I'm listening.
How should the US get more people like you? How do we get sufficient quantities of people good at math, tech, science, etc?
This is probably going to sound familiar, but:
Pay them what they're worth, and make it a respectable career. Stop the tactics of wage suppression. Change the American model of business to value the contributor—especially the superstar—rather than just the executive staff.
Listen to your engineers.
Stop pumping curious kids full of Ritalin and Adderal. Stop boring them by forcing science down their throat the way you learned it. Stop keeping them cooped up inside all day long. Foster an independent intellectual curiosity, and stop worrying exclusively about measurable academic performance.
Teach kids to question authority, and not to accept everything they're told just because they respect the source.
Allow and encourage kids to pursue their interests.
Stop arresting people who do neat things, just because you don't understand them—stop suppressing the "weird" and unusual. See "Chilling effect". Stop punishing the kids who color outside the lines, or want to understand the "why" before the "what".
Stop overvaluing life—a life unexamined, unlived, uninterested, safely ensconced within a padded cell, interacting with the world through safe, sanitized inputs is not a life worth living. Encourage calculated risk.
Foster a sense of wonder within them.
And as a society, love your artists and musicians. Not just the superstars, but all of them. Allow that there's more to the human experience than biological adequacy, and allow and embrace art as a non-competitive, non-judgmental form of expression, a conveyance of emotion that can be raw and still beautiful.
If this all sounds like "hippie BS" to you, then perhaps you're too closed-off. This world is way more weird, complicated, fascinating, and incredible than science can ever quantify, and that's an
integral part of its beauty and the beauty of science.
-Fox
