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It's ultimately about practice: Spain's first high speed train was massively over budget, and seen as a boondoggle. If building had stopped there, it would have been a curiosity, but the government kept asking for more track, and with practice come better results.

It's difficult to succeed in early projects of all kinds, but it's not just people that learn: organizations do too. Set up good incentives, and be OK with early failures. And if you lack expertise, but someone else has the knowledge, just hire a few experts away.

On most problems where America is very inefficient, it's either a matter of lack of practice or horrible incentives. If there's a cultural failing, it's unwillingness to deal with those bad incentives.

Especially for big projects, I often get the sense that failing a couple times is seen as unthinkable in the US: so a lot of ambitious initiatives lose funding or become laughingstocks because of publicized early failures. As a result, there’s a tendency to over-engineer in some areas and reduce ambitions in others.

It has been my experience that there are good and bad engineers from all origins; Americans do not have a monopoly on it in either direction, nor does anyone else.

If you can't generalize then you can't think. Of course any affirmation can be turned down on the basis that it is not specific enough.

OP is pointing at differences in cultures, they do exist.

It sounded like the person I was responding to just wanted a lazy poo-poo soundbite. There are many examples of all of the countries mentioned making ridiculous/awful products and also amazing products.

> If you can't generalize then you can't think

If you blindly follow others' generalizations without question, you can't think.

Compression is a form of intelligence

Sure, but blindly following something without question, isn't compression, even though both happen to involve reduction.

Sure if it isn't a losing material information in that process. It is easy to compress anything to true/false if you're willing to live with information loss. I think material information was lost in the aforementioned "Country X can't build anything" hot-take.

So people compress to the point where the speed vs information loss tradeoff makes instinctive sense to them.

You can dramatically increase your computing power if you're not constantly deriving everything from the fundamental physics and instead rely on some stereotypes.

This ranges from "objects that look like that are chairs" to "I can sit on chairs" to "Americans can/can't do X"

It's amusing that this text chain is about derivations when in reality we can reference a direct quote. We're not deriving any meaning here.

I'll leave it as an exercise to you to find that direct quote, as it'll be sure you actually read the comment :)

Short good

Good and bad in the sense that they can achieve management's directives? Yes, anyone from any culture so long as they have a practical grasp of the language they're working in can adapt to the circumstance.

But the culture starts at the top. Everything within the U.S. spiritual ecosystem is geared towards a superficial approach to all things. One example in the vein of engineering is Ford vs. Toyota. Anyone who has owned both of these can attest to the difference. There is a craftsmanship culture within Japan that I'm sure we're all acquainted with, but there are also much more subtle values at play (f.e. duty, sacrifice, etc.) that color everything an individual, and the society he makes up, touches. The individuals of America do not have strong values or sensibilities. I want to say this is because of its quality of being a "cultural melting pot." But this aspect of it doesn't turn it into a stone soup, where all the different and varied ingredients work together to make something unique, with surprisingly complimentary flavors. Instead, I think it turns into an actual crucible, where people of all different mettle are melted down; and all of the extraneous spiritual slag is scooped off the top, before being poured out as a completely uniform metal, without a noticeable difference batch-to-batch.

Instead of refining and building upon a culture, as 99% of other nations do, America specializes in annihilating it, and integrating the stray quality here and there that it finds useful towards its ends. And its ends is something I cannot even begin to know.

"Everything within the U.S. spiritual ecosystem is geared towards a superficial approach to all things"

This is hyperbole, I don't think there will be any way to convince you.

I agree that there isn’t much of a chance I can be convinced otherwise, having travelled and having not been born in the U.S.

I disagree that it is hyperbole. The main motive of this country seems to be exerting power over others. Whether that be through military, monetary, or quasi-cultural means: onto other nations and onto its own citizens. It’s very Prussian in its pursuit; and nothing that requires sensitivity can flourish here.

Your assertion of "Everything within the U.S. spiritual ecosystem is geared towards a superficial approach to all things" is hyperbole since you qualify it with "Everything" and "all things".

> spiritual ecosystem

what does this mean?

Hard to define if it doesn’t “click.”

I’ll try though: the collection of intangible qualities that interact with the human spirit, that are found within a certain environment. The qualities themselves interact with one another to create a sort of “bubble”/“soul”/“vibe”/“mood”/etc. For example, if you go into a loud open office with harsh fluorescent lights, no windows, and stagnant air you could say the environment drains the spirit. From there it will have an effect on your psyche, and cascade into you acting a certain way that reinforces that draining quality and adds a certain extra “flavor.” E.g. if the environment drains you, you might become short-tempered, unaltruistic, or mean-spirited. In that case your actions will reinforce the overall displeasing atmosphere of the office, but now you’ve also added the aforementioned knock-on qualities. If we take this further, then perhaps this would lead to a work environment where no great work is done. People go in, do the bare minimum and tolerate it, but the possibility of any higher qualities like craftsmanship, care, and conscientiousness have been rendered null — due to the collection of qualities just mentioned. And from there it continues to cascade.

Thanks for the explanation!

pg's essay on the subject is a must-read: http://www.paulgraham.com/usa.html

America has the most productive economy in the world by dollar. We make everything from rockets to disposable forks. Don’t confuse meeting a price point with a lack of ability.

The US for sure knows how to build things. SpaceX alone delivered over 80% of mass to orbit while China’s entire space program can’t keep pace with a single American company. We are also killing it at EVs, again, all the great might of the Chinese economy is playing catch up to Tesla.

The thing is, we know how to build things.

Those things aren’t crappy block apartments or faster trains. They are: space ships, artificial intelligence, robotics, cutting edge medicine, etc. The name of the game is individuality, entrepreneurship, and freedom (The ingredients that built the most powerful economy in the world). These are antithetical to both their political system and their culture.

"As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it -- talking trade balances here -- once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity -- y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else

music

movies

microcode (software)

high-speed pizza delivery"

-- Neal Stephenson, Snowcrash, 1992

Most of what you mentioned is research & development, not building. I don't know why you say we're killing it at EVs, when there's many competitors, and Tesla churned out dreck for years until it finally produced a decent car without defects, and had to be floated constantly on US government subsidies. SpaceX is the only thing that seems to work reliably, probably due to sheer will from passionate engineers and a ton of QA (and a whole lot of NASA experience).

Anyone can come up with a new sandwich, given enough time and money. Not everyone can churn out 1 million sandwiches, quickly, perfectly, every time. That's what building is about.

Pst; all of tech is floated by government. It wants to keep a pipeline of engineers around.

IBM refused to risk its old tube business on transistors so Uncle Sam paid for it, gifted tech to IBM.

Internet was a government defense project.

Capitalism is just people. The euphemism is getting too deep. We need waders.

I'd love to try the software products from these countries, but I can't deny that some of the very things spoken of in the article came from the origins of which you speak.

Samsung made Tizen, and many of the 'TVs with eyes and ears' out there.

BMW was apparently the flagship for heated seats as a service.

To be fair, Nintendo is pretty good at innovation in both hardware and software, but not so much at cutting edge power these days. Or, like, people trying to have fun with friends (whether online or in tournaments).

I can't speak for China on your list; would love to hear of some battle tested counterexamples though.

All of that said, greed is undoubtedly a leading cause for many of these industry wide ailments. Why innovate when you can coast? Why invent something in your spare time for nothing when someone can pay you good money to transform JSON?

Nintendo purposely doesn't focus on cutting-edge or power. Hasn't since the the mid-80s. Having fun with friends is a core concept of what they do. Hand a Switch to a group of people to play party games. It's really interactive and social.

Nintendo is good at social if all the players are in the same room: their internet services leave a lot to be desired.

China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) is a nifty bit of now proven novel engineering with active shaping and nimble receiver positioning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Sp...

Ableton comes from Germany for instance - not my cup of tea personally but by all accounts great software.

Samsung meanwhile has a significant software development presence in California.

>> It seems like nobody knows how to build things anymore.

>The Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Germans, etc might disagree.

It's funny, after riding the Chinese HSR network, this quote from the article had me shaking my head:

"California is spectacularly behind schedule and overbudget on its quest to build the world’s slowest high-speed rail.

It seems like nobody knows how to build things anymore."

Well China may have a HSR. But it's sort of bankrupt on arrival outside of the main metro's. China has the luck in this scenario of being free of oversight, and able to create it's own money. Most western Infrastructure isn't built in a vacuum that allows it to arrive as a gold plated entity.