pointless and useless crap.
Wow, lets devote billions of dollars and thousands of manhours to study defective, spent (Third age) people whose problems cannot be cured but hey we can organise our nice congresses and shower praise upon ourselves in a circlejerk manner.
No, the actual geniuses most often do not go into “Science!” paper writing business, they sign up for lucrative and meritocratic fields (IT, Math, Physics, Hard Engineering) – a very talented software or electronics engineer is much more important to a country than theoretical paper writing Academia.
You are approaching it from the wrong direction.
We can’t and never will be able to compete in wages with global funding leaders, hence the career- and recognition- hunting scientists will usually depart for greener pastures.
But we don’t really need them. Vast majority of them produce output which is useless/adds nothing of value overall, or just for Serbia.
We are not a Tech leader. Period.
What we do need is a thorough reform of higher education and education overall – to make the education more in service of local job market. This means basically extinguishing anachronistic and autocolonial faculties – I am looking at FPN, FFBG, etc while at the same time making sure that elsewhere the enrollment quotas meet job demand – unless someone is willing to cash out.
Furthermore, why would a manual labourer or a manufacturing worker pay taxes to fund these parasites? Why should the taxpayers money be spent on superfluous degrees in a country beset by poverty and pressing issues? Or graduates emigrating right after obtaining their taxpayer paid education? To hell with that.
Yes, scientists should make decent living, and $500 in Moscow certainly does not do it. However, the cost of living in the provinces is 2-3 times lower. Moving research there would achieve two good things: 1) cut costs; 2) decentralize overly centralized science in Russia. It would still take 10-20 years to get somewhere, but fair grant review system is a conditio sine qua non. Without it even in 200 years the science would remain pathetic, regardless of the investment and salaries. The system can still make use of Russian scientists currently in the US for fair reviews, but this window of opportunity will close in 10-20 years. Our children are not Russians any more, many don’t even speak Russian well.
The smart people usually work in the private sector nowadays with companies like Google having their own research establishments. The university academics are just sad people who didn’t manage to get jobs in the real world and so pretend to be smart writing esoteric papers of no real value. The useful research will come out of industry and not academia as the former are more in touch with what the pressing issues of the time are.
Most science is junk these days.
Why not, it might be give them a slightly better chance of meeting a normal man who is heterosexual, NOT Muslim, and wants to have children.
Seems like Russia should pay its scientists, doctors, and researchers better, but then require that they have their children educated only in the RF.
In addition to keeping those salaries in the country, they would lower the chance of those young people being indoctrinated into western faggotry, moral confusion, African worship, disloyalty to their own country and culture, and placing selfishness over raising a family.
As an aside, I wonder whether Spanish will become more a language of international business, finance, and academia after the USA becomes majority Hispanic and plurality Spanish-speaking.
This seems very likely to happen by 2050 in the USA’s four most populous States, including most of its biggest centers of banking/finance, import-export, academia, and entertainment/“culture”: first in California and Texas, then in Florida and New York, then even, sadly, in Chicagoland.
In any event, it would seem wise for someone aspiring to a career in international business, science, medicine, finance, or academia to learn English and Spanish if their target is North America or Latin America — but English and Mandarin if their target is almost anywhere else.
If you mean BS “studies”, that is true. However, in basic sciences (biomedicine, chemistry, physics) the industry is a parasite on academic research. Big Pharma companies wouldn’t even touch anything innovative with a proverbial ten-foot pole. They expect academia to discover the molecular mechanisms, select targets, and develop compounds hitting those targets. Then the industry will do “research” on the best way of packaging, come up with a fancy name, patent it, and then charge 10-100 times more than the real cost is. Besides, pharmaceuticals would never invest into anything really life-saving. Remember the flop with anti-AIDS drugs? The industry, as usual, overcharged manifold and was accused of pricing life-saving drugs out of reach of people needing them. From industry standpoint, the best bet is something that fights acne – you can charge whatever you want, nobody can accuse you of preventing people form getting life-saving medications. You have to remember that pharmaceutical companies are in exactly the same business as weapons companies – making money. They don’t give a hoot whether you live or die. Industry is driven exclusively by greed, which makes it remarkably myopic. For industry long-term planning is next quarter share price. Anything that requires longer view cannot and is not done by industry.
With some exceptions, industry will never accomplish major leaps in science due to profit orientation. The few companies able to do so, like Ma Bell, essentially had so much money that they were resembling governments. Alphabet can approach that sometimes with its moonshots.
These are exceptions, not the rule.
It always annoys me when people claim to just let “companies” do research with zero awareness of the lack on incentives such companies have in doing anything interesting.
Name a major scientific leap in the last 50 years.
Performed by Academia.
And list the science expenditures and scale
of grants given during that period.
You correctly pointed out that rapid-cycle, share price obsessed companies are incapable of conducting structured, meaningful R&D work because true R&D envisions the non-obvious, experimental/risky and not-immediately-profitable projects.
However, not all companies are like that, and not all companies can afford to neglect long-term R&D due to either tough competition which possesses certain cost advantages or due to the danger of rapidly dropping out of business in case their major competitor attains capabilities beyond theirs.
Lets just think of the military R&D results diffusing into civilian spheres.
And compare it to Academia.
A brilliant young man that I know (he might be the second smartest man I ever have direct contact with) went to silicon valley because he understood himself as being not good enough to be a research mathematician. He of course said it with just a bit more nuance. 🙂
Novosibirsk, Kazan, Far Eastern and Tomsk have got high quality universities producing high quality research.
I do think language disproportionately affects recognition and circulation of work- remember Portugal, Germany, all of Scandinavia, Holland and Belgium have large proportion of their educated people who can speak English very well. Russia has to be suffering in this regard from much of the Warsaw countries doing less academic interaction with Russia than they should, or even ex Communist country academics now working in the west for whom collaborating with Russian universities is professionally and Commercially not particularly viable.
BTW did you see this dickhead Zelensky offering 1 million US dollars to any Ukrainian scientists that can create a COVID-19 vaccine? I thought I misheard it at first – surely it was $1 million paid by the government to a group of Ukrainian scientists as a grant to develop a vaccine….. but no!! LOL, I don’t know how this freakshow is tolerated. US-sure such a proposal is workable, but in Europe’s poorest country (or even most of the advanced European ones) the offer is completely the wrong way round. Cretin
Simple elementary school math: for every dollar you and I feed into the insatiable maw of MIC, fewer than 5 cents are spend on NIH.
Language is part of the problem, but not the whole problem. PubMed has entries for papers in non-English languages. They are not cited as much, because fewer people can read them, though.
As to Ze, in terms of ineptitude the Ukrainian government is undisputed #1 in the world. That is natural: svidomism of the brain is a severe disorder. What really irks me is that in response to this virus the US government turned out to be #2 in ineptitude, with Brazil’s Bolsonaro running at #3.
Yes, yes, glory to pure mathematics and 1=2 proofs.
Down with the applied sciences and engineering peasants.
There’s a long-established, high paid (given no expertise required) massive industry in taking Chinese factoids and turning them into tasty, prejudice-confirming, clickbaity news memes.
The CNN ‘story’ is typical of the industry’s output. In real life–and as Karlin readers would assume– Chinese researchers stampeded onto the Covid-19 bus. Beijing discovered 299 ‘major’ (expensive) projects and almost a thousand lesser ones. So their ministry suggested consolidating some to free up brainpower for other, equally important matters. Hence Beijing tightens grip over coronavirus research.
It’s not a lie or anything, it just reinforces Beijing’s ‘tightening grip.’ Because freedom.
Beijing is the intellectual and cultural (as well as political) capital of China–it has that country’s top two universities, Peking and Tsinghua–while Shanghai is the “capital” of commerce, more comparable to Hong Kong (well, before mid-to-late 2019). Hence the large discrepancy in research output, with Beijing coming out on top. Accordingly, when Bill Gates looked to build a Microsoft lab in China twenty years ago, he (or perhaps the Chinese government) chose Beijing. It was a wise decision: Gates would say years later that the best-quality research papers of all of Microsoft’s facilities around the world came from Microsoft’s Beijing labs. This is interesting because Shanghai and Shenzhen are seen as tech hubs, yet some of the best research in IT and tech, at least for Microsoft, is actually coming from relatively sleepy Beijing. Then again, it’s not that surprising–it would be the equivalent in the US of putting your lab near MIT instead of New York.
Modern science is shamelessly exploiting the enormous prestige acquired by physics when quantum mechanics were established during the first decades of 20th century. In a brief period of time, cutting edge theoretical research finally mapped out how the world around us works and opened a way to all following technological advancement. It helped that nuclear bombs and nuclear energy withe the massive psychological impact came out directly from this research…
There have been few similar big leaps earlier in history – calculus, atomic theory, electromagnetism and maybe statistical mechanics. But other than these, most science is incremental technological advance that does not justify the big hype and can indeed be done by industry. There has also been constant hope of similar “big leaps” in molecular biology and genetics, information theory and so on but these are not realized. And probably will never realize.
But keeping academic science is still useful for countries because of synergies it creates with high-end technological manufacturing.
So basically, half of the world’s most important science is produced by Anglos in London, Boston, DC, Chicago, SF, etc. Showing the world that without us, the world would be an unsophisticated shit hole. Looks like IQ doesn’t capture everything. Say it with me: “I AM AN ANGLO AND I AM PROUD. I AM AN ANGLO AND I AM PROUD.”
Really though, what’s the deal with Beijing? Can we trust those numbers? Heard far too many stories of paper mills and other academic dishonesty coming out of China from people like Emil Kirkegaard. How is it that Beijing is double Tokyo? Similar IQ, similar city sizes, and the Japanese are generally viewed as more creative than Chinese.
I mean, I’m not doubting that Beijing should be a big blob. But maybe smaller blob?
That makes sense. I suppose that another factor that could have helped a surviving Russian Empire–assuming, of course, that it would have eventually managed to reform itself–would have been the huge size of its Jewish population. With an Ashkenazi Jewish population of 2-3 million, Israel nevertheless performs very respectably on the Nature Index. Meanwhile, a surviving Russian Empire–assuming no Holocaust, of course, as is likely–is bound to have something like 6 million Jews–or 8 million Jews if it will keep Poland in the long(er)-run, though, a Russian Empire that reforms might face compelling calls to let Poland go, thus pushing its Jewish population back to around 6 million. So, around two Israels’ worth or perhaps even three Israels’ worth of Nature publications could potentially be added to the Nature publication total of a surviving Russian Empire–assuming, again, that this surviving Russian Empire would have eventually allowed Jews full opportunity to prosper, thrive, and make good use of their talents at some universities. (Even if Jewish quotas would have been retained at some universities, surely creating some additional purely meritocratic universities would not be too much to ask for from a more liberal and tolerant Imperial Russian government?)
(Yes, a lot of Russian Jews emigrated during Tsarist times and would have been likely to continue to do so, but they were also reproducing rapidly in the 19th and early 20th centuries–which prevented their population from actually decreasing during Tsarist times. For instance, I read that the Jewish population in the Russian Empire in 1897 and 1914 was roughly unchanged at about five million in spite of the fact that extremely enormous numbers of Jews emigrated from Tsarist Russia during this time–with the reason for this being that high Jewish birth rates compensated for this extremely massive Jewish emigration.)
That sounds reasonable and pretty realistic. Interestingly enough, based on Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment, Italy and Spain didn’t produce all that much notable figures when it came to science in the 19th and early 20th centuries but nevertheless have a lot of Nature publications today:
https://hbdchick.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/charles-murray-origins-of-significant-figures-1800-1950.jpg
Do you think that this was due to Italy and Spain being more backwards and underdeveloped (illiterate, poor, et cetera) relative to countries such as Britain, Germany, and possibly even France in the 19th and early 20th centuries–thus causing Italy and Spain to make less use of their human capital potential back then than these countries (Britain, Germany, and France) did?
As others have noted: Beijing is “brain-draining” China in terms of science. Basically all scientific research is being conducted there, thus necessarily creating the numbers.
The question was more directed at Russia who could afford it, Ukraine probably could too if it weren’t a basket case
Even as a kid in my gut I knew there was something wrong when listening to FFBG graduates talk
I agree completely
I think Shenzhen fits in there too, despite it not pumping out many papers a lot of popular tech is coming from it
The bazar appearance of some of it’s stores is very appealing to me at least, reminds me of my childhood of hunting down computer parts in flea markets
It’s mostly consoomer stuff but hey, that’s where the money is earned, certainly more useful to China then Philosophy students
For me the most lovely development from it was excellent phones becoming cheaper and cheaper, a lower price Huawei or Xiaomi is much better then a lower price Apple product
On the contrary, a company that engages in “long-term R&D” of significance is almost always a company engaged in “moonshots”, which by definition indicate a lack of fiduciary responsibility. Research is one of those things which does not generally equal consistency or profitability as you noted; even success prototyping leads to “bleeding edge” results. Even software companies tend to avoid being experimental and the entire venture capitalist system exists to promote startups which are later acquired by larger companies if they are successful.
The companies which I mentioned that conducted basic research are not, generally speaking, successful by the mark of history. Ma Bell, which gave us the C programming language, was eventually broken up as a monopoly(thus why they could afford it). Dow Chemical, really one of the few companies really famous for research, had to make a deal with the devil with Berkshire Hathaway in 2008, resulting in Buffet holding them pretty hostage. Most corporate research is like McDonald’s research into food additives, with an eye to immediate profitability. An enormous amount of it is wasted – with oversight even worse than marketing, it is an excellent place for corruption.
In terms of potentially exciting development, SpaceX and Boston Dynamics are “private companies” that do a lot of research(and probably a lot of DARPA’s other babies), but such sponsorship is enormously through government grants. By and large, I don’t think they operate like a normal business at all.
Two problems exist in the U.S. that have negatively impacted elite basic research. (1) Government grant money is vastly insufficient. (2) The diversity grand bargain has broken down. It used to be tacitly accepted by diversity beneficiaries that they got the position, but, their responsibilities would be less rigorous, and sometimes even perfunctory. This realistic, even cheerful, acceptance no longer obtains. The relaxed-performance phenomenon is contagious within the lab, as a matter of practical necessity, and, achieving social peace. It is not limited to the sciences.
According to your link this is ancient technology from outside the SSA.
No, because Jews are cowards, while Anglos are a race of pirates and thieves.
My comment was no slight on Budapest or Hungarians. Rather wages are quite low, it is far away and Hungarian is an obscure and difficult language.
Everybody is a bit touchy these days. 🙂
One point people rarely mention is that, whatever instituions we have, it will gradually rot as time goes by, because people want to exploit it. Thus, if you put too much attention on the rules, you might be, really, just kidding yourself. But the trend of our time is to put a hell lot of emphasis on things like Magna Carta.
Yes, Hungarian is a very difficult language. What’s even worse, it is not related to major European languages. Driving through Hungary I had the same feeling as driving through Wales: you know every letter in the road sign, but the words are undecipherable gobbledygook.
However, there are smart and creative people in Hungary. I recently had a pretty productive collaboration with one of the labs in Budapest. I just had to translate their paper drafts into English for publication. I don’t mind, I have experience translating paper drafts from Russians, Chinese, Koreans, Germans, and Turks into proper English.
I thought that the hukou system makes internal migration in China rather difficult, though? Or is it different for very smart people?
The hukou system is not designed to stop the capital from accumulating talent, and in fact, would be immediately reformed if it was demonstrated to do so. The tendency for the capital to draw talent from all of China is both historical and basically intentional.
So, what is the purpose of the hukou system? To prevent China’s eastern cities from becoming overwhelmed with excessively large numbers of migrants?
Pretty much only one written language in China after Qin was done with their thang. Conception of the Chinese as one people, regardless of any actual ethnic differences, more or less followed.
Sorta. Its an holdover from older systems; but a casual and easy explanation would be that it is to control the movement of the population for the benefit of Beijing. And as such, it is to the benefit of Beijing to accumulate as much talent for itself, so it obviously isn’t going do anything to stop that.
In practice, it primarily exists to prevent social services in cities from being overwhelmed by rural migrants.
OT: Pola Raksa
Today is Pola Raksa’s 79th birthday. She was a legendary Polish film actress
famous for her unearthly beauty who reached her peak in the 1960s and ‘70s.
You can hear her sing (and appreciate her beauty) in (slightly accented) Russian
in the World War II series “Czterej pancerni” (R: 4 tankista) in which she
played a nurse attached to a tank battalion. Just google Pola Raksa śpiewa/Pola Raksa
sings/. The website m.9gag.com has the video. The video is so heavily protected by
various copyrights, you can’t find it on YouTube, at least not in the U.S.
Back in the ‘60s she played in the Polish movie “The Saragossa Manuscript,” which
was one of Jerry Garcia’s (Grateful Dead) favorite movies. The movie is based on
a picaresque novel called “The Manuscript Found in Saragossa” (1800), penned by Count
Jan Potocki, Polish writer, in French.
China strikes again !!!
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/03/science/oldest-known-pottery-found-in-china.html
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/jun/28/ancient-chinese-pottery-oldest-yet
Or perhaps the Australians can claim this Ancient Technology.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coolgardie_safe
Fascinating! Would someone making a statement like yours be ordinary in Tennessee?
It is for keeping the poor and stupid masses far away.
It’s to prevent the creation of these :
Khayelitsha in Cape Town (South Africa): 400,000.
Kibera in Nairobi (Kenya): 700,000.
Dharavi in Mumbai (India): 1,000,000.
Neza in (Mexico): 1,200,000.
Orangi Town in Karachi (Pakistan): 2,400,000.
https://www.borgenmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/urban_slums-1078×516.jpg
https://thumbs-prod.si-cdn.com/rU-sYzzXSaKc03vD3LWxXG3cN5Y=/800×600/filters:no_upscale()/https://public-media.si-cdn.com/filer/Sketches-by-Boz-Seven-Dials-631.jpg
While simultaneously achieving this:
Urbanization in China increased in speed following the initiation of the reform and opening policy. By the end of 2019, 62.52% of the total population lived in urban areas, a dramatic increase from 17.92% in 1978.
If the US becomes a majority Hispanic/Spanish-speaking country, I think the result would be a US much more culturally and socially aligned with Europe than it is today.
Hispanics generally seem to have a significantly stronger sense of being connected to Spanish/European culture than Anglo-Americans do, the latter mostly see themselves as totally disconnected from Europe and often have arguably a hostile attitude towards Europe.
It isn’t unusual for US Hispanics to casually refer to themselves as “Spanish”, whereas I don’t think any Anglo-Americans would refer to themselves as English/British, not even WASPs.
In fact I think most Anglo-Americans would be offended by the idea that they are just an offshoot of English/European culture and not an independent culture in their own right.
Probably not. Then again, I was not born in TN. My job – research – is also far from ordinary in this state. A lot of locals respect it, but few understand.
BTW, I am not saying that I know all those languages. In fact, I am only fluent in Russian, English, and Ukrainian, and can say maybe a hundred words and phrases (mostly what you need in restaurants and stores) in Spanish, German, French, and Italian. I just translate from what people speaking those languages consider English into real English. I should specify: American English, not Queen’s English. American English uses a lot fewer words (at least half of the words in Webster are never used in the US) and has very little grammar. Still, there are rules, for sentence construction and word usage, which non-native (and native) speakers break unwittingly. In fact, when I get my exams back from graduate students, the writing in 80% of them is atrocious. It is hard to tell who a native speaker and who isn’t.
American English has a smaller vocab than British English? Does that mean on average British people use a wider range of words than Americans do?
I suspect there’s far more single Hungarian women going to live in the UK than single British women going to live in Hungary so I’m not sure your theory is correct.
Yep, Brits (educated ones) use much wider vocabulary than equally educated Americans. What’s more, older generation of educated Brits actually know Shakespeare, Dickens, Joyce, and numerous lesser writers and poets, which is almost unheard of in the US. From Russian perspective, American education and overall attitude to culture is incomprehensible: in Russia a person with University education who knows nothing abut literature, theater, classical music, and other arts, would be considered a defective moron, whereas in the US it’s a norm. American specialists often know their field well, some are even creative, but outside of their field they know sports (e.g., that highly commercialized thing that passes for sports in the US) and nothing else.
Because we are different in many ways. Plus the separation was quite some time ago. Millions of white people in the South and Appalachia put ‘American’ as their ethnicity, rather than ‘English’ or whatever.
Australians are equally interested in creating their own ethnic identity, and do not like being called an offshoot of Britain (even if you don’t bring up the convict issue).
In fact, the petty parochialism of Europe (England vs. Scotland, French vs. Flemish in Belgium, etc.) seems outdated to Americans, and also explains why the EU has completely failed at its integration project (itself an attempt to achieve the scale of the US, after being envious of it).
Well Australians are European and descended from the English (largely) but it would be a bit ridiculous for us to call ourselves English when we aren’t. Sure Australian’s and English are racially the same but I would have to go back over 200 years to find my ancestors who were born in England and not Australia, so it makes little sense for Australians to say they’re English.
I don’t see the issue of Americans saying they’re American, since they are a different group, but for Americans to pretend their country and their people weren’t historically a European state would be dumb.
I don’t quite follow the criteria in this study. Just, as far as I recall, Polish and Soviet Russian mathematics were, in the interwar period, on par with German, and better than British & American (I barely recall anyone from Britain until 1939; in US there were MacLane & Birkhoff). In Poland Kuratowski, Banach, Ulam… & in SU Luzin, Kolmogorov, Markov, Khinchin, Pontryagin,…
I wouldn’t call this a plus. That class of Brits usually use 500 words to say what can be said in 50. It is a lot of rambling avoidance.
I used to think there was some truth to this narrative, but outside of American amazement at anyone who speaks two (let alone three) languages, this isn’t true. At best, it is much more true of American women vs. foreign women, rather than American men vs. foreign men.
I would pit a US team against a Russian team in a game of Jeopardy or Trivial pursuit (curated to be global in nature, rather than US-centric), and expect the US team to win. Of course, neither team is the average person of their country, but still.
” And despite its status as China’s tech hub, Shenzhen (189) is not impressive at all. I suppose this would be one way in which it’s different from Silicon Valley, which is embedded within America’s third biggest cognitive/scientific cluster. ”
That’s a dodgy assertion.
If I understand the Nature Index correctly, it covers natural sciences, not engineering. Shenzhen is a tech hub, not a major center for physical and biological research. If you were to look at software/AI/hardware patent applications, publications in engineering journals (etc), it would likely be much more impressive.
Also, the sociology of science (e.g., Harry Collins) has shown that scientific publication shows network effects. It isn’t a pure meritocracy, but instead, there is a certain amount of gaming involved in pushing a paper through the elite journals. Elite journals will favor teams from elite institutions, for various reasons.
Not in my experience. Although I must admit that I personally know maybe fewer than a dozen Brits. None of them is overly verbose. They are scientists, though, educated, but not upper class.
In fact, American politicians manage to talk for a long time saying noting at all. This can be construed as positive, though: when they actually say something, they lie.
Languages are another issue, I am not even talking about that. I personally know more than 50 American men, virtually all with PhDs in real science, and only two of them know and are interested in anything outside of their field, including geography and history. Even though at least half of them are pretty good in their field, they wouldn’t be able to find Vietnam or Bulgaria on the map and had no issues with Trump’s “Nambia”. CNN journos that placed Ukraine somewhere in Pakistan on live TV aren’t an aberration, they are typical “educated” Americans (they do have college degrees, but I wouldn’t say that they have any education). As far as an average Joe without a college degree is concerned, the world consists of three roughly equal parts: Main Street, out of town, and overseas. I know many immigrants educated in other countries (half or more of faculty in any research-oriented University are foreign-born), and never encountered this level of ignorance outside of their field. Only in the US you can find a prominent successful scientist who never heard music by Bach, Albinoni, or Mozart, never heard an opera, never read anything by Dickens, Faulkner, Joyce, etc., and is not quite sure who Shakespeare is (but knows Arni Schwartzenegger, although wouldn’t be able to spell his last name).
If Jeopardy questions are about Hollywood sluts or baseball, the US team would win hands down. Anything else – no chance. They’d lose even to Nigerians.
Yes. I’ve spent a lot of time in Canada and found that Canadians, too, use more words than Americans do when they speak. And I don’t think it is lack of knowledge, necessarily. I remember a Canadian friend once mentioning that some exam was “torturous.” I can’t recall an American ever using that word in casual conversation, he would just say “bad” or “difficult.”
When I speak I tend to simplify my language also.
Doubtful, all high schools in the USA have Shakespeare as required reading, at least in classes that are not for the severely learning disabled. There is no way he would not be quite sure who is Shakespeare.
America varies widely by region. The public high school in the town where I live offers four years of Latin and classical Greek and each offers class trips of Latin students to Italy, Spain or Greece (cancelled this year). English students can visit England and see a Shakespeare play at the Globe theater. On the other hand, one of my friends dated a girl who had moved North from the deep South. She had never had to write an essay in school, and asked my wife if she spoke German because she was from Russia (my wife kindly explained that people speak Russian in Russia). She was starting university studies at the time.
There is something charming about it. They are like hobbits, decent folk who stay in place and have no need for information about strange and morally suspect lands beyond the sea.
I detect contempt for your neighbors in your post.
Dickens and Shakespeare are pretty standard, traditional fare at American public schools, though I don’t know about the ghetto. Quite remarkable, when you consider how both were pretty based when it came to the JQ.
“I detect contempt for your neighbors in your post.” – Note that this is a very feminine characteristic. I am a prettier bitch inside. Just look inside and you will see and the other bitches might be pretty on the surface but beneath it you will find emptiness while my Russian woman souls has an infinite depth.
Anyway, this is not uncommon among immigrants from the Soviet intelligentsia which is very aspirational, very pretentious and with a sense of entitlement. Being educate meant being transformed into a higher entity: the obrazovanshchina that Solzhenitsyn painted not a very pretty picture about. For him the term meant of being ere merely educated. They feel under appreciated in America that what they knew and valued in the old country is not a currency in America. The entitlement is gone so what remains is a resentment and contempt. But the truth is that in the old country what they knew and valued did not mean shit either for people who were the real movers and shakers. What they valued was appreciated only among the members of obrazovanshchina where they were showing off their tastes and appreciations for the classier and loftier stuff that had no other value for them than as a signaling code signifying the belonging to the group. And here they do not belong to the group.
AnoninTN often exaggerates to the point of wild dishonesty when he tries to make a point.
I’ve noticed that Dickens is no longer required reading, they’ve replaced it with To Kill a Mockingbird (we never had to read that). But Shakespeare still is. Of course any adult scientist now would have had to read Dickens in school, grad students might be a different story.
I’ve explored some southern small towns while taking road trips to Florida. The people there are so nice. Very friendly, with an appreciation of their local heritage. The last thing I thought of when spending time talking to them was – “this stupid asshole hasn’t seen an opera.” Which is apparently how AnoninTN thinks as he lives down there.
https://youtu.be/1MwN5nDajWs
I agree with you. Illiteracy greatly affects society, and its effects can be felt several generations after it has disappeared. Take the PISA scores for Spain: the ranking of regions by PISA score today is the same as the ranking of regions by their literacy rates in 1950.
So, illiteracy not only affects countries by crippling their scientific and economic growth in the moment it happens, also for the decades and even centuries to come.
I got curious about Dickens. The have it. They have Dostoyevsky and many many more gretat books.
New York State Education Department: Recommended Reading
https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/programs/local/list1.html
Do they actually read them that is another question.
What you describe there is Americans’ insularity. But yiu are still not capturing it completely. In an Eastern European university, specialization starts with year 1. You learn about classical music on your spare time. In contrast, the first two years of college in America are usually not specialized, and supposed to provide them with “general culture”. Sadly, most of them spend those years learning what Eastern European learned in the final years of high school, such as introductory mathematical analysis or 20th century literature.
I clicked on a tweet posted in a comment to Sailer. It was posted by a woman, complaining of a bikers riot in Manhattan. Most of the replies were negative, but what struck me were the school-dominated whining. More than one commentard asked her if she was the pupil who’d remind the teacher that she forgot to assign a homework. My conclusion was Americans hate school, since theirs is an industrialized babysitting system.
On the other hand, Eastern European schools are moving in the same direction. In Romania, they are already used for feeding children (like in America, but very much unlike under “Communism”), although I fail to see how a child can’t fast for 6-7 hours. I doubt this generation, fed on state-issued food and raised in the admiration of local Trumps, will have any interest in classical music.
I wasn’t arguing that American culture isn’t genuinely very different in many ways from British/European culture, Latin American culture is also very different in many ways to Spanish/European culture, but rather Hispanics seem to take more pride in the Spanish/European roots of their culture and seem to more generally seek to associate and connect themselves to Europe in symbolic ways.
For instance, I find that the urban planning, street signage, etc, in Latin American countries often looks distinctly European, like they are making a conscious effort to mirror Europe in their own societies. Likewise many small towns and villages in Latin America look clearly more like something you’d see in Europe than in North America. Also, Latin Americans seem to have a preference for European style cars rather than Americans style cars. I think all this would mean that a majority Hispanic/Spanish-speaking US would effectively merge with Europe to a large extent.
I found visiting cities in the Southern Cone they reminded me much more of sprawling, car-based American cities like LA than anywhere in Europe. Also (in parts) they had gated housing estates and huge houses with swimming pools, extremely rare in Europe but much more common in the states
Sometimes I find that Americans use wordier constructions than the British though. For instance, Americans say “public transportation”, whereas a British person would always say “public transport”, saying “transportation” sounds unnecessarily long to British people and frankly odd.
Also, British refer to an apartment as a “flat”. The term “apartment” is considered somewhat pretentious in Britain, anyone who said they lived in an “apartment” rather than a “flat” would be considered a snob. Likewise, British people would say “lift”, and Americans would say “elevator” which sounds a lot wordier to me, and like how a “holiday” in the US means a public holiday, and a “vacation” means a trip, whereas British English just uses the word “holiday” for both.
Most Americans rarely read stuff that is recommended but not assigned. The kids will have read all of Harry Potter, when they are older Steven King, and other such stuff. However Shakespeare is assigned everywhere and everyone will have read him. Typically Romeo and Juliet, and in better schools additional works such as Hamlet, Macbeth, etc. Dickens seems to have been assigned and universal until the 1990s.
“The last thing I thought of when spending time talking to them was – “this stupid asshole hasn’t seen an opera.””
Why should you? Your conversation covered Tom Hanks and Arnold Schwartzandnigger just as well. The fact that they seemed to be interested in you, although they couldn’t be bothered with Camus, could not have triggered the feelings that the other side lacked curiosity and merely feigned. You were feigning it just as well.
“The public high school in the town where I live offers four years of Latin and classical Greek and each offers class trips of Latin students to Italy, Spain or Greece ”
Sure, “eating local food” transports you to the Roman Empire, just like reading The Meditations in original. It definitely isn’t Disneyland for teens, paid for by parent consoomers. It’s CULTURE.
But those Africans and Gypsies, who go to Italy to beg / steal / languish in public spaces, must be even more versed with Latin CULTURE. They have been taking in the delights of the terroir for so much longer.
‘Burgle’ vs. ‘Burglarize’
We did the Merchant of Venice at school, which led to a huge increase in anti-semitic teasing
In many people such “overeducation” looks grotesque, absurd and perverse. Such people are Sharikovs. It is unnatural. AnoninTN, unlike many decent small-town Americans in the South whom he despises, has heard Bach, Albinoni, or Mozart and has polluted operas by his presence. So what? He is still a Sovok from Donbas whose mind naturally focuses on and writes about prostitution which he uses in his analogies , who lies easily and freely, and who cynically takes grant money for his purposes while having little to no sense of loyalty to the place where he has lived for decades and the people amongst whom he has been living.
Bulgakov was rightly disgusted by such a phenomenon.
Why would I discuss them with strangers in the South? You have a weird view of Americans, probably based on TV.
The small town Southerners thought it was wonderful when they overheard me “preserving my heritage” by speaking to the kids in Ukrainian and shared about their own local traditions and the importance of preserving them. They are friendly people open to discussions with strangers.
They do that, but they also have guided tours of Pompei and other Roman sites, have some sort of assignments. Obviously as a class trip it’s mostly about having fun with friends. Is there something wrong with this in your world?
Acculturation for many immigrants happens vicariously through their children who are growing up as Americans. Then the edge of the personal resentment and nostalgia for the old country is greatly softened and dulled. W/o the transcendent purpose that children give a pathological nostalgia for the old country may arise which in reality is just a longing for the lost youth which pretty much always is happy. Even if the person was not a sovok back home now may spiral down into it as a refuge and solace.
Broke: toilet
Woke: bathroom
Bespoke: loo
Or they say “home invasion”, and on a similar note they would formally refer to a prison as a “correctional institution/facility” whereas it’s always a “prison” in Britain, even in formal language.
The idea that Americans always speak more casually/informally than the British is not always true, a lot of Americanisms sound very stilted/overly formal to British people. It works both ways I think.
Strange that a country like Russia, with its capability to mine raw resources and refine them for the production of high-end military hardware; with its burgeoning electronics know-how, including the indigenous development of microprocessors; with its top-notch nuclear industry, and with an ‘okay’ drug R&D industry, is a science production desert.
Something has to give, sorry.
Trips to Italy are great. Living there is even better. I have relatives in Italy, like every Romanian. Maybe among your middle class Americans, trips to Italy are CULTURE, but my little birth town had sever buses every day to Italy. I am simply not impressed by your Latin studies.
Look, I know the side of “reading Latin in original”. If I could draw, I could paint you the Column of Trajan. I know the side with “I am taking two weeks from my multinat corp office job to immerse myself in CULTURE”. I know the side with “I [a Romanian] get olives delivered by a local farmer to press my own oil”. I know the part with “we [younger Romanians] sleep 10 in a room and pick tomatoes all the summer”. I know the part with “Italian dentists (expensive and infection-wise) are shit so I [a Guido] am getting my caries fixed in Brasov”.
Of the above, the consoomer calling a few week in Italy “Latin studies” is probably the stupidest. It’s Italy, it’s not the Roman Empire. My grandma with two years of schooling knew more Latin that your children. Well, she cheated. She was a Catholic, and Romanian is 80% Latin.
And your money are not getting you the best olive oil either. Just as you don’t due any diligence on Marcus Aurelius, you won’t do it in selecting the best olives either. You just splash some money, and assume that’s going to buy you an appearance of intelligence.
Look that fool who is proud to be anglo while drinking Pasteur-ized milk. If you anglos are so smart, how come chloroquine was invented in Germany? How come azithromycin was invented in Croatia in 1980? Those communists, without free elections, without free market, without gay marriage, without an empire to milk of oil and brains, created azithromycin, while you watched Schwartzenigger fighting Ivan Draco. Why don’t we rub our dicks with CRISPR, if Anglos are so innovative? I keep reading about GWAS studies on unz.com. How is GWAS helping you through the covid crisis?
All the US uni professors, including those born overseas, mentioned some movie or some sports event if I met them on a second or third day, or if they had to give a presentation longer than half an hour. Look at the comments in each of Sailer’s posts. At least one quarter is about an actor or a sportsman. Just like those US professors, he might be smarter than the audience, but a quarter of his posts are about actors. It is a good measurement of America’s attention span: 100 minutes, 4-5 protagonists, lots of sex, and more sex.
But the stupider than the consoomer is the one who read a condemnation of “Disneyland masquerading as Latin studies” and replies: “Obviously as a class trip it’s mostly about having fun with friends. Is there something wrong with this in your world”. Who said it’s wrong to have fun? It’s wrong to simulate intelligence without paying me to simulate admiration. I won’t be feigning.
On topic: Anatoly, was azithromycin’s discovery reported in Nature? What is the size of Zagreb on your silly map?
The Hobbit simile would have been apt, but for one critical difference. The Shire did not interfere in the business of foreign lands, sowing chaos and misery everywhere in Hobbit’s name. The US today is more like the Shire taken over by Saruman and his Orcs. Ruling gang and its minions do everything in their power to keep the US populace as ignorant as possible. The saddest thing is, they are succeeding. Perfectly nice honest hard-working people are led by their noses to fund thieves and murderers with their tax money under the lame pretext of defense. When the time of reckoning comes, there would be hell to pay. What’s more, these normal people, myself included, would be left holding the bag, not the ruling criminals who deserve to be publicly hanged.
So, what I feel is not contempt, but pity. Especially as there does not seem to be a prospect of any Frodo coming and putting things to rights. As the time of reckoning is drawing nigh, in 5-10 years I will try to run away as far as possible. After all, I am not guilty of crimes committed in my name by Orcs. Or maybe I am. That’s the question, as prince Hamlet put it.
Unfortunately, so do Russian schools. They introduced an equivalent of SAT and replaced entrance exams with it, even though Russian culture always considered that multiple choice tests are for morons. Now the best Universities reintroduced entrance exams, and the state is modifying that test, making it less and less SAT-like and more like a real exam. But Ministry of Education does not want to admit that this whole test thing was a huge blunder.
American: restroom
“Anglo” is a ridiculous term as it implies that all white, English-speaking people see themselves as the same people/race when in reality they don’t and many Americans and Australians would take offense at the idea they were just a variant of English people and not a separate people/culture in their own right.
Almost no one says Serb and Croats or Germans and Austrians are the same people, despite the fact they speak the same language because other than language they aren’t the same people culturally and historically. Even within Britain there is no “Anglo unity”, do the Scots count as “Anglo” in your opinion? I doubt most Scots would appreciate being called “Anglo”. In general the “Anglo nations” don’t act and think as a collective bloc any more so than the Western world as a whole does.
You talk as if all white, English speaking people regard scientific achievements in any “Anglo” country as if it was their own when that is just not the case. Most British people see the USA as a foreign country, as foreign as any non-English speaking country. A British person would not see an American scientific achievement as their own and would take no pride in it themselves.
That is one that I had to unfortunately read. I wouldn’t burn it, but I would put comparative racial murder and rape statistics in places where they would be difficult to tear out. Same with public service announcements warning kids about probable gays like Boo Radley.
It just goes to prove how insidious school often is, where kids are exposed to these brainwashing ideas. The worst in the US is probably the MLK mythos, since it hits them earliest. How are you going to explain to a 6 year old, who was forced to watch a video hagiography of him, that he wasn’t a good man, didn’t believe or write the words “I have a dream…” And that the guy who wrote the speech for him, also didn’t believe in the ideas? It’s not an easy task.
I do not feel loyalty to the government committing heinous crimes in the name of ordinary people who would never approve of them. I feel loyalty to the normal, honest, hard-working American people. They pay for my research with their taxes, not the thieving government. The Orcs would approve if you have trouble seeing the difference between the government and the people. I, on the other hand, can only pity you.
So you didn’t read the part about the four years of studies, but focused on the trip and thought it was bad or stupid because kids were spending money and having fun, and spending money between visits to Roman ruins and lectures that integrated some of what they had been studying with their tourism/“evil consumerism.”
Are you similarly bitter about Soviet school kids from Russia visiting, say Riga, or was that okay because they had less money to spend.
I get it. You are just too cool for Hollywood and for sports. The American professors should not have mentioned such things on the second or third day, or ever. You are so much better than they are. Italians or Romanians would never do such things.
Of course, cool people mention Vlad the Impaler or Rachmaninov on the second or third day. This makes them cultured.
Canadian: washroom.
As a Doxbridge graduate myself, i can only agree.
Children of exiles can become more nationalist than the exiles. Mine did.
I have heard it said that American is more action focussed than British English which is better at description. So American ends up with strings of jargon like correctional facility attempting to describe the outcome.
I thought it was bathroom. It turns out to be yet more insipid though.
I doubt it
I bet that England still has a lot of prestige in foreign eyes as a legacy.
Damn. You were very descriptive about their educational depth! It’s beyond belief that I got hung on that Italy trip. It’s as if you didn’t write about anything else, in re. to Latin studies.
Wait, now that I re-read your post, you didn’t write about anything else.
Consoomer.
Australian: Thunderbox.
Depends on the subject. 35 Engineering Scientists a year just can’t cover the ground. Believe it or not, both the engineering department and the business school at Durham were allowed on sufferance as the Senate thought they were too “applied”. The promoters of such had to point to Theology, Law and Music as precedents. A level requirements were set very high. So leave quantity production in engineering and business to Newcastle (once a Durham colleage anyway) and Manchester but Chemistry, Geography, Languages, etc are very well regarded and big departments. North of Birmingham they matter still.
The guy at #121 thinks he can take pride in everything “anglos” did. I am, of course, aware of others being more modest, but it is the dominant mindset in America and among people who create silly maps based on impact factors. I don’t see a segmentation with “this part of SF research community is educated in Beijing, this other part in Mumbai”, it’s just a big San Francisco bubble.
If you subtract from American science everything done by foreign-born researchers, all bubbles would be seriously deflated. That includes Nobel prizes, too. In research-oriented Universities about 80% of post-docs and ~50% of faculty today is foreign-born.
However, from personal experience I must say something for the US. When I came here in 1991 from the USSR, my productivity increased manifold due to much better conditions. I could get necessary restrictases within minutes from the freezer next door, instead of searching for people who happen to have them for weeks in the USSR. The difference in speed was about the same in other reagents. So, the time from the bright (or not so bright) idea to the experiment that tests it was shortened to a day or two, instead of many weeks or months before my move.
Maybe that difference was not as drastic for people from France or Germany, but they acquired another advantage: in the US science your creativity and productivity used to be readily rewarded, whereas in European countries you are promoted mostly when your boss dies or retires. The downside is that we are totally dependent on grant funding, which is becoming more of a lottery with paylines of 5-7% at NIH.
So, as they say, every cloud has silver lining, but, as they don’t say, every silver lining has an associated cloud.
That’s interesting, I didn’t know about engineering and chemistry at Durham. Among my friends who didn’t get into Oxford, Cambridge or Imperial, I think most went to universities for science (UCL, Lancaster, Sheffield, Southampton) but Durham was quite common as a second choice for Theology, English, PPE etc.
I had the A levels for Oxford and Imperial but picked Durham for Engineering Science mostly on the grounds it was so demanding of students. If I had had the grades for Cambridge, I would have gone. Durham was an interesting 3 year introduction to the upper class (Oxford and Cambridge were already almost entirely meritocracies by then. Durham still mixed it up). There is a big Quaker strand to our ruling elite. They go to York now. I never regretted not going to Oxford. I have always had 2nd thoughts about not going to Imperial.
I wrote four years of Latin studies and referred to that, not the class trip, as Latin studies. I did not describe the curriculum (fwiw it follows the Cambridge Latin course) during those four years because it was irrelevant to our discussion. You focused on the trip as if that was the only thing mentioned, perhaps out of envy at the American kids enjoying themselves and buying stuff in Italy while you or your countrymen pack cans of tomatoes, or whatever.
And you are not? You are 2 cool 2 buy things? Lol.
You demonstrated you contempt for the ordinary hardworking Americans until you were called out about it. And in your other post you admitted that if things get bad you will abandon them after having taken their money for decades while sneering at them as being dumb rubes for not going to operas or listening to Bach.
The funny thing is that I suspect you think you are somehow superior to your fellow-Sovoks, who did what they did to Russia after you escaped.
It was the only thing that you mentioned. “Four years” is not a thing. For all I know from your post, they might have been traveling through Italy all those four years.
Tell you a secret: words “insipid”, “vapid”, or “jejune” aren’t used in the US. At least 80% of Americans never heard or read them. “Bland” covers it all here.
As one of my colleagues (we were post-docs together in the same lab), American born and bred, used to say, the US and UK are two countries divided by the same language.
I knew that it’s useless to talk to Ukie. Seeing white, it says “black”. Typical symptom of a mental disorder.
My original statement:
“The public high school in the town where I live offers four years of Latin and classical Greek and each offers class trips of Latin students to Italy, Spain or Greece”
So yes it was mentioned, and it was mentioned first. Also, the word “and” ( I bolded it for you now) indicated that trips were different from classes so no, kids weren’t roaming around Italy for four years.
So you fail like the Atlanta Hawks did, against the New England Patriots.
Lol, правда глаза колет.
Let’s review:
You take their money and live off them.
You admit you will flee and leave them behind if things get bad for them, when they can no longer support you.
In your defense, you at least do something useful for the money. But overall, it isn’t a very pretty picture.
I think that’s fairly typical of Eastern European immigrants to Western countries. Britain has a lot of Polish immigrants and most of them frankly regard their British hosts with contempt and certainly have no loyalty to this country mostly by their own admission.
I don’t know about Britain, but Poles in America tend to be pro-American. They are proud and like their own people more, as most people do, but they don’t drip contempt towards their hosts as AnoninTN does.
Also, it seems that many Brits themselves dislike Britain. Although Brexit suggests that many do not.
This almost always happens. The exiles children do not fully identify with the host culture and have a sort of identity crisis which they try and remedy by pursuing an exaggerated version of their true national identity.
This also explains why most of the Islamic terrorists in the UK are not first generation immigrants but 2nd or 3rd.
The Poles in America had the intention of becoming American. In the UK they simply exploit EU freedom of movement (well, before Brexit anyway) to undercut native labour in things like plumbing and joinery, and send the money back home where one Pound Sterling goes much further than in the UK.
On top of their main goal being simply to earn as much money as possible, they also see the types of things going on in he UK, mass Third World invasion, LGBT mafia, feminism etc and feel disgusted. This experience creates an attitude of contempt within them for the British, which is an understandable feeling.
Sort of understandable for temporary workers, but much less so for people who have chosen to settle for decades in a place.
Sorry, I was MIA for a while, but I disagree on the importance of grants so really want to comment on that. Grants are an imperfect mechanism of determining who should get the funding as you say, but I think that they are even worse than you think.
First something not important to that point, but countries that are big enough and where people don’t know English all that well, like Japan, have a closed grant system where outsiders don’t review the grants. This may not be ideal, but they have so many scientists that it works out. Also, their grants are a lot shorter than an NIH or NSF grant by design, and for the vast majority of them you can only apply once a year, so you don’t waste time continuously asking for money or reviewing grants. There are big problems with the system, but they are separate from being closed to outsiders.
I think that grants are a waste of time that take away from research, and that are mostly articles which you were about to publish in the next year anyways (plenty of ‘preliminary’ data in an NIH grant). And they do also suffer from bias in that a famous researcher is more likely to get it, no matter how objective is the panel. I don’t think it selects for actual novelty of the research proposal. They are a waste of time and an exercise in who has more connections, like a lot of other things.
I think that after you get your first independent position, you should get stable funding of some sort for five years, and then write a review of what you did over the past five years. You should have some small document about future plans, but it should not be the focus. Then the reviewers (five to ten of your peers, maybe from other countries) will have to decide if your research over the past five years was worth it, and how much funding you should get for the next five years, or if you were so terrible that the university should fire you (of if you have tenure take away your lab and leave you with a lower middle-class salary and a moldy office). That would concentrate the minds of the reviewers much better. It would also allow for truly innovative science that you do on your own and doesn’t tie you to some popular bullshit and buzzwords that you feel like you have to put into a grant to get funded.
There is definitely overlap between this proposal and the grant one, but not enough for me to prefer it to grants.
I enjoyed the film Liam Neeson film Taken but felt that it was aimed at the rather large number of Americans who do not have passports and think primitive foreign outposts like France are appallingly dangerous (in reality, Americans can be killed, robbed, raped etc. while staying in the USA, perhaps with a higher probability of same than if they went to Europe).
What you describe is in essence HHMI system. As it involves peer review, it has all the same drawbacks as grant system (except that usually you get NIH grants for four years, while you suggest a review once in five, like HHMI). People with established names would still have an unfair advantage. I see this first hand: critiques of my grants were a lot harsher (and fairer) 20 years ago. In more negative critiques you see envy (most unscientific feeling) instead of well-reasoned objective criticism (which is always possible – there is no such thing as a perfect proposal). Besides, I see that my grants are treated more favorably by Councils and ultimately Institute Directors (if you read the fine print, study sections and Councils are all advisory, the Director of each NIH institute has the right to decide on funding whichever way s/he feels fit) than other grants with the same score. Their judgement is clearly affected by my track record. Yes, so far I brought more glory per dollar to the institutes that funded me than most grantees, but that does not mean that I’m going to be as good in the next four years: ostensibly, grant proposals are about the future, not the past.
Anyway, what you propose is the same peer-review system, under a different name, with some modifications. I hold that it is far from ideal, but still better than any other system.
The whole “No Go Zone” thing is an invention of the American media, most Europeans would be bemused by the idea that there are certain districts of their cities that are simply too dangerous to go to.
There are numerous American cities that are vastly more violent than any city in Europe, but for some reason they don’t seem to think of those places in the same context.
A certain kind of American official language is pompous, perhaps more so than its British equivalent. The British cartoonist Steve Bell parodied Guantanamo when it started to be used as a holding centre for suspected terrorists. A penguin is brought in with a bag over its head and interrogated. What the penguin says is unintelligible and the US commander says, “Remove the bag. I cannot determine his reply.” The bag is removed, the penguin asks for a lawyer and the bag is immediately put back over its head.
I think American institutions and big organisations tend to think that officious, wordy jargon re-enforces a sense of authority and importance.
In Britain officious jargon is usually discouraged, especially when speaking to the public. British institutions and organisations tend to like to put across an impression of being straight forward and down to earth.
On the other hand, most of these “desert” areas have ultra-autochauvinistic smart fractions that would literally bang their head against a wall until brain is mush than stay where they are
Good point! On the other hand would Polish immigrants in America, be as pro-American had America been opposed to Poland? Or would the hypothetical animosity between Poland and America, make Polish immigrants in America less pro-American?Assuming Russias relations with America was as friendly as Poland’s. Might that make Russian immigrants in America more positive of the American experience.?
I’d bet that AnonFromTN, disparaging view of America, has more to do with his pro-Russian sympathies than with America itself.
That’s not to say that the relations between emigrants home country and destination country, determines entirely the emigrants perception of their destination country.
Probably. Poles in Poland are also among the most pro-American people in Europe.
I suspect not. I think utu’s diagnosis was accurate though I wouldn’t extend it to most members of the Russian intelligentsia who had left. I know such people and they don’t express contempt for Americans just because they can sprinkle their conversations with references to Russian or Argentine or German literature and Americans can’t.
If a normal Russian hated or was disgusted by America he probably would not come here. Those who do stay and hate America, are probably some kind of social marginals. Especially after living here for decades. A healthy person would make some friends, have children, and come to appreciate enough good things to not hate the place. Solzhenitsyn was a Russian nationalist; he seems to have been happy living amongst rural Americans in Vermont where he settled :
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/26014867/ns/us_news-life/t/vermont-town-remembers-solzhenitsyn-fondly/#.XpkdJshKiUk
Finally, in 1994, just before he and his family moved back to Russia, Solzhenitsyn spoke at the Town Meeting again, said Svec, who will play the writer giving that final address in a theatrical production devoted to local history later this month.
‘Could not imagine a better place’
“Our children grew up and went to school here, alongside your children,” Solzhenitsyn told his neighbors, as interpreted by his son Stepan. “Indeed, our whole family has felt at home among you. Exile is always difficult, and yet I could not imagine a better place to live, and wait, and wait for my return home, than Cavendish, Vermont.”
::::::::::::::
How different in attitude from the comments by our ungrateful Sovok contributor.
The Romanian appears to hold a general animosity for people who he feels act too posh.
Here is what he said the better part of a year ago:
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/titushki-triads/#comment-3345589
I still see an important difference in that with this system, you’re rewarding past competence explicitly and giving lots of freedom for the person to do whatever they want with their funding for the next five years. Maybe it will allow people to work on science that is not so popular and does not get as many citations or get published in the top journals, but when the reviewers are forced to read it after five years, and have to make a decisions basically on the livelihood of the person, it might focus their mind better.
I think it will work best for early career scientists though, and will be prone to established names automatic passes at more advanced career stages. That’s why I also think it’s important to have staff scientists (or research assistant profs under the same system who work in a bigger group) and to limit group sizes, and this system would allow for that as it’s only one review for a set amount of funding. You will not have super groups with lots of NIH grants where the boss basically doesn’t know what’s going on in the lab and their name just gets the grants.
There is a YT video of a Greek guy explaining the difference between the meaning of “friend” in the East and the West. He calls the “Russian’s friend” and “American’s friend”, but it works on a wider scale. Surely you can talk all night with an American you just met in a bar, and he will call you your friend; but you can’t use that word in Russia.
Apparently, Americans think they are making a favor by talking to you. When you go to an American’s house, you bring something, because they are showing you kindness or something.
In Russia, it’s the other way around. A friend is someone who would insist helping. He’ll come help you move furniture, scare or directly beat your noisy neighbor, and will donate you one kidney. You can’t leave a Russian’s home without being asked to have one more plate of this, one more glass of that. The Russian host will give you a bottle “for the road”.
The Greek guy is in one sense too narrow. This difference in the meaning of “friendship” extends to a larger geographical area. You can’t leave a Moldovan house without being stuffed with a third and a fourth serving. You will drink your wine if you visit a German.
As people who know a different kind of friendship, Eastern European interacting with the Westerners can’t be anything but grossed. My friend this, my friend that, when 99% of the people you talk to want to kill their boredom, or to fleece you, or it’s something to do with religion (direct proselytism or just “holier than thou” signaling). Unfortunately for you, most of us derive entertainment by alternative means, earn their money through actual work, and have an established system of beliefs, which doesn’t sway when another church provides a shorter drive time. We wouldn’t save you fropm boredom anyway, most of us do not feel interested in Atlanta Hawks in adulthood.
Writing this down, I realized that love comes into play as well. Westerners use it mostly as an economic thing, as in “mortgage will be cheaper if I share it with another salaried person”. Even in the deepest dark of the nineties, with poverty, alcoholism, atheism, and general loss of values, the divorce rate of Eastern European countries did not reach America’s rates.
How could you, “Star-AP”, living in a country where marriages are shorter than the life span of a contemporary car, where the waiters are “friendly” because you tip them, how can you comment anyone from the East, for not participating in your fake friendships and fake love? What do you know about making friends?
Note to Easterners: Bucharest has had plenty of Western people, and Western influence. Calling random people “friends” because you talk with them about generic stuff is rampant. I guess large Russian cities are just as shit by now. Most of the people who spend their time indoors are fed on a Hollywood diet, regardless of country. Sometimes, I worry in might become “friendly”.
Limiting group size is a good idea. It is well known that labs bigger than 10-12 people have a lot lower per person productivity than smaller labs. NIH limits the number of grants that a single PI can have, but those limits are inadequate.
You can have a staff scientist or Research Assistant Prof in current system, good positions for qualified scientists who have no fighting spirit of just refuse to bother with writing grants. I have one in my lab, who is very useful in many ways but won’t get his own funding, even though technically his publication record is more impressive than that of full professors in many second-rate colleges.
But the key problem would be the same as in current grant system: people with wide name recognition would have an unfair advantage. I don’t know any human-based system that does not have that issue. I had personal experience only with Soviet and American system, and due to numerous collaborations know how German system works. So, I am comparing the US grant system with the funding systems in Russia and Germany. In Russia (both in the USSR and today) the system is too rigged. Some decent people still get something, but too many undeserving people get funding and leadership roles in science. In Germany, as soon as you get your first permanent position as a junior professor, you become state employee who cannot be fired unless s/he goes to prison. Thus, if after becoming a junior professor you do nothing whatsoever, the worst thing that can happen to you is that you retire as junior professor. In the US permanent positions exist only at the cemetery. So, people are forced to do something until they retire or die. Still, it is a lot easier for a big name to get money than to a young scientist, who might be smarter and more creative. But I don’t see a way around that problem.
How many of the great Slavic minds were Jews or part-Jews?
I suspect you have few if any friends, “western” or “eastern” style.
Teach me more abut Russia, where I have lived and where you have not.
Americans smile superficially and engage in a lot of “small talk.” It makes for smoother and more pleasant brief social interactions with strangers. I suppose you are just too cool for that, you prefer to brood silently because doing so makes you “deep” and superior.
There is nothing cooler and spiritually deeper than a waiter sullenly staring at you when he gives you your meal. And when you don’t tip him – you are so deep and authentic.
In Russia it is considered rude to come to someone’s house as a guest and not bring anything, such as flowers or a cake.
Are people in your country rude and don’t do that? Is that the Romanian way of being a guest, to come with nothing? Is that your reflection of the deeper Eastern soul?
There’s an obscure but funny American expression – a friend helps you move but a real friend helps you move a body.
Organ donor rates by country:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_organ_donor_rates
Friendly Americans near the top. At the very top, among places where one has to opt in rather than opt out. 32% in America. In Russia it is 4% and in Romania it is 3%.
Among living donors (i.e., people who donate a kidney) Eastern Europeans are at the bottom, Americans surpass all white nations other than the Dutch. Koreans and Turks surpass all white people:
https://www.kidney-international.org/article/S0085-2538(19)30185-1/fulltext
Friendly Americans are much more likely to donate a kidney to their “superficial” friends than are Eastern Europeans to their “deep” friends.
The process is treated like a holiday, they get personal trainers afterwards, etc. I suppose this makes it less cool in your brooding world.
You have very sad interactions, in that case.
And yet I suspect I have been married longer than you have been..
I also suspect I have better friendships than you have, deep and cool brooder who doesn’t smile to strangers and who is too cool for sports.
Kolmogorov was a nobleman and Banach was a village highlander. Ulam was Jewish, of course.
Pontryagin was accused of antisemitism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Pontryagin#Controversy_and_anti-semitism_allegations
You are confusing ability to take a healthy kidney from a motor vehicle accident victim, or the willingness to check a box while applying for ID, with actual altruism. You are confusing donation from healthy donors, with organ recycling from the brain dead.
First, Romania has near-null ability to bring in a potential recipient in time for an unplanned transplant. Almost all transplants in Romania are done on among friends and relatives. IDGF about people I don’t know. That idea that “the kidney belongs to the nations”, is Communism. We don’t do that anymore.
Second, the incorruptible Westerners have created a “European network”. Some Romanian kidneys have been used in unplanned transplants in Germany. But no western organ has ever been received in Romania. I, like millions, am not allowing the state authorities sell my kidneys. As soon as they switch us to opt out, I will be opting out from transplants. I would be donating to actual friends while not dead.
The idea that my kidneys belong to the EU is absurd. There is a second channel, where rich westerners can get a transplant with 10-20 thousand euros, in Turkey, from healthy Eastern European donors. I am not checking the box “gift Hans 20 thousand euros, have mercy, he is so poor”, even if you see me an egotistic.
The idea that I am friends with 32% of a 330 million people, by offering them my discarded carcass, is ridiculous. Go tell it to a friendly waiter.
I’ll repeat:
Among living donors (i.e., people who donate a kidney) Eastern Europeans are at the bottom, Americans surpass all white nations other than the Dutch. Koreans and Turks surpass all white people:
https://www.kidney-international.org/article/S0085-2538(19)30185-1/fulltext
Friendly Americans are much more likely to donate a kidney to their “superficial” friends than are Eastern Europeans to their “deep” friends.
Romanians are not listed. But Poles, Latvians, Hungarians, Slovaks, Czechs, Slovenes, and Greeks all have living donor rates 3 – 18 times lower than those of smiling Americans.
OK, my friend, your love for me is greater than mine for you. Economics seem completely irrelevant to you; as does the 80%+ percent taken by live donations in Turkey.
I just have a narrower circle. In fact, it got much narrower once after living through Communism, and seeing through it; and further narrowed in the West, after getting enormous amounts of lip service. Most of us in the East think the fewer, the better; and find ridiculous the use of words “friend”, “love”, “service” the way it is used in the West.
There is no point in criticizing one of us for not “making friends” or “getting a wife”, if you are merely confusing words. We can make “friends” of the sort you have, but you can’t make closer friends. We do have just as many “hello-hello” friends and brief sexual relationships in places like US and UK, where most locals have this mentality AND are somewhat used with foreigners. In fact, Romanians seem to be pulling quite a lot in France, which is already more fash.
The psycho Tsarnaevs were going to parties, and married local fatties. As their example shows, your social life is not something to write home about.
Are you suggesting “deep” Romanian friendships result in only a small fraction of live organ donations as do “shallow” American ones because money is more important for Romanians?
Evidence, other than wishful thinking? You listed organ donation and now we see that was a complete debacle for you.
As a Romanian you perhaps shouldn’t discuss attractiveness of women. In Slavic countries much as Russia your people have a poor reputation.
In America weight depends varies social class.
Here are obesity rates by country:
https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8xODI0MTY1OS9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyOTExNjEzNX0.0Ac6qQrbrJyU_gOYtpbsHTWGYWqe17Zn05vRFzxN7aI/img.png
Not much difference between Romania and a non-redneck state such as Massachusetts.
Education level:
https://i.imgur.com/xMGjAur.jpg
Whites with college educations, about 25%. European norm.
So the girl you call “fatties” may be for Romanian immigrants who can only find poorer natives.
BTW here is Tsarnaev’s girlfriend whom he beat, and who doesn’t look fat:
https://i2.wp.com/img.aktualne.centrum.cz/568/18/5681818-nadine-ascencao.jpg
“Economics” meant that an American surgery clinic gets you annual salary, or maybe twice as much, for a transplant. A Romanian doctor, not as much. Unless a Romanian comes to his senses and splashes a comparable sum through informal / illegal channels, the surgeon won’t be in any hurry to do the work, even if you have the kidney. Ask your local surgeon to work on less than a one-percenter, and see the results. Same goes with operating rooms, immunosuppressants, and so on. Just last month, the country ran out of thyroxin.
Romanians spend, in absolute and percent term, least in EU for healthcare. I am pretty sure we have fewer transplants in absolute terms, and I am certain it’s due to economics. But when it happens, it happens in a relatively closed circle. We don’t do communism any longer, my friend.
Re. Tsarnaev’s wife, I am impressed by his pulling powers, as well as by you debate skills. We were debating whether marrying in US, or having friends in US, is such a big deal, given the difference in meaning of the words “love” and “friendship” between East and West. The fact that a Tsarnaev pulled a non-fattie and was still pissed off shows just how much “love” he felt.
Now, where were we? I was debating your ad hominem, in comment 218, where you said AnonFromTN is not “healthy” for not having an American wife. (And because Solzhenitsyn this and that, in Vermont of all places.) By your criteria, Tsarnaev is healthy. Thanks to your most recent picture, and using your criteria, I understand that he was one of the healthiest people in his village.
By similar criteria, you are probably the most intelligent person in your village. But only by your criteria.
If there were demand for these transplants the system would accommodate. Clearly there is not. Turkey is not richer than Romania but Turks do far more transplants than even Americans do.
So clearly “deep” friendships are just romanticizing.
The fact that this is enough for you to conclude something about love tells us how “deep” such feelings are for you.
BTW you had mentioned divorce rate as some sort of evidence for deep relationships. Romania indeed has a lower divorce rate than the USA (22% vs. 42%). But the divorce rate in Russia is higher (52%). And it is much higher in the European Latin countries other than Romania than in the USA. Portugal – 71%, Spain 57%, France, 54%, Italy 47%.
I did not mention that at all, it an invention from your mind and therefore reveals something about your personal problems. I mentioned having children in the USA, but did not specify the nationality of the implied spouse. This was what I wrote n comment 218:
“If a normal Russian hated or was disgusted by America he probably would not come here. Those who do stay and hate America, are probably some kind of social marginals. Especially after living here for decades. A healthy person would make some friends, have children, and come to appreciate enough good things to not hate the place. Solzhenitsyn was a Russian nationalist; he seems to have been happy living amongst rural Americans in Vermont where he settled.”
:::
Interesting that my comment triggered you in such a way and not only elicited this fantasy from you but compelled you to respond with your bitter screed. Were Western women rejecting you too much as a lover, and Western men rejecting you as a friend? Are you coping with being a social loser by thinking of your “deep” friendships lol?
I went away with my wife, we repatriated together. Similar to Linh Dinh story, the wife was more perceptive about the emigration game.
We believed the “it will be better for you” story. We switched to the “it will be better for the children” fairytale. But then we learned statistics, for work no less; and we applied it.
As Marie Antoinette has explained, if the market demands cake, blabla.
I explained earlier that Turks do the elective ones even for Germans.