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Comment by azan_ | Hacker News Reader

Isn't China currently among the leaders of material science with lots of top 10 universities located in China? [0] (in rankings that do not incorporate prestige but actual scientific output)

[0] https://scholars-stage.org/china-and-the-future-of-science/

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its difficult to see from the lens of software and information technology, and open source academia, but physical science is often discovered via experimentation and cant just be brute forced. usually it disseminates as it is adopted into industrial process and is then copied. a lot of scientific discoveries are made due to impulsive-creative intuition

for example: - until the end of ww1 the haber bosch process was confined to germany

- jet engine turbine blades today

- most historically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire , medieval napalm that nobody has been able to replicate even now

Quantity isn't quality.

Isn't having universities in global top10 actual quality?

Where are the jet engines?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi%27an_Y-20#Specifications_(Y...

In the making I'm sure. It's really naive to think that jet engine is challenge that won't be overcome.

In the J-20Bs

All I know is that they produce a lot of engineers, while the US produces a lot gender studies majors. I rarely say it, but I do not foresee much that they won't be leaving us sharply behind on soon, other than poverty and homelessness, which we have pretty well covered.

There are about as many gender study majors in the U.S. per year as there are aviation engineering majors. That is one small niche of engineering majors that includes all of gender study.

I guess I can relax and stop worrying that we're falling behind a bit. But I do wonder what the numbers really are, and just how many engineers we produce compared to China, of course, without qualifying everyone that learned Visual Basic as an engineer, unless, of course, that's where they're actually getting their own numbers from.

I see you're getting downvotes, but my intuition strongly aligns with yours. Many of the top minds/academics in (North) America are from overseas, and most of the time that's India and China. And it's been this way for a long time, and it basically makes sense from a numbers perspective. Note that I say this without a particular bias for or against.

So when many of the top minds, publishing most of the top papers in your country got educated in USA but will most likely return to their country of origin - that needs to be factored in to the calculation (especially if tensions increase). At the end of the day I think it's arrogant and wrongheaded to pretend that the USA has dominance in R&D, against China in particular.

Thanks for that, and you directly hit the point that most fear to express. Also, you mention India, which strategically, is probably the one critical nation that without, American stands little chance of keeping pace with China. The tariff nonsense and other blunders, have squandered that opportunity though, with many billions now dedicated to stable cooperation with China and a pivot away from the US. What I think many do not see are the repercussions that have yet to show. Forward looking, I see a bleak future. And as an American patriot, I think we're being outdone, in too many ways. On the abstract, I think if we were to nix all the corruption, (and maybe put nootropics in the water supply), we might have a chance, but competing with a highly disciplined collective-oriented society in 2026 onward, I think is a predictable loss with our current paradigm. But at least we have fighting cages on the white house lawn, nu? Our MMA guys can just beat up the Chinese engineers, and anyone who questions our greatness, I guess.

That's actually pretty bad. The rest of the world is very willing to spend money on American aerospace products and services.

Is it willing to buy gender theory from you for similar amounts of money? If not, the production of specialized majors should not be 1:1.

Even in our "productivity at any cost" society, sometimes people still study things that they find interesting. That's probably a good thing, in the long run.

Scale matters, and there are aftereffects on the society as a whole.

Historically, societies which produced a lot of ideologically minded professionals (such as clergy), tended towards implementing that ideology top-down. I am on board with Turchin's theory of elite overproduction here, and gender studies is modern equivalent of catechism.

To choose a less ideological example: personally, I love Egyptology, but I would be a strict opponent of producing as many Egyptologists as aerospace engineers. Chances are that the superfluous graduates would push for an Egyptocentric department in every public institution and half of private ones.

There are three times as many religion and philosophy majors as ethnic and gender studies majors. If you are worried about ideologically minded professionals, there are bigger fish to fry.

Oh, sure, I would fry them all together.

> Chances are that the superfluous graduates would push for an Egyptocentric department in every public institution and half of private ones.

Better that than, say, the business school.

Do you think its zero sum? We could just put all the gender studies students into engineering and expect them to thrive there?

I think your understanding of the numbers is multiple orders of magnitude off. Looking at a recent year (2024) in the US, the total number of "Area, Ethnic, Cultural, Gender, and Group Studies" majors graduated 11961, whereas "Engineering" was 193,458 and "Engineering/Engineering-related Technologies/Technicians" was 83,665.

From: https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/SummaryTables/report/360?templateI...

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