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Comment by monkeyelite | Hacker News Reader

For this theory to hold up you would need to explain what changed as high schools in the US have loved sports since at least the 40s

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Changed was the reduction of brain-drain from Germany/Hungary and later USSR to the US.

I doubt much changed. American STEM education has always been pretty mediocre. I've been hearing about my whole life.

Mediocre by what metric? American STEM education seems to objectively be doing pretty well in terms of Nobel prizes, scholarly journal articles, patents, technology product revenue, etc. Of course there's always room for improvement.

> American STEM education seems to objectively be doing pretty well in terms of Nobel prizes, scholarly journal articles, patents, technology product revenue, etc.

I hate to break it to you, but a lot of our most valuable research is produced by people who did their primary education outside the US. Just go to a STEM research lab at any US university connected to a Nobel prize or Fields medal in the last 10-20 years, and it will be almost completely made up of internationally educated students / professors / etc.

Yes, they are getting visas via academia employment.

If someone is curious about this data, I made a little analysis a while ago - Nobel Prize in numbers: https://blog.royalsloth.eu/posts/nobel-prize-in-numbers/#sec...

About a half of Nobel Prizes in the US were awarded to immigrants or children of immigrants.

Unfortunately, those metrics are very focused on the 0.1%, if not the 0.01%.

Like a sorting algorithm which is O(n) on nearly-sorted input - the utility is limited.

? That’s a common use case for sorting though.

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