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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

#291

Post by gandhium »

ItsMe000001 wrote: post #281
gandhium wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> huge part of entertainment in movies, shows and games made/consumed in the US is about violence horror, and/or the end of society or even the world (oh and "heroes" of course - always coupled with violence). That is not a global phenomenon It is a global phenomenon. Chinese 'Three-body problem' and wuxia/xanxia flicks. Japanese films and animes. Also numerous books and films from France, England, Russia, Australia.…

> It is a global phenomenon. Maybe now, but as I already said in my comment. It was not so when I grew up, and I would dare to claim that much of what you mention is based on aping Hollywood success, especially as a business model. As for the wars, what exactly is the connection to the phenomenon we discussed? Those were state-sponsored wars. Not that it changes anything, I stand by my gut-feeling based claims that I…

> Statistics that selects only the data that happens to support what you would like to show is dishonest at best.

This. This applies to your post as well, don't you think?

> Let's not even mention the story of how the US was made - with guns, by individuals as well as the state.

Let's not, since I don't think there's a country in Europe (bigger than Monaco/Lichtenstein, ofc) or even in the whole world, that wasn't made "on guns".

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

#292

Post by rsj_hn »

tacomonstrous wrote: post #155
rsj_hn wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, but the NSF research budget (7 billion) is small potatoes compared to the NIH (37 Billion per year), and DOD (70 Billion). And it's about the same as the Department of Energy (7 Billion, not including the national labs). There is plethora of other Federal agencies that fund research, such as the EPA, NIST, NASA, Federal Aviation Administration, Food and Drug Administration, even the Bureau of Land Management is i…

>but the NSF research budget (7 billion) is small potatoes compared to the NIH Exactly! And they are the main organization for funding non-medical basic science in the nation.

I see, so is your argument not that we need more total federal dollars for research, but that they should be shifted away from the other organizations and towards the NSF?

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

#293

Post by auganov »

baybal2 wrote: post #259
TulliusCicero wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything I'd expect the opposite. US universities are more prestigious, you'd expect stronger students to be the ones who end up there (at least at better schools), because they'd have a much better chance of being admitted.

Prestigious they may be, but their entry requirements are laughable by Chinese standard, and, most importantly, most are fine just taking money. There still is a reactionary part of Chinese society that is super obsessed with matters of class and status, or at least they are much more than Americans for sure. Not having your child getting into a university can be seen as a social stigma, and parent of such child will…

You realize it takes substantial money to bypass admissions, right? And it's not easy to pull off as a foreign student. If you feel like donating $100k+ you can probably get your way in China too.

The few standardized tests that do help in admissions like the SAT are just glorified IQ tests. Very hard to practice for beyond a certain point. Not that there isn't a whole industry of people cramming for SATs for nothing...

In most of mainland Europe you can easily pay peanuts to get into the absolute "top" schools. Yet few want to. American education is that much more valued.

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

#294

Post by JackFr »

JackFr wrote: post #246
reacweb wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always complain about the poor results from google translate between english and french. It works well for litteral translations, but I do not need help for litteral translations. I need help to translate from idioms in a language toward idioms in the other one. I often use https://www.deepl.com/translator which is slightly better than google translate.

I could care less.

Okay down voters, I guess I was being to clever by half.

My point was idiomatic translation is hard. “I could care less” means it’s literal opposite.

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

#295

Post by hodgesrm »

dash2 wrote: post #200
Oreb wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hmm. It seems clear that where you start from plays a role. At the same time, it seems obvious that Latin grammar (3 genders, 6 cases, 4 verb conjugations, 5 noun declensions, multiple moods etc) is more complex than Italian... or am I wrong?

It also depends on where you are going. If your goal is native fluency including clean pronunciation and grammar I find most languages equally hard. (Have mastered or had runs at 7 other than English.)

To your second point, Latin inflections are for the most part very mechanical, even for verbs. Latin is difficult to master due to the fact that it's for the most part only read. It's far easier to gain fluency if you develop an active vocabulary through speaking and writing.

If you are looking for objectively hard things to master I would pick German noun gender or Japanese Kanji. They both require rote memorization of thousands of items. Both have relatively weak patterns to cut down the amount of cases you need to memorize.

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

#296

Post by bayesian_horse »

gumby wrote: post #230
bayesian_horse wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Mandarin Chinese is that well suited for scientific publishing. I'm not at a high level of reading proficiency in Chinese, but the language seems to be rather bad at incorporating foreign words. On the other hand, cooperation among Chinese scholars is only going to increase, so papers will increasingly be published in Chinese. Another factor is that China doesn't really have a reputation for honesty and…

> I don't think Mandarin Chinese is that well suited for scientific publishing. Ignoring path dependency the same could be said of English. And while that path dependency provides hysteresis, it doesn't imply inevitability; Arabic and Latin had good runs as dominant scientific language but were eventually overtaken by English, which will ultimately be overtaken in turn.

My point is that Mandarin has some genuine disadvantages over other languages. For example the effort involved in incorporating foreign words. Mandarin excludes a lot of syllables common in other languages, so you need to choose different sounds to replace the word. Worse, you have to pick characters for these syllables which preferably don't have ridiculous or offensive side meanings. Then everybody in the field has to learn the sounds and the characters. If as a non-native you want to talk about your subject in Chinese, it's almost as if you had to study the whole subject again.

Another really not nice thing about Mandarin is that its phonemes are generally less redundant. Let alone the tones, there are lots of consonants to distinguish, and in general, the average syllable contains more information than in other languages (Spanish or Hawaiian at the extreme end). So any noise in a communication channel, or a not-so-experienced speaker and it's unintelligible. That's also one reason why Mandarin still uses Chinese Characters. Especially with dialects, native Mandarin speakers can have trouble understanding each other.

Arabic has some of the same problems, if less pronounced, but its strength (in my opinion) was the reach of standard Arabic as written and spoken language of a major Religion, and it was/is used as trading language.

Latin was very good at assimilating foreign words. Again, it was the language of an empire and of a state religion.

I won't say that the success of English is only due to its linguistic advantages. Clearly, the cultural dominance of English speaking countries has helped. But still, it's a lot easier to learn than most languages, especially for people from indoeuropean backgrounds. Even for Chinese it seems to be easier to learn English than learn to write Mandarin to a high proficiency.

That's why I don't believe Mandarin will dominate over English, not even in a distant future. And there just is no other contender to the throne. The most likely alternative would be something that evolves from English, but with the current language being preserved in the cultural permafrost of books, movies and the internet, that's going to take a while.

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

#297

Post by jabl »

dnautics wrote: post #245
dnautics wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is the US government's responsibility here? There are very good arguments that government funding of science has actually been a problem, starting with the big picture: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/saving-science

Lots of down votes but no explanation. I'll put a counterargument. Lots of good science has been privately funded: A lot of things in the early 20th and 19th centuries, Salk Sabin and the cure for polio, Peter Mitchell and solving the chemiosmotic effect, the entire HHMI, etc. Do we actually need a lot of science? A lot of the low hanging fruit has been picked and it seems to me like the next advances will require de…

I didn't downvote your contribution, but I suspect a lot of the downvotes were due to your argument being, at best, tangentially related to the point made in the article you linked to.

So the article makes the claim that left to its own devices, science wanders off into the weeds, spending a lot of money and brainpower on things which have absolutely no foreseeable application to the real world (e.g. stuff like string theory). FWIW, I do have sympathy for this viewpoint; while I think there is a place for purely curiosity driven blue-sky basic science, perhaps a smaller pie of the total R&D spending ought to be spent on such things.

From this you then conclude that government financing of science is bad (which goes against the econ 101 reason why the state must shoulder some of the R&D responsibility, so I won't bother to discuss that further here), whereas the article makes the opposite conclusion, namely that the state should take a much more hands-on goal-oriented approach to funding science (e.g. "get our boys to the moon before the commies").

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

#298

Post by mrep »

jjeaff wrote: post #187
WilliamEdward wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're all missing one important point: The advancements of translation technology. In due time it might not even be necessary to learn any other language at all. I wouldn't even put a single penny on Chinese becoming the dominant language, even besides this fact.

How much has it really advanced? I hear this all the time, but I am always unimpressed when I see actual results.

I recently stumbled upon GAFAM [0] which is a french acronym for Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft and google translate auto-translated the page really well. I even went off to some the french sources and google translate handled them all amazingly well.

[0]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAFAM

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

#299

Post by beojan »

JackFr wrote: post #294
JackFr wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could care less.

Okay down voters, I guess I was being to clever by half. My point was idiomatic translation is hard. “I could care less” means it’s literal opposite.

It's an iffy example, since many people consider 'could care less' to be incorrect.

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

#300

Post by catpack »

bayesian_horse wrote: post #296
gumby wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think Mandarin Chinese is that well suited for scientific publishing. Ignoring path dependency the same could be said of English. And while that path dependency provides hysteresis, it doesn't imply inevitability; Arabic and Latin had good runs as dominant scientific language but were eventually overtaken by English, which will ultimately be overtaken in turn.

My point is that Mandarin has some genuine disadvantages over other languages. For example the effort involved in incorporating foreign words. Mandarin excludes a lot of syllables common in other languages, so you need to choose different sounds to replace the word. Worse, you have to pick characters for these syllables which preferably don't have ridiculous or offensive side meanings. Then everybody in the field has…

This is very untrue--if you look at math or machine learning terminology, the phrases used are actually direct literal translations of the constituent words. It is very understandable, even from my perspective as someone only slightly literate in Chinese.
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