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Comment by dr_ | Hacker News Reader

With the ongoing rhetoric that America is on the decline and China and India are the superpowers of the future, I think the important takeaway paragraph is this:

"China and India are likely to produce many rigorous analytical thinkers and knowledgeable technologists. But smart and educated people don’t always spawn innovation. America’s advantage, if it continues to have one, will be that it can produce people who are also more creative and imaginative, those who know how to stand at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences. That is the formula for true innovation, as Steve Jobs’s career showed."

It is for this reason, short term economic maladies aside, in the longer run the United States will remain the strongest nation in the world.

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It's also an odd unsubstantiated claim to make given what he writes earlier (same point is made in book as well):

He told me he began to appreciate the power of intuition, in contrast to what he called “Western rational thought,” when he wandered around India after dropping out of college. “The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do,” he said. “They use their intuition instead … Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work.”

Yes, and right after claiming that Benjamin Franklin invented the battery.

I've got copies of both Einstein: His Life and Universe and Steve Jobs on my nightstand right now, awaiting their respective time slices, and I've got to say that this article didn't make me optimistic about diving into them.

You think it's rhetoric to claim America is on the decline? Hard times are even being felt on Sesame Street [1]!

[1] http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/things-are-so-bad-...

Innovation is not olympics.

You assume that ways of thinking and doing are rigid. I don't know about that.

Moreover, when we do look at the "humanities," the wisdom gained from China's five-thousand year history trumps that of this country.

They are not just rigid. They are exceedingly strict beyond comparison. having spent a little time in the Indian system, this I can assure you. It's also no surprise that the biggest hit movie of India in the past few years was about how rigid the education system is and how students should be allowed to pursue their own passions, rather fulfill their parents desires.

As for China, what they've gained culturally in the last 5000 years became irrelevant once communism took hold.

hmm, 5000 years passed in the west as well and presumably people were also learning in the west.

in the end, it is not how long knowledge has accumulated in a place but how open people are to learning from others.

And how open is often a crap shoot accident of history. The US forced Japan open when Admiral Perry paid Tokyo a visit. Had he only gone to North Korea instead, history would have been completely different.

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