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The U.S. share of global science and technology activity has shrunk in some areas even as absolute activity has continued to grow, as China and other Asian countries have invested in science and engineering education and increased their research spending.
That's one of the main takeaways of the "State of U.S. Science and Engineering" 2020 report, published by the National Science Board Wednesday. The report has historically been published every other year, but starting with this year's edition, the NSB is transitioning its format from a single report published every two years to a series of shorter reports issued more frequently.
"While the U.S. remains a leading player, other countries have seen the benefits of investing in research and education and are following our example," said Julia Phillips, chair of the NSB Science and Engineering Policy Committee. "While China is not the only story, its dramatic annual rate of R&D [research and development] growth is impressive. Other countries have seen the benefits of investing in research, and China is on a path to shortly become the world's largest R&D performer.
National Science Board report finds US dominance in science is slipping
State of U.S. Science and Engineering - 2020 report
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ikanreed on Sunday January 19 2020, @05:11AM (13 children)
Yeah, no.
China might have had a nice period of 30 years where religion was all-but-banned and the particular vareties of magical thinking that we like here are less common, but other absurdities, like Traditional Chinese Medicine have huge inroads for similar levels of stupid.
People are people everywhere, and that means stupid
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 19 2020, @02:51PM (5 children)
You say Traditional Chinese Medicine as if the government isn't spending tons of money on research into the safety and efficacy of those traditional practices. You also say that as if there isn't at least some access to more modern forms of treatment, which there is. There are issues with Chinese medicine, but what you're saying is inaccurate.
They use TCM because it often times works. Yes, proof by induction isn't great, but doing medical research is hard and there's a lot of medical practices in the west that are based on even less. The recommendations for sodium intake are based on the experiences of 6 patients in France with high blood pressure from the better part of a century ago. And nobody seems to think that's a problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 19 2020, @05:42PM (2 children)
Western medicine is driven by unthinking application of a catalog of assumed probabilities. Just read about a case where a thirteen year old girl was vomiting up her food and losing a lot of weight. They gave her psych pills, because girls like that must have bulimia. A year later she comes back with the vomiting and refkux. Now they scanned her and found out her stomach was herniated through her diaphragm. They let her keep the stomach, installed a grommet to prevent her stomach from herniating again. She comes back a while later with the same symptoms. Doctors order another scan and now discover she actually suffers from SMA syndrome, which may have been the cause for all her problems.
A rare disease for sure, but it shows the lack of broader analysis in reaching a treatment decision.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday January 19 2020, @11:23PM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @03:16AM
Tiger penis may have been better for her than the psych drugs.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday January 19 2020, @11:23PM (1 child)
>They use TCM because it often times works.
People pray to God because it often times works. We forget when it doesn't.
As a previous poster stated, people are people, i.e. stupid and so very fallible.
The Chinese are very good at double think. They praise TCM, but when shit hits the fan, they go to a Western doctor. They praise their country, but those that have the money are moving it and their families to the West as fast as possible. They praise socialism, but they're even more capitalist than the West.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @04:59AM
The point you're ignoring is that they're engaging in research to evaluate whether or not it's working and when it does work weather it works better than other options.
I get that it's China so, they don't know anything about medicine, hurr, hurr, hurr, but you're making yourself look like a moron. I used to live over there and they use both, it's not unusual to go to a doctor and receive both medicine and herbs to address the problem.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 19 2020, @03:58PM (6 children)
Other than Communism.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Sunday January 19 2020, @09:28PM (5 children)
The set of things that stupid people deem religions is quite large. Thank you for your contribution to the list though.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 20 2020, @04:19PM (4 children)
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday January 20 2020, @04:23PM (3 children)
It's a dumb point based on a dumb interpretation of a dumb theory of ideology. Within those confines, though, it does technically qualify as a point, so there's that.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 20 2020, @07:10PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday January 20 2020, @08:11PM (1 child)
The comparison of ideology to religion is inherently vacuous, almost whenever it's made. All people everywhere believe at least some incorrect things through bad information, bad deductions, social conventions, occasionally literal delusions, often under the umbrella of common sense. Religion distinguishes itself, not through ferver or wrongness, but by the umbrella of understanding that dictates the belief.
Particularly distinguishing for religion against other ways of getting things wrong: a fundamental tie to an unprovable supernatural element, an implicit moral value tied to belief as an end to itself, and sometimes a claim to final and unquestionable moral authority that can never be questioned derived from the supernatural component.
People, largely assholes with no moral structure at all, will just toss anyone who fervently believes anything on any moral grounds into that group because they can't or won't separate making moral inferences from claiming final authority, and glibly ignore the other two characteristics. It's not just communism that gets this lazy-ass treatment.
Now if you wanted to argue that the CCP was a cult, you'd have an easier time of it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 20 2020, @11:28PM
"Vacuous" says the man who just supported that claim with a meager observation that people believe things.
Particularly distinguishing for religion against other ways of getting things wrong: a fundamental tie to an unprovable supernatural element, an implicit moral value tied to belief as an end to itself, and sometimes a claim to final and unquestionable moral authority that can never be questioned derived from the supernatural component.
People, largely assholes with no moral structure at all, will just toss anyone who fervently believes anything on any moral grounds into that group because they can't or won't separate making moral inferences from claiming final authority, and glibly ignore the other two characteristics. It's not just communism that gets this lazy-ass treatment.
The obvious rebuttal here is that first, Communism places a supernatural importance on the value of labor and attributes a supernatural power of obstruction to the various, mostly imaginary enemies of Communist progress like counterrevolutionaries, Capitalists, reactionaries, etc. For an example of the first, Karl Marx claimed the supremacy of labor ("labour theory of value") in economics even to the point of claiming they should be receiving reward for all future use of the products of their labor. This mystical value of labor could not be annulled even by generous wages, the product shifting to other hands, or deliberate action of the workers themselves.
For example of the second, upon the successful establishment of the USSR virtually all industrial and agricultural efforts were put into the hands of worker groups. When this started to fail, the government started demanding [wikipedia.org] retaliation against perceived enemies:
The point here is not the well-known brutality of the regime, but the certainty that 100 kulaks (basically, relatively wealthy peasants who owned their own farm land) could be found to blame for it.
Second, there is the social observance of Communism, including the repurposing of religious buildings as museums for Communism. All that changed was the target of worship.
Cults are a subcategory of religion, by connotation considered to be unusually wrong or extreme. The nightmarish habit of most Communist governments to arbitrarily turn directions and destroy hapless people who got in the way would validate the definition of cult, but it doesn't make them not a religion.