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China now the most prolific contributor to physical sciences, engineering, math

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Re: China now the most prolific contributor to physical sciences, engineering, math

#171

Post by xamolxix »

badminton1 wrote: post #158
cm2187 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But none of what it takes for Chinese to posibly overtake one day is in place. Schools aren’t mass teaching chinese, chinese movies, music and authors aren’t captivating people’s mind, and there is already a modern latin (english), so learning chinese isn’t going to fix a problem people have, other than communicating with Chinese nationals who do not speak english.

More people are learning German in the EU now, and now there is also Brexit, which removes English as an official language there. Simultaneously, the role of the UK as a trade hub will be heavily diminished. I would not be surprised if in 50 years German surpassed English in the EU. China is heavily investing on Africa, so I would not be impressed if Africans start learning Mandarin more actively than they do now. Af…

> which removes English as an official language there

That's not true. The republic of Ireland and Malta (and possibly more) still have English as an official language.

Re: China now the most prolific contributor to physical sciences, engineering, math

#172

Post by KennyCason »

throwaway713 wrote: post #36

The quality debate about scientific merit aside, if the U.S. wants to remain "the best", then we need to incentivize the best scientists and researchers in other countries to come here and become U.S. citizens. A lot of famous physicists, mathematicians, and logicians have done this over the past 100 years. Unfortunately, the attractiveness of becoming a U.S. citizen is waning because (1) current U.S. policies on sci…

Completely agree. The sad part is that I know many Chinese people who have studied in the United States and want to stay, but we do not make it even remotely easy to do so.

Re: China now the most prolific contributor to physical sciences, engineering, math

#173

Post by Nitramp »

throwaway713 wrote: post #36

The quality debate about scientific merit aside, if the U.S. wants to remain "the best", then we need to incentivize the best scientists and researchers in other countries to come here and become U.S. citizens. A lot of famous physicists, mathematicians, and logicians have done this over the past 100 years. Unfortunately, the attractiveness of becoming a U.S. citizen is waning because (1) current U.S. policies on sci…

I've relatively recently lived in the US (in SF) for two years and returned back to Europe. It's been a great experience, and there are many great things in the US, NorCal, and San Fracisco.

Still, I'd have a hard time settling in the US for the long run. The country comes across as so deeply troubled, drenched in toxic politics and a seemingly irrecoverably broken society. Even with lots of economic, scientific, etc opportunity, I'd be very worried about long term happiness in such an environment.

Maybe that's a rather personal take, but to me, what's the value of lots of opportunity if everyone still seems troubled and struggling?

Re: China now the most prolific contributor to physical sciences, engineering, math

#174

Post by GlobalFrog »

rsj_hn wrote: post #160
mrb wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

« English will remain the defacto global Lingua Franca of science. » Just like Latin remained the defacto lingua franca of science? :-)

Latin was the Lingua Franca of science until the 17th Century, or 1300 years after the collapse of the Roman Empire (Sorry Byzantium), so if that's not evidence for the stickiness of languages, I'm not sure what else you'd need. Wait for 1000 years after the North America, India, Western European civilizations collapse, and we'll see what international language scientists are using -- there's a good chance it will st…

One could argue though that we live in highly accelerated times compared to when latin was used. It took quite a long time for the roman language domination to be built : between 509 BC to 480 AD (roman republic and western roman empire), whereas the english dominance came in roughly 70 to 140 years only (depending on the importance you give to the british empire, my opinion being that it is mostly since WW2). So, to sum up, it took around nearly 1000 years for latin to be carved into enough many countries/kingdoms/other entities so that it was used for the next 1300 years in science/church or as the base for the new languages that appeared (and moreover, latin was for quite a long time an official language for the administration). Today, I don't think it will happen, but I wouldn't bet against the possibility it could take only 50 years or less for english to be equaled in global use by another language, because english does not have the same foothold that latin had.

Re: China now the most prolific contributor to physical sciences, engineering, math

#175

Post by Oreb »

nunobrito wrote: post #169
badminton1 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More people are learning German in the EU now, and now there is also Brexit, which removes English as an official language there. Simultaneously, the role of the UK as a trade hub will be heavily diminished. I would not be surprised if in 50 years German surpassed English in the EU. China is heavily investing on Africa, so I would not be impressed if Africans start learning Mandarin more actively than they do now. Af…

Only if you count the recent wave of a million illegal immigrants, otherwise German remains difficult and not so popular to learn. If you disagree, please provide a source. From my own experience (I speak/write in 5 different languages and live in Germany since 2011), it takes between 5 to 10 years to learn German minimally. Other Western European languages are simpler to learn and more popular: Spanish, English, Por…

Linguists don't really believe in objectively easy or difficult languages. Subjective difficulty depends on your interests and what languages you already know.

As a Norwegian, I found German far easier to learn than English, French and Spanish.

Re: China now the most prolific contributor to physical sciences, engineering, math

#176

Post by oh-kumudo »

throwaway713 wrote: post #36

The quality debate about scientific merit aside, if the U.S. wants to remain "the best", then we need to incentivize the best scientists and researchers in other countries to come here and become U.S. citizens. A lot of famous physicists, mathematicians, and logicians have done this over the past 100 years. Unfortunately, the attractiveness of becoming a U.S. citizen is waning because (1) current U.S. policies on sci…

US certainly has a cultural problem, out of all major countries out there, US has a weird position where a significant population denies evolution/climate change, and turned those topics into highly political charged issues.

Also the US education system prior to college takes an another interesting aim to cultivate students' confidence, not by equipping them with logical training, but circumventing hard subjects like math/science, which is really ironic. A very lazy excuse to insufficient investment in maintaining their domestic pool of potential STEM candidates.

While on the other hand, what China demonstrated here is, that it is totally possible for a poor country to bootstrap itself into a major science power, providing the society has strong focus on science education and an effective rewarding system to provide incentives to study science.

Plagiarism concerns aside, it is pretty successful, otherwise we won't be talking about it here, let alone compare it against US.

Maybe it's time for US to let it down its own myth about American exceptionalism, and revisit the true cause of its current lead in global research: large influx of foreign talents, first from Europe, then Soviet Russia and now China/India. US was lucky to have this constant grab of the best minds from the rest of the world, but sadly, or maybe not, I can't see this would continue.

Time to wake up.

Re: China now the most prolific contributor to physical sciences, engineering, math

#177

Post by ForHackernews »

xamolxix wrote: post #171
badminton1 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More people are learning German in the EU now, and now there is also Brexit, which removes English as an official language there. Simultaneously, the role of the UK as a trade hub will be heavily diminished. I would not be surprised if in 50 years German surpassed English in the EU. China is heavily investing on Africa, so I would not be impressed if Africans start learning Mandarin more actively than they do now. Af…

> which removes English as an official language there That's not true. The republic of Ireland and Malta (and possibly more) still have English as an official language.

Actually neither of them has English as their "official" language in the EU because you only get to pick one, and they both want to promote native languages (Irish and Maltese) instead.

Now there's a funny game of chicken to see if one of them will blink and switch to requesting English in the EU: https://www.politico.eu/article/english-will-not-be-an-offic...

But as a matter of practicality, I'm sure English will continue to be used as a working language across European institutions.

Re: China now the most prolific contributor to physical sciences, engineering, math

#178

Post by rsj_hn »

GlobalFrog wrote: post #174
rsj_hn wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Latin was the Lingua Franca of science until the 17th Century, or 1300 years after the collapse of the Roman Empire (Sorry Byzantium), so if that's not evidence for the stickiness of languages, I'm not sure what else you'd need. Wait for 1000 years after the North America, India, Western European civilizations collapse, and we'll see what international language scientists are using -- there's a good chance it will st…

One could argue though that we live in highly accelerated times compared to when latin was used. It took quite a long time for the roman language domination to be built : between 509 BC to 480 AD (roman republic and western roman empire), whereas the english dominance came in roughly 70 to 140 years only (depending on the importance you give to the british empire, my opinion being that it is mostly since WW2). So, to…

So, I'm not talking about total use. English isn't the most popular first language even today.

I'm talking about which language is the most popular second language used in international dialogue, especially research.

And the relevant speed there is not population growth but how fast the interconnections and traditions of science change. On the one hand, you have a lot of new scientists coming online, but on the other hand, the bigger the network of scientists, the harder it is to change -- e.g. the lockin effects are bigger.

Rather, I think today a lingua franca is much more sticky than it was in the past, when you were talking about scientists from just a handful of nations communicating with each other. It was mostly just Europe and North America. Now, it's global. The best chance of another language displacing english isn't today, it was in the past. Now, even if China, India, and Japan all ban English and adopt, say, Japanese as their Lingua France, the rest of the world will continue with English and they'll be pulled back into the orbit. Also, there is much more trade today than in the past, so you have a network that is bigger and more interconnected, that has settled on a lingua franca, and that system has much more inertia.

Re: China now the most prolific contributor to physical sciences, engineering, math

#180

Post by WilliamEdward »

jeffmcmahan wrote: post #54
qd6pwu4 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is racism

No. I said they're cleverer than we are, at least on average. I said the Chinese government should learn some humanity (which they obviously should -- and given the current state of the US gov't and Western politics broadly, ours should too).

There's no concrete way to measure intelligence, and if there were, copying a web browser from google and calling it their own would not be a sign of intelligence to me.
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