>>11262813I don't know if it's just IQ. As was said already, Japanese have pretty high average IQs. What drove the west forward in leaps and bounds were a few outlier geniuses who were given relatively free rein, relative to other countries, despite all struggle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD72QxVIdeABut the way China is being run, I don't think they will ever overtake the west. Intelligent people don't like being constrained. And scientific advancements, breaking new ground, questioning the status quo - that's not something that flourishes in a country where you can't even compare the president to Pooh without being arrested.
Science needs freedom and it needs taking chances on a few high IQ people that can make the next breakthrough. We have a lot of IT grunts nowadays, a lot of code monkeys. I have worked at several large US software companies. They all pride themselves with hiring the very best, but I was somewhat disappointed: yes, there are some super smart ones, which lead the flagship products, but the projects are so huge that most of the people companies hire, and most of the paper being published, are just glorified grunt work. Well paid grunt work, but nothing really novel. Sometimes I felt we were just duct taping things together and overcame obstacles with more people, more hardware, more resources, not smarter ideas. I didn't really feel like I was learning anything new. It also didn't feel like it really was the goal. We just did more of what was safe. There was little innovation.
Now I am back in academia because I was hoping it would be more fulfilling. I am depressed because all we are doing is throwing ever more datasets into the same machine learning models. I would really like to be part of the next big technology but I'm not sure anymore where that is going to be.
