Through its educational priorities and excessive fixation on the quantifiable, the U.S. only supports forms of eccentricity that lend themselves to some immediately definable commercial goal, while neglecting any that have to do with pure curiosity. Hence, we’re lobbing gobs of money at the Sam Altmans and Elon Musks of the world, while forsaking interest in reality itself, in what all this stuff actually is. Pure curiosity about nature, the force that motivated Thoreau and Ramanujan, seems liable to languish on the fringes.
Jim Rain
@JimRain