Comment by lynndotpy
12 days ago
> As an academic you know that such claims are irrelevant without quantifying them.
This is a principle which means nothing and it's not one I share, and I don't think you share it either. HackerNews is not academia, and academia does not deal exclusively in quant, (even though my corner of academia was indeed 100% numbers 100% of the time). I'm only expressing the impression I have from my perspective as someone who still has ties to academia.
> I'm not sure what you're saying.
It's already been common for the allure of the United States shift depending on the politics of the country and the politics of the specific academic. But that hadn't been enough to shake the crown off our head, so to speak. I am saying that I believe we are no longer number 1.
> If my town is washed away by a flood, I don't say, 'we've always had rain'.
To extend this analogy, I am saying "We've always had rain, we've even had floods. This is the first flood to wash away much of my town. I am sad about that and I don't think it will recover."
As I said, your comment didn't make sense to me. Now it does, thanks.
> This is a principle which means nothing and it's not one I share, and I don't think you share it either. HackerNews is not academia, and academia does not deal exclusively in quant, (even though my corner of academia was indeed 100% numbers 100% of the time). I'm only expressing the impression I have from my perspective as someone who still has ties to academia.
I do have that principle. The evidence in your comment wasn't meaningful to me because we can find a few examples of anything. A commonplace claim about today's many problems are, 'it's always been this way' - that's what I thought you may have been saying.
Maybe you didn't mean it as evidence but as an illustration, but that wasn't clear to me.
> To extend this analogy, I am saying "We've always had rain, we've even had floods. This is the first flood to wash away much of my town. I am sad about that and I don't think it will recover."
That makes sense now, but as I said it was unclear to me. And the first part makes more sense in that context.