US reading skills
Top research institutes for contributions to Nature journal
https://www.nature.com/nature-index/research-leaders/2025/institution/all/all/global
America has a deep and disperse anti-intellectual culture that starts being transmitted to children as early as age 6 or possibly even sooner, with book-smarts being something that is actively or passively looked down upon in the mainstream. Perhaps since the 2010s this is beginning to slowly change, but by the time it really turns over a new leaf, it will be far too late.
“probably due to increases in screen time and the pandemic” owie i stubbed my toe this was probably because of tiktok and covid
they’re not even saying it’s a result of covid (which continues disabling childrens’ nervous and immune systems en masse): they’re saying that the paltry public health response (which didn’t exist in most places) was so traumatizing that it set the next generations of kids back by 3 decades
covid (and the response to it ig?) is a major issue but i feel like the media is blaming everything on it to avoid acknowledging the general decline of amerikkka, i dont think covid is one of the biggest things setting kids back
How much brain damage do you think they need to get before it’s an issue?
“covid is a major issue”
i dont think covid is one of the biggest things setting kids back
Have you examined the evidence on how it’s directly affecting their biologies at the population level?
Consider that in just 5 years of its existence, Long Covid is now the most common chronic illness affecting children in Amerikkka (eclipsing even asthma):
Also interesting to note that the almost all the institutions with a growing share are Chinese, and almost all the institutions with a diminishing share are non-Chinese (at least in the first 50 or so before I stopped going down the list)
(“Looks at comment section everywhere online with Americans”) yeah we can tell
BUY CORN
Of course Americans can’t read!
“Reading is for commies! If people can read, they might read Lenin, and then we’ll have a Bolshevik Party on our hands, and that’s the last thing anyone wants! Communism drools, freedom rules! USA! USA! USA!” - some random USian
Sort of related: An academic with whom I’m close is a physics/mechanics-adjacent professor and has previously said that, in his experience, there are tons of Chinese articles/publications which are sort of absolutely useless. Like a “they make quantity, but quality lacks” sort of thing. Anyone have strong opinions and/or fact-based responses to this? I am no academic, and rarely use any sort of works that aren’t already entirely institutionalized in my work, so can’t really judge that for myself. Seems like it could be based in the classic racism, but this person generally isn’t the type to say such without some grounding.
All that said, of course USians can’t read anymore, reading is for wimps or something
This is bullshit I read a lot of scientific articles every day and the highest quality ones with actual use cases are Chinese.
Glad to hear! Might be something about the particular field or just brain worms in the person I know. Glad to know that hexbear users have direct experience behind the opinion though!
like the other poster said, Nature is somewhat of a “gold standard” for academic publishing in the hierarchy of impact factor and all that shit. i have my own reaervations with the entire business-model of the “publish or perish” managerial university, but anyone who says that China is uniquely getting useless / Least Publishable Unit / publons / “slicing the sausage” to get the most amount of pubs from research needs to apply some of that critical insight to the broader academy.
this research and publish model we live under was invented by post ww2 profit seeking western publishers and their collaborators in the neoliberal academic administration. it is absolutely an extremely wasteful game that elevates those who play the angels. when western academics complain about chinese authors sharking the stats, all i hear is sour grapes over someone playing their game better than them, with a dash of eurocentric racial supremacy.
china has over a billion people and they fund the living shit out of scientific research in a way most westerners couldn’t even fathom. of course they are going to run the fucking table.
The physics papers I cited in my field were mostly all Chinese
Even if we accept the premise that the “quality” is bad, the sheer quantity of research coming out still means there ends up being more absolute volume of quality work coming out of China than in the west. From my experience, they were the ones doing most of the quality work that were relevant for what I was doing.
Sounds like cope to me. Western chauvinsim is deeply rooted in people’s brains and often unchallenged. Especially among the STEM academics I was around who just couldn’t believe that non-white nations can do science better than Europe+America.
Also, what everyone else said too lol
Nature is a well-regarded peer-reviewed journal. They don’t just publish any slop that gets submitted to them, they have quality standards. Plus the reasons people usually give for why this would be the case don’t explain why it wouldn’t also happen to non-Chinese institutions. It might just be racism, but there are ways a reasonable person could come to have an unreasonable belief. It could be the case that where-ever this person is finding Chinese articles is highlighting only lower quality Chinese articles, and only higher quality non-Chinese articles. Like if they’re getting articles from some kind of news outlet or something, and not just looking through articles about a specific topic they need.
Edit: I guess it could also be a translation thing. Translations from Chinese works can often be complete ass (my experience is with books but I imagine it would also apply to research article), so that might affect his opinion even if the methodology is sound.
Thanks, I don’t havea grasp for the filters that could be part of this, but I definitely think that mechanism makes a lot of sense. With their specialty field, one which is sometimes useful for weapons and such, it could also be a much less natural filter. Might also have an impact, and maybe Chinese institutions don’t encourage publishing in the ‘best’ western journals in that field.
…tons of Chinese articles/publications which are sort of absolutely useless. Like a “they make quantity, but quality lacks” sort of thing…
Isn’t a big part of experimentation to be constantly checking the work previously done? Change a tiny varaible here or there and run the experiment again, to be sure that the outcome is the same? When shit happens different is when you start acting concerned, right? Either the whole body of previously accepted knowledge is invalid or you fucked up your experiment somewhere.
Western science is currently in the middle of a complete collapse in reproducibility.
Being able to read the study and replicate the results is kind of a critical requirement of science.
In Western journals, about 50% of psychology studies cannot be replicated, with 20% of attempts resulting in significant results that disprove the original study’s conclusion.
40% of medical studies were non replicable, with about 20% being directly contradicted by replication attempts.
Only 10% of cancer studies produced the same conclusion when replicated.
These figures are all from 10+ years ago. Before Trump. Before COVID-19.
The Reddit sages laughed when I said investing in international and mainland China securities indexes was the future, and the only way to secure hope for retirement in the imperial core.
History will disprove them, and soon. The Chinese century is already here.
There’s a bit of truth to that in low level journals, because these days there are so many journals, so many predatory publications preying on the need to publish and pad out CV’s in academia that there are large volumes of publications from especially from countries like China, India and Korea that are quantity over quality. These days it is hard to find a qualified peer reviewer because the system is truly busted and academic peer reviewer is wasting their precious time while not getting compensated. And this is not to say the same behavior is not rewarded in western academia, Asian academics just have more hustle in them to prove themselves.
But in the example above, this excuse is pure cope. Nature is the highest impact factor journal with one of the strictest peer review. Many old and crusty western academics, as well as eager and overly critical young postdocs are eager to tear apart papers submitted to Nature, if anything just to also virtue signal to the editors that they are smart and critical scientists so that next time they submit their papers to nNature the editor will cut them some slack. Publishing in Nature is definition of publishing high impact high quality work.
Real late Ottoman Empire hours
No amount of western cope and seething can stop the Chinese Century
may the people’s republic remain resilient and responsible in managing the decline of the great fascist global empire.
the chinese century has arrived with the mandate of heaven
MANDATElol I was picturing a little great uncle sam cussing at me to get out of his living him from his hospital bed. but I guess this interpretation of the word sundowning isn’t too far off.
