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There's no mocking. When you have a docile and powerless population combined with an intelligent central planning system, it's a no brainier that it would succeed--especially within the realm of exploitation of its own people. It's just not obvious that the next level can be reached. The US is open to people being different and intellectual exploration. These are important qualities for innovation. China is draconian in its approach to making people try to become "the best" on some centrally planned linear scale. That's great for resolving the hardest math problems that have already been solved, but it's not great for thinking about problems and creating products that are outside the domain of current human knowledge.

What exactly do you mean by "people being different and intellectual exploration" being the most important qualities for innovation? Based on what? How does this contrast against the times of some of the most famous American inventors? Ask people to name famous American inventors and names like Ford, Franklin, Bell, and Edison will predominate. And how does this contrast against China?

Some of the people you mentioned are just the beneficiaries of other people's creative genius. And that's an important distinction, since, at a country level, it doesn't matter who benefits from a breakthrough, just that the breakthrough happened somewhere.

Also, creativity is a pretty hard thing to quantify. So, I'm not sure how we'd create a data set on how creativity correlates to innovation. How about I just quote the single person whose insights have vaulted technology farther than any other man in modern history: Albert Einstein (granted, not american).

"The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination."

"I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious."

"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."

"Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere."

How does this contrast with China? I'm interpolating some here, but if all information that citizens receive through the internet must be approved of by the government, I can't help but think the population will have a narrow/brainwashed perspective of the world and their place in it.

Like Einstein said the true sign of intelligence is not knowledge, but imagination. However, when he says imagination there he's not referring to creative drawings or a good story. He's talking about having a deep enough theoretic knowledge to begin to be able to go beyond that in a creatively intelligent fashion. Creativity is 'Maybe our entire universe is like an electron in some other universe.' Intelligent creativity is string theory.

Technical development and invention requires first and foremost an extremely rigorous understanding of what work has already happened. For instance special relativity was largely a work to reconcile Newtonian mechanics with Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism while applying and expanding upon a breadth of other technical knowledge. Maxwell's equations are something even most electrical engineers are not going to have an in depth technical understanding of.

Has Facebook made the US a more intelligent nation? Has it made it a less intelligent nation? I think most would probably say the latter. But if so, you're implicitly stating that banning Facebook, censoring the internet, would potentially make the population of the United States more intelligent (even if in the form of being less unintelligent). I am, first and foremost, an advocate for freedom so I could never recommend such action. But I think there is a strong argument that complete freedom for the masses is not necessarily the path to the most enlightened and knowledgeable society.

I just find it mostly disappointing that we're simply sitting by watching China inch its way towards becoming the world technological leader while we sit by and alternatively mock them or make excuses. They've overtaken the world in solar development/technology, have built the world's largest radio telescope, are in the process of building the world's largest supercollider, and more. And now their next generation are going to be some of the most well educated in the world. By contrast it feels as though we're resting on our laurels. And more accurate would be to say that we're tearing our laurels to pieces as social values begin to be seen as more valuable than knowledge - a pattern that has repeated itself countless times throughout history, never ending well.

You're totally right about the hokey notion of imagination. Just because an idiot can conceive of something mildly unique on a local level doesn't mean he has the prowess to be truly innovative. I'm talking about diversity within the >99.99th percentile. In all fairness, though, where you (and China) are totally dismissive of the kid who grew up in a nudist colony and self-studied his way into having some solid intellectual skills at age 18, the US welcomes that person as a potential source of innovation and puts resources into cultivating him, even if he only got a 1450 on the SAT and his parents don't have any important political connections.

In this same vein, what happens with the people who have no intellectual influence is of little consequence to this discussion. So, yeah, banning Facebook would help the 50th percentile be more intelligent. So would a lot of things. And in this realm, China is beating the shit out of the US. It's not even close when you compare the average American to the average Chinese: they're easily 15 IQ points higher. Like I said, though, I'm more skeptical of China's ability to make one of those Einstein types who transcend being the best test taker alive, and who truly advance human knowledge.

To your final point, China will (has) take(n) over. But I'm not convinced that they will be able to carry the torch of top dog as well as western countries have. Much like their failure to participate in the Industrial Revolution because their society was not flexible to change, it looks a lot like the same thing is happening now. They tore down the old regime to make way for one that works really well in 2017 (espionage, slavery, and education), but it's hard to see how they can evolve as the world does.

I suppose we'll see in the relatively near future. China is setting themselves up to completely dominate solar in the future. Not only by investing and developing heavily in their own country but also having the prescience to start doing things like buying up cobalt resources throughout the world -- perhaps inspired by the success of the petro dollar.

But their development for now is mostly just one of taking something, refining it, and producing at scale. If they intend to go the whole 9 yards with solar they're going to need to come up with innovative deployment and load balancing solutions that will be first in the world. Similarly with things like electric vehicles, which they're also investing heavily in. Will they simply have the equivalent of 'electric gas stations' everywhere or actually take things to the next level with ideas like wireless as-you-drive charging? And they're also pursuing automation in their factories as wages rise. That in turn will lead to interesting technological, and social, problems. And they've also put forth interest in working on completely revolutionary projects, such as a permanent manned moon base.

So I suppose this will be answered in the near future. For now I just don't see any reason to expect them to suddenly fumble. I think you're dramatically underestimating the difficulty of what they're achieving. Like I mentioned in the first post, if their 'secret' was just "espionage, slavery, education" then it makes one wonder why all developing nations (most of which pay far lower wages that China) aren't on their way to becoming a technologically advanced industrial civilizations.

China's PISA data is notoriously cherry-picked.

Source

He's likely is referencing the fact that back in 2012 the Chinese data was just from Shanghai. This was not a secret -- it was also listed as just being from Shanghai. And they took first or near first in literally everything. Shanghai, of course, is a city (a rather large one at a population of 24 million) but not China as a whole.

There was extensive media coverage calling China's results completely fake and unrepresentative. The most recent data from 2015 (what I referenced) tested China as a whole. Their rankings declined, yet they remain far ahead of the US in everything except reading where we are a tiny sliver ahead of them. This received minimal media coverage.

This is a general issue when media. When the media emphasizes one issue strongly, only to give minimal coverage to the revelation that they were wrong (the implication of the coverage was that China would not be a world leader if the data were 'real') - it leads to a misinformed populace.

The general criticism I've heard (not about China specifically) is that the US is at a significance disadvantage by virtue of mainstreaming our special education and ELL students (I.e. all students are tested in US). This is, apparently, less true in other countries so we're not making a true apples-to-apples comparison.