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The Decline of Science and Technology in America
puke76 writes "There's a good article over on the BBC about the decline of science and technology in the U.S.. Vint Cerf and others are going on record to voice their concerns about the current administrations recipe for 'irrelevance and decline.' Scientists are increasingly concerned about the White House's pandering to the religious right at science's expense. From the article: 'radically we have moved away from regulation based on professional analysis of scientific data ...to regulation controlled by the White House and driven by political considerations.'"
There's a saying that I hear a lot of religious people say: "You reap what you sow". Ironic then that in this case America gets precisely what it sows. You teach kids that ID is science and you get crappy scientists. You cut the percentage of GDP spent on RND and you get less nobel prize winners. You ignore the science of economics and you end up with a huge current account deficit which will take a decade to repay. You ignore the *fact* that human produced carbon dioxide is warming the earth and you wreck your environment just in time for your grandchildren.
America is at a cross-roads of sorts. It can choose to be the The Christian Republic of America or the United States of America. It seems as time goes on these options are becoming more and more mutually exclusive. The religious fanatics are intent on replacing the textbook with the Bible. The atheist fanatics (yes they do exist) are intent on removing any shred of religion from public life.
The next fifty years are going to be interesting. Will the US continue to train world class scientists and be a home for the creative? Or will the US sink in to irrevelence through placing religious dogma before pragmatism.
The condom policy in Africa makes me think the latter rather than the former.
Simon.
The sad thing is many of these christian fanatics are uneducated, Rush Limbaugh/ Bill O'Reilly products (sculpted zombies) who's life doesn't stray further than Wal-Mart.
I think this is a key point. And not just public support for science and government funding, but the motivation of young people going into the field is critically important to whether or not scientific effort actually makes a difference in the real world. Are there real world problems (like the problems that led to development of
radar and computing in WWII, or the needs of cold war espionage and besting the Soviets post-Sputnik) that captivate people's attention? If the critical needs are there, that ensures both public support, government funding, and highly motivated researchers bringing real advances.
And we do have critical needs for R&D work right now - renewable energy probably most critical. Developing things further in space is a challenge that needs our best efforts now too. But our government and media, and even places reflective of geek opinion like slashdot, spend a lot of effort downplaying the seriousness of problems like oil depletion and
global warming. People can't be motivated to do anything about it if most of the country thinks it's not really a problem at all.
Energy: time to change the picture.
"Young Americans are opting for better paid law and medicine over science and engineering and visa restrictions on bright foreign students further dilute the talent pool"
Well, the more we blame this situation on religious/anti-religous bugaboos and other flamefests, and not on THE WAY WE RAISE OUR KIDS nothing will ever change.
How many of you (or your wives for that matter) get on their childs teacher's case for being "too hard on my kid", "they just aren't good at math" etc. and not the other way around?
Why do you think Asians kick so much ass in the sciences and tech fields? Because they believe in hard work and challenge their kids (granted, maybe too much sometimes)
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
If not that, they ended up running universities where their business depends on having more science students to
Then they get stressed out that my kids look around at their father and his cow-orkers stressing over whose job is the next to vanish. They look at the management, lawyers, and politicians getting wealthier and more powerful every year, and shock! they decide not to go into tech.
Here's the paradox: they want the best and brightest to make life decisions that they themselves saw as foolish.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
It isn't a matter of falling standards and laziness. It isn't the fault of too much TV or rap music.
There are forces in society who want science neutered and brought to heel.
"Intelligent Design," and the manufactured controversy over "junk science" . . . it's all part of a plan to:
You can find it all here, in a document called "The Wedge Strategy."
http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.html
Or they just don't get it. I sat down with one of the VP's at my old job (as the company was starting to head down the toilet) to talk about their hiring practices. The company policy was "we pay in the 60th percentile." For every job, they used some salary survey to determine what it was worth. They literally looked at the salary range and picked a number based on the 60th percentile. Here's a summary of the conversation we had:
Me: What kind of organization are you trying to build?
VP: World Class.
Me: So, if you were going to hire someone to administer your databases (a component so critical that even a VP knew that the business did not run without them), what kind of person would you want?
VP: Someone at the top of their field.
Me: So if you had to rate them, say on a scale of 1 to 100, what are you looking for?
VP: I wouldn't even consider someone who isn't in the top five percent of candidates.
Me:So what your looking for is someone whose skills are in the 95th percentile but is willing to work for pay in the 60th percentile?
I never got a reply. For what it's worth, I wasn't an employee, I was a contractor.
Still, with a plan, you only get the best you can imagine. I'd always hoped for something better than that. -CP
As a Christian, and an amateur scientist (though not a Christian Scientist) I am increasingly disturbed by an administration that ignores whole chunks of the Bible (namely, nearly every word of Christ) in favor of pandering to a small and crazy fringe group who wants an untenable literal interpretation.
I am disturbed as a a scientist because it's holding us back, and educating our kids with BS, and I'm disturbed as a Christian because this is not Christianity, at least not of the mainstream portion. And most Christians are too afraid to stand up and say anything at the wholesale hijacking of their faith. (I wonder if this is how Muslims feel) Please, slashdotters, don't paint with a broad brush Christians as being like.....this.......
The "meat" of Christian teachings are _not_ incompatible with evolution, the big bang, modern society in general, etc, etc.
Voted for Bush the first time around, voted libertarian on try number 2.
What you are saying, that America has always been a Christian nation the way it is today, is a nice little fairy tale, but it simply isn't true. Members of the Christian political movement that have hijacked America's politics in the last 45 years try to pretend that the spot they hold is their divine right and that they have always held it, that oceania has always been at war with eurasia, but the fact is a political member of the SBC stranded 200 years ago would be nothing but a ranting street preacher. Drop them 225 years ago among the deist-packed "founding fathers" that people are always trying to lay claim to, and they'd be even worse off...
Take any shred of religion out of the government, but don't tell me our forefathers or constitution says it should be that way.
Our "forefathers" and the constitutional law they wrote say it should be that way, in very specific terms:
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I am a scientist working at a university and my salary comes entirely from research grants. Thanks to the Bush administration's bad attitude towards science, my funding will run out in a few months. I have written new grant proposals, applied for government research jobs and teaching jobs, but so far have had no luck at all. There are so many people out there right now who are in a similar situation, and many of them have even more experience than I do, so I really don't have a chance at competing with them.
The article commented about visa restrictions preventing talented people from coming to the U.S. to study or do research. I just don't see that at all. In my field, there are tons of foreign post-docs working in the U.S., and many them decide to stay here after their post-doctoral appointments are done. Ironically, I have been told by many people in my field that I should look for a job overseas, since I can't find one here. Instead of trying to cultivate the talent that is already here in the U.S., our government's policies and the hiring practices of many institutions are bringing in foreign scientists while American scientists are being told to look to other countries for employment. In principle, I'm not against bringing foreign talent to the U.S. to help with scientific research. I just don't think it makes sense to do this on a large scale when U.S. scientists are struggling to survive.
I've also heard the complaint from many industry leaders that they can't find Americans with the right technical and scientific skills to fill job openings, so they need to bring in foreign talent. I've started looking into industry jobs, and I'm beginning to realize that computerized resume searches may be partially to blame for the apparent lack of qualified applicants. Most of the job descriptions are so specialized that I don't think there would be anyone in the entire world who fit the job exactly and would have all the right keywords in their resume. It doesn't matter if corporations look for employees in the U.S. or in other countries if they aren't willing to invest in training their staff. The executives and upper level managers of most corporations probably don't have a lot of technical experience themselves, and yet they expect a prospective employee to show up at their first day of work and know everything there is to know about the corporation's products. This is unreasonable and impossible, given that this type of information is often proprietary and available only to people who already work at the company.
I think that there are plenty of talented scientists, engineers, and programmers in the U.S. but the policies of our government and the practices of large corporations make it nearly impossible for us to actually find work in our chosen fields. Until we fix these problems, the U.S. is going to get further and further behind the rest of the world.
Yes, you are an anomaly.
Much of the present climate is very much anti-science. In recent times I've been almost ridiculed for "believing" in DNA. One woman sneered and called me an "academic".
I think the problem is that science is being made into a "belief system". I've heard so many times, "Science is just like religion" or "Science is just another paradigm". Clearly it's not. If I were to say that the Bible instructs the faithful to wear purple polka-dotted pantaloons on Wednesdays I'd be dismissed as a crackpot. Yet so many in the religious community can claim that science is a "belief system" and misrepresent aspects of scientific theory (evolution, the Big Bang) and get away with it. They have conned people into believing that science is something more than a process and by doing so, forced people to choose between God and science.
Sure it's noble to seek knowledge, but ultimately it's just a process. One might as well call arithmetic a belief system. "You're adding! You godless heathen!!!"
... Dubya's crowd, I'm afraid this has been going on for much longer...
Back in the 50's and 60's there were research organizations throughout corporate America -- even a number of basic research departments (yes, that's right -- BASIC research, not just APPLIED research).
And corporate America had at least one eye focused on the big picture, making plans beyond the next quarter and being more concerned about the welfare of the company than their bonuses and severance packages.
Over the intervening years, we have seen not only basic, but applied research departments closed down in all but the largest companies. Emphasis has shifted to the current quarter (never mind the next quarter, we'll deal with it next quarter).
All that Dubya can take credit for is using the Religious Right to pummel the weakened science establishment. And the most likely reason he has chosen to attack the scientific establishment is that they ARE weakened and do not represent any sort of political (or other) power in contemporary society. Dubya picks his victims well.
The fault is in our society, and its view of science. Why we belittle the importance of science, and ignore the methodology of the scientific method, I know not, but it is manifested in the declining fraction of college and university science graduates for a much longer time than Dubya has been a factor.
Dubya is more the symptom of the problem than the cause.
regarding illitirate scribes, I don't know if that was true as a rule.
7 .html
Certainly I know that manuscripts produced and used in celtic-monasteries have margin notes and other additions that are not the work of illiterates:
c.f. pangur bán: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/16
There was also the preservation of written works for their own sake. Many non-religious classical texts were preserved and duplicated in monastic settings, and this went some way to preserving these works during the interregnum following the decline of the Roman empire.
Though surely coming from your personal experience, I think some of your other comments come across as a little prejudiced and over-general. I'd be interested to see the evidence for your origin of copyright laws thesis. And as another poster commented, there's no indication that Newton was by any means an atheist.