Maybe smart people don't care about money all that much, but they want their lives to not suck, their effort to not feel wasted, their identity not wrapped up in the service of dysfunction and politics. There are not many places where you can better humanity for a living and live the life such a person deserves, and it is not the job of humans to sacrifice themselves for no reward. That's why people who do so, effectively, are so rare.
I’m concerned that the US — one of the innovation powerhouses of the world — will hurt its own future considerably if we continue to make educational professions unappealing.
Is there any indication that education needs geniuses? Does it substantially improve innovation? When America was world dominant in innovation, were its geniuses in academia, or industry?
I doubt any industry needs geniuses. I don't think the human race needs a super-human .01% individuals to come in and solve all our problems every quarter century. I wouldn't be surprised if 90% of the genetic geniuses Mother Nature gives are struggling in the 3rd world somewhere.
I don't think most of our medical breakthroughs in the last 50 years came from geniuses either. They came from mostly regular people, who put the perspiration in and slaved away trying and failing time and time again to deliver life saving products.
The sad thing is these people aren't praised for their work and these people have a much higher bar to set. These people aren't any more gifted than the guys at Google. They just made the choice to work in Medicine and not Software Engineering. To me post like OP's say "To everyone who has done anything in medicine in the last 100 years, your achievements don't matter because you aren't as famous as Rob Pike."
Why the fuck does this guy think that the engineers at Google would be have half as good as the researchers at Johns Hopkins? What special quality do they have that allows any field they enter to turn to gold? Is it really the case that Google Engineers are super humans or is OP ignoring the hundreds/thousands of researchers who are working towards a cure for diabetes?
So Sweden is ranked as the "most innovative" country, with the USA coming in seventh. Switzerland and Singapore beat the US also.
Yet I can't think of a single innovation I've seen from them. Good governments, great fashion, cheap furniture, sure. But what is the innovation they speak of?
Fwiw, Iceland was number one last year. Was it for their constitution?
My point is that I don't think you really have to look into history for "when American was dominant in innovation". (And this is coming from a major cynic of current affairs in the US!)
> When America was world dominant in innovation, were its geniuses in academia, or industry?
Good question. How I'd answer for the 1940s-60s depends heavily on what you consider the status of research labs that were outside academia, but rather academic in terms of personnel, style, and management: the national labs, the NSA, the Manhattan Project, Bell Labs, etc.
If that's included as honorary academia, I would feel comfortable saying that "academia" (or perhaps "academia-plus") had most of the geniuses of that era.
Maybe smart people don't care about money all that much, but they want their lives to not suck, their effort to not feel wasted, their identity not wrapped up in the service of dysfunction and politics. There are not many places where you can better humanity for a living and live the life such a person deserves, and it is not the job of humans to sacrifice themselves for no reward. That's why people who do so, effectively, are so rare.
Here's a guy who left the ivory tower for Google: http://cs.unm.edu/~terran/academic_blog/?p=113
I’m concerned that the US — one of the innovation powerhouses of the world — will hurt its own future considerably if we continue to make educational professions unappealing.