Earlier quoted context omitted.
Political activists and journalists are hardly the brightest group of people either, so you’re just assigning the opposition group that you prefer to align with, with a token of “the brightest” because it makes you feel good about it. How about you look at the rest of the society who couldn’t or weren’t willing to leave the country and who still run projects in Russia despite the sanctions. Are they not the brightest…
There's lot of smart people left, that's no doubt, but there is an obvious filter that the ones left behind are on average less risk taking, more conservative, often older, often the ones with the national motto of "от нас ничего не зависит/there's nothing I can do", and the next google or the next scientific breakthrough is much more likely to come out of the young risk taking ones now living in a functional country…
Where’s that clarity come from? The opposite could be argued as well: those who’ve left are seeking safety and safety isn’t associated with risk taking. There are fewer risks in leaving Russia than in staying in.
> breakthrough is much more likely to come out of the young risk taking ones now living in a functional country and not from the aging engineers living in a dictatorship and working at a bureaucratic rosatom making "up to $720 a month" (actual number, I looked up their open engineering vacancies).
Here, you did it again: “those who work at are less likely to make a breakthrough, because I don’t align with them, and therefore I assume that only aging engineers uncapable of breakthroughs would consider staying and working there. Look, even salaries prove that they are less likely to have it.”