Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 143 posts

Re: The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking

#61

Post by muninn_ »

didibus wrote: post #56
electrograv wrote: post #16

Earlier 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…

It sounds a little like denial. I mean, Bloomberg does a great job, its pretty simple: "The 2018 ranking process began with more than 200 economies. Each was scored on a 0-100 scale based on seven equally weighted categories. Nations that didn’t report data for at least six categories were eliminated". So its an equally weighted average of 7 categories. The data was reported by the nations themselves. Now the key tak…

Sorry but not buying it. The selection of even 7 categories, let alone suggesting that such categories should be equally weighted is unreliable at best. The nations self-reporting the data is completely irrelevant and, again, at best unreliable.

Now, maybe the US isn't as innovative as Sweden is. Ok. What exactly does that mean? Why do I care if the percentage of graduate educated people is higher? How does that actually affect innovation? Are those people releasing new, globally-changing products and services? What are some examples?

What does it mean if Samsung has more US patents than any other company besides IBM? Is IBM more innovative than Google?

It's fun and popular to bash the U.S. (has been for some time) but I really don't see much meaning behind these rankings. It's not an in-depth study. Amazon has more criteria for picking a HQ. Do you really think Bloomberg can look at these '7 criteria' and come up with a meaningful estimation? No.

Re: The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking

#62

Post by potatoyogurt »

pimmen wrote: post #39
dvdhnt wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This is an odd redefinition of innovation. Is Snapchat more innovative than a proof of the Riemann hypothesis? Number of people who Snapchat: apparently at least 178 million. Number of people who want a proof of the Riemann hypothesis? Maybe a million? Out of which probably ten thousand will actually read it?

Yes, the Soviet Union had many problems, but

>how did they apply these technologies to create products the market actually want

is essentially just asking "why were they communist and not capitalist?"

Re: The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking

#63

Post by ddebernardy »

notatoad wrote: post #47
tlb wrote: post #8

What 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…

>Or you might claim that the US is a developed country with a developing country attached huh?

You've never been to central California or the Mid West? In contrast with the West and East coasts, they look about as developed as Belize - including in Hollywood movies, I dare add. It's like, there are a few mansions here and there, but there are also a lot of crack shacks and developing world worthy public infrastructure.

Re: The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking

#64

Post by dogma1138 »

vidoc wrote: post #28
Bucephalus355 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around 50% or so of Russian PhD Dissertations are plagiarized. Here’s your source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/03/... Russia did a lot of innovation in the 1950’s - 1970’s. They then made two terrible decisions. One was to stop producing their own computer parts and steal from abroad, which worked at first but then it became harder to steal and reverse engineer than simply make themselves…

> Around 50% or so of Russian PhD Dissertations are plagiarized. Your "source" looks like a troll to me

While I can’t say if the percentage is correct it’s not that far off.

Both my parents were on their 2nd PhD in Russia in during that time (born 1942) both are Jewish the level of plagiarism in the academia was insane they had to enroll under non Jewish names to be even accepted were accused of plagiarism multiple times while some of their dissertations were not only plagiarized but effectively stolen.

It took my father probably an extra decade to get trough every thing PhD in biology and an MD simply because of the corruption in the academia where party favorites got preferential treatments and outcasts would have their exams lost recieve false penalties and if you happen to be Jewish often given tests which were designed to be impossible to pass.

Re: The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking

#65

Post by creaghpatr »

fishcolorbrick wrote: post #55
creaghpatr wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but most other nations receive hundreds of millions of dollars and it's mostly africa and middle eastern countries. US is planning to spend 1.3 trillion in Israel in FY18, although I imagine most of that is military. No denying Israel is a leader in innovation because they absolutely are, but the headline seems to imply that they unseated the US, which is kind of misleading. https://www.foreignassistance.gov/exp…

>US is planning to spend 1.3 trillion in Israel in FY18 That isn't what your source says... where'd you get that number? [0]: https://www.foreignassistance.gov/explore/country/Israel

On the homepage when you hover over, but say it's $3.1B (the number doesn't really matter because it's impossible to gauge how much goes to military spending)

>U.S. assistance helps ensure that Israel maintains its Qualitative Military Edge (QME) over potential regional threats, preventing a shift in the security balance of the region and safeguarding U.S. interests.

My argument here is that the US is outsourcing innovation to countries like Israel rather than investing in it domestically. This likely serves to kill 2 birds with one stone but it makes it weird to index the 2 countries against each other.

Re: The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking

#66

Post by fauigerzigerk »

virmundi wrote: post #58
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The US easily produces the most innovation globally As would be expected given the size of the US population. The only two more populous countries are both developing nations. But a ranking that didn't normalise over the size of the population would make even less sense than this one.

The EU is a confederation. They need to be considered as a block now. Don't look at Germany. Look at the EU.

I can't. There are tons of EU countries missing from this list.

Re: The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking

#67

Post by defertoreptar »

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #50
tlb wrote: post #8

What 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…

So how would one measure a region's demonstrated capacity for innovation, in a meaningful way?

Imo focus on output of new technologies.

Re: The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking

#68

Post by balthasar »

CodeSheikh wrote: post #14

Part 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…

The entertainment industry has always had pop culture icons making more than skilled-professionals. Are you getting social media confused with companies who innovate just because they both use computers?

Re: The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking

#69

Post by baybal2 »

cryptonector wrote: post #11
dvdhnt wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Not innovative it was...

American measures of creativity are narrow minded, short sighted, taken from singular point of view.

The first two domestic microwave ovens in the Ussr were: first one, built without a magnetron, with "surplus" solid state RF emitters because all magnetrons were spent on military radars; second one, made with multi-kilowatt, water cooled klystron and weighted 60 kg, because the designer thought "with klystron, we can modulate the power with a cheap rheostat" without having to use "complex, tricky, always breaking mechanical timers."

"USA does not have talent to build kitchen appliances out of super duper expensive mil-spec components?" - will ask some. No, but US simply never had conditions that would've required creative solutions to problems like "how to make consumer goods when the whole country has been turned into a munitions factory?"

What I can jab commenters above with is that behind each "particularly creative" article an American big co. releases, there are thousands of anonymous engineers, designers, software developers and many other highly skilled people working in outsourcing sweatshops in Asia.

For each "creativish" GUI app, there are thousands of research hours of anonymous geniuses that went into fundamental research in computer science and electronics engineering that made it possible that you can carry computing power of a supercomputer from few generations ago in your pocket.

Now, how many artsy, creativish, anorexic tech CEOs there are in US who are, say, epitaxy metrology specialists who know how to grow 3D transistors with 10 times fewer mask scans than a competitor?

Re: The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking

#70

Post by alkonaut »

martinshen wrote: post #6

Honestly a lot of these "global" rating systems are ridiculous. The US easily produces the most innovation globally. This is similar to ranking systems that consider McGill the Harvard of Canada or consider Babson College the #1 for Entrepreneurship.

It would perhaps be more interesting to look at cities, or for the us at least states.
Post reply on HN