Is # of patent applications really a criteria in innovation? Seems to value quantity over quality.
The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking
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Re: The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking
#32What drags the US down most in these rankings is "tertiary efficiency": roughly the fraction of people in grad school or with graduate degrees. Ranking countries is a dodgy business, even more than ranking colleges. A different set of weights or ways of measuring things could give you totally different answers. If you're looking for a way to claim the rankings are biased, you might argue that this up-ranks countries…
These rankings need to account for mobility of high profile graduate students. For example some of the top CS programs in Canada have 50-75% of graduates leave for the US tech sector. Canada gets rewarded for it's STEM grads who end up working for US companies in the US market while the US gets punished for it's lower domestic STEM grad production. If the rest of the world is producing a fairly substantial number of…
There are more successful startups in Sweden per capita than in the US. Just get over yourself.
Re: The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking
#33Many of the comments here show why critical thinking is a useful skill esp with articles such as this one, but given how much volume there is nowadays, and the fact that we are not all subject matter experts, it becomes a bit cumbersome. I wish these articles had a "Ways in which our claim could be wrong" section. Maybe every article should. E.g. Here is what i think, but here are aspects of it that I haven't looked…
It's also worth keeping in mind who this data/report for. Bloomberg has a specific audience, who love distilled information - that is doesn't capture the whole picture is a given, but who really has the time to do research themselves? That's why you pay Bloomberg.
But now with the internet, any rando can read this stuff and obsess over it.
Re: The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking
#34I mean, sure, it's feasible that Israel unseated the US at no. 10, but also the US gives Israel tens of billions of dollars in support.
> but also the US gives Israel tens of billions of dollars in support.
Is this really $3B/y of military aid for buying weapons from US?
Re: The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the USSR failed anyways, and it failed to innovate enough before it failed to overcome the downsides of communism. That's the point. You can have lots of people with post-grad credentials whose creativity is not fully utilized. Or who don't really have the requisite creativity in spite of their credentials. The USSR may have had quality and quantity in spades (maybe it really did!) but their economic structure wa…
> But the USSR failed anyways, and it failed to innovate enough before it failed to overcome the downsides of communism. You mean “the downside of starting off as a poorly-developed state engaged in a multi-generation combination of outright war and proxy wars and military spending races with the most advanced countries in the world”.
No. A number of successful countries started off "as a poorly-developed state engaged in outright war and proxy wars". The U.S. itself, for example. And Israel, for another. Stop making excuses.
And, as if the arms race of the Cold War did not involve choices made by the Soviets! Come off it. They could easily have chosen not to get dragged into an arms race. But instead they chose no only to play that game, but to then start quite a few expensive proxy wars... Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, a number of civil wars in Africa, Nicaragua, ... These were their choices.
Re: The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking
#36Part of the problem, money is flowing more towards sinks like "Social Influencers", "V-loggers" and other similar jobs. Younger generation is focusing more on instant fame/money/reward/acknowledgement than investing in long term initiatives like pursuing STEM based programs. Sadly we live in a time where a 15 year old is making more money posting his/her pictures than someone holding a Phd. Forget about academia jobs…
Is that really any different than kids going to college for kinesiology just to play football? There's a huge education problem in the United States, and it has existed long before the advent of the vlogger.
Re: The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking
#37What drags the US down most in these rankings is "tertiary efficiency": roughly the fraction of people in grad school or with graduate degrees. Ranking countries is a dodgy business, even more than ranking colleges. A different set of weights or ways of measuring things could give you totally different answers. If you're looking for a way to claim the rankings are biased, you might argue that this up-ranks countries…
When casual readers see results titled "Bloomberg Innovation Index" (myself included, a while ago), there's a tendency due to brand reputation (Bloomberg!) to believe that this is some scientifically and statistically rigorous analysis of a well-defined "innovation" that can be trusted. This is dangerous, and IMO disappointing (I know, I was naive and optimistic) regarding the statistical credibility of many "reputab…
You should apply this kind of logic to scientific papers too. It's infuriating that some papers manage to get published that have the type of errors that would at the very least gotten a letter grade taken off(if not an F) for papers I wrote in undergrad physics labs.
Re: The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking
#38Is the metric for most stem masters or phds useful? The Soviet Union use to produce many such people but never achieved much.
The first nuclear power plant connected to the grid to actually power stuff was one in the SU. The first artificial satellite, first animal in orbit and first human in space are all from SU. The first properly continuously inhabited space station Mir was also theirs. Then they (Russian which is de facto descendant of and was most important part of SU before it dissolved) also contributed to the ISS along the US. They also made the Tsar Bomba, FOBS, AK, Katyusha, RPG, Su, MiG, T tanks, etc. and had other weapon, space and medicine related achievements.
In the interwar period in 1919-1921 war SU was also badly beat up by 'weaker' Poland (that only gained independence in 1918 after 123 years since it was partitioned completely in the last of 3 partitions) and it and its satellite states in Warsaw Pact/Eastern Bloc grew to be strong enough to engage in a stand off with USA and the West.
If that's not much then I don't know what is.
Re: The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking
#39Is the metric for most stem masters or phds useful? The Soviet Union use to produce many such people but never achieved much.
I disagree. Some of the Soviet scientists who won a Nobel Prize in science [1]: - 1958 Pavel Cherenkov, Ilya Frank and Igor Tamm "for the discovery and interpretation of the Cherenkov effect" - 1962 Lev Landau "for his theories about condensed matter, particularly about liquid helium superfluidity" - 1964 Nikolay Basov and Aleksandr Prokhorov "for fundamental work in the area of the quantum electronics, which led to…
Yep, they produced a lot of research. So, how did they apply these technologies to create products the market actually want? And abundance for all people to lead better lives?
Re: The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
When casual readers see results titled "Bloomberg Innovation Index" (myself included, a while ago), there's a tendency due to brand reputation (Bloomberg!) to believe that this is some scientifically and statistically rigorous analysis of a well-defined "innovation" that can be trusted. This is dangerous, and IMO disappointing (I know, I was naive and optimistic) regarding the statistical credibility of many "reputab…
You should apply this kind of logic to scientific papers too. It's infuriating that some papers manage to get published that have the type of errors that would at the very least gotten a letter grade taken off(if not an F) for papers I wrote in undergrad physics labs.
Oh I absolutely do, and IMO this scientific irresponsibility is far more dangerous within fields that actually call themselves "sciences" -- at least these "indexes" don't claim to be scientific (even if some people erroneously assume otherwise, such as my former self). There are certain fields with the word "science" in the title that are notoriously awful in this respect. (I won't name names, just for the sake of simplifying the discussion, but it's not hard to find out.)
Even the notion "hard science" vs "soft science" is a very slippery slope, IMO. We should not seek to speak of "hard" vs "soft" science; instead, we should focus on distinguishing good from bad science. Even science performed on incredibly difficult and complex topics (with immensely numerous confounding variables, near impossibility of controlled trials/experiments, etc.) can still be done correctly! One simply needs to adhere to statistical rigor and qualify conclusions from data with appropriate levels of uncertainty, withhold conclusions with no predictive power or statistical significance, and publish meaningful negative results just as frequently as positive results.
This movement of lax scientific rigor within fields that call themselves "sciences" is incredibly dangerous and threatens to erode the credibility of all results/fields that call themselves "scientific" in the eyes of the general public -- the vast majority of whom do not have the time, energy, or ability to review each field and/or publication to understand how rigorous and honest it actually is.
When you read about problems of anti-intellectualism and public distrust in science, the first thing we should do is look to the "sciences" (and bad journalism) that justify this distrust.