NYTimes.com: Money Alone Won’t Buy U.S. Tech Superiority

[John Clark]

Check out this article from The New York Times. Because I'm a subscriber, you can read it through this gift link without a subscription.

Money Alone Won’t Buy U.S. Tech Superiority

Semiconductor supremacy isn’t something we can buy. It’s something we must build.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/25/opinion/america-tech-visas.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuomT1JKd6J17Vw1cRCfTTMQmqxCdw_PIxftm3iWka3DKDmwfiOMNAo6B_EGKbK9ufdo41nGHSdRBdaEuX_VpiO9DOkgnAy-Znqy5orVXaSMktdD0GWosw5PGWb1__DLhPjS0cL86ybbi5VfbaWm8RPeIg3Q-JA4zoZY0dVit3ycI1b6FRrAuoqR22vkqB5p5QDcSNmLd77SzVUIIaJjRZQrc6wI2R-hcRTrX-NeX4L4KewlVYknUGDI9uS1vrYMBZ65Eefr3PBUie8HhgLQOCWAOLYehA5w5Q4S8hKzO-dTOpEHna5iKD_JoxfBa&smid=em-share

John K Clark

[Lawrence Crowell]

I think in the end you need to have an intellectually competent population. The average American functions at a 6th grade level. To use George Carlson's line, "Consider how dumb the average person is and realize half of everyone is dumber than that." 

LC

[Gadersd]

Why do you think the average American is so dumb? Factors that I can think of that may contribute are genetics, environmental effects, and/or a lack of curiosity. My theory is that the average person has stunted curiosity caused by environmental/cultural defects. The average person has access to all of human knowledge and numerous learning resources at essentially zero cost thanks to the internet. One may argue that the average person lacks time to learn, but that has not been my experience. Most people I know simply have little interest in learning or self improvement.

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[Lawrence Crowell]

The performance of Americans on average with people around the world is poor. Metrics on literacy and functional intellectual competency are not good. Much of it really has to do with diminution of education and that electronic forms of communication have come to dominate reading. Don't worry, this will probably happen to the entire world at some point.

LC

[William Flynn Wallace]

It should be no surprise to anyone that people of limited intelligence quit trying to understand life somewhere in their teens.  No more cognitive maturation after that.  In fact a denial that more information would do any good.  Conservative down to the bone.   bill w

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[Stuart LaForge]

I think it can attributed to three major economic trends that have largely gone unnoticed and unchecked for the last 20 - 30 years. Since these are not often discussed, I will come up with names for them. There might be better names for them out there, but I don't have time to research this right now.

1. Attention commodification. We have built an ad-based economy that commodifies attention to the point that there are always distractions competing with the things we are trying to accomplish for our attention. These distractions have been psycho-engineered to cause the release dopamine, adrenaline, and other powerful neurotransmitters and hormones to influence and manipulate consumers. The end result is that the minor dopamine released from doing well on a math test cannot compete with the huge dopamine rush of killing a boss in a video game or getting a text on Instagram. This trend also makes kids expect instant gratification and anything where gratification is delayed, such as the work that goes into learning a new skill, is deprioritized to instant rush of push-button success.

2. Service economics. Because we offshored and outsourced most of our STEM jobs in the 90s, we have conditioned an entire generation of millennials to believe that their only worth is as a servant to paying customers and the wealthy where the only job skills they need is enough obsequiousness, charm, and obeisance to prevent Karen from summoning the manager. Note that this ties in to the overselling of college degrees, and hordes of youth trying to pay back student loans for college degrees that they can't use working as baristas and bartenders. Note that the one STEM field we didn't outsource is the medical and healthcare fields, but also notice that a high-paid servant is still a servant.

3. Welfare entitlement. Years of Dr. Spock-style child-rearing where self-esteem is prioritized over competence and children are shielded from the negative consequences of their own actions or inactions, have bred a generation that feels entitled to things that have traditionally been the reward for cleverness and hard work. This was glaringly exposed during the pandemic, where unemployed people who simply stayed home were paid more by the government than the essential workers that risked their lives were paid to keep society limping along. Nature does not give everyone a trophy just for showing up, and whatever buffer  we have created between civilization and jungle law by virtue of the surpluses of past generations and the indebtedness of the current one cannot evade the reckoning of natural selection forever.

Stuart LaForge

[Gadersd]

I concur with your assessment. Which societies in particular do you think are doing a better job of cultivating intellect? Do you think all societies are dumbing down or will dumb down in the future? I’ve been searching for a place to set down roots and I don’t like where America is headed.

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[John Clark]

On Wed, Aug 3, 2022 at 9:46 PM Gadersd <gad...@gmail.com> wrote:

 > Which societies in particular do you think are doing a better job of cultivating intellect?

Taiwan and South Korea immediately come to mind. Anti-intellectualism has always been a disturbing part of American culture, but thanks to Donald Trump it has increased dramatically in recent years.  

John K Clark

[Gadersd]

It is a good thing I’ve been learning Chinese for the past few years then, but I’m afraid Taiwan will soon be no more.

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[Stuart LaForge]

It is not as cut and dry as you might think. Anti Intellectualism in America is a very old tradition being written about extensively in the 1960s and remarked upon as far back as the likes of Mark Twain and PT Barnum. Ironically however, no country has better cultivated its intellectual capital than the USA. While our elites dumb down our masses to better control them, they also tend to recruit the best and brightest from around the world to work for them. As such, you will likely find that while the average Japanese is smarter than the average American, the smartest Americans are better utilized than the smartest Japanese. In fact, the smartest Japanese are likely to be found in America. So while America might rank in the 70th-80th percentile IQ-wise, we have some of the best universities in the world.

http://www.kailchan.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/KC_Intelligence-Capital-Index-full-results-and-methodology_Apr-2017_v2.pdf

And yes, dumbing down is a method of societal control and therefore will be practiced by any country where there is a class system either explicit or implicit which is pretty much all of them. I don't think the collapse of civilization is imminent and even if it was, I can't think of any place you could go to escape it.

Stuart LaForge

 

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[John Clark]

Speaking of anti-intellectualism, this is what Herschel Walker, the man that both Donald Trump and the Republican party believes should be the next US senator from Georgia, had to say about air pollution:

"Since we don't control the air, our good air decided to float over to China's bad air, so when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move. So it moves over to our good air space. Then, now, we got we to clean that back up."

And here is Walker's devastating critique of Evolution he made in a campaign speech to a church congregation: 

“At one time, science said man came from apes, did it not? If that is true, why are there still apes? Think about it."

John K Clark