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U.S. science is in chaos

scientificamerican.com

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Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#651

Post by like_any_other »

bdamm wrote: post #302
stainablesteel wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

im referring to the admissions process, and this discrimination has been present for decades

Are you thinking of affirmative action? Affirmative action is by design discriminatory, but not against nationality. It's discriminatory based on race and sex. So I think your grudge is not striking the right target. And in any case, affirmative action has been mostly wound down, which began to happen when Obama was President. Not because he did anything, but because SCOTUS declared that his election was evidence tha…

> affirmative action has been mostly wound down, which began to happen when Obama was President.

It was so wound down that 6 years after Obama left office, whites were 0.54x under-represented in the Ivy League, despite having SAT scores close to the groups that were ~5x over-represented: https://archive.org/details/ivy_league/

An expected outcome of still having explicit affirmative action hiring/admission criteria in 2025: https://www.city-journal.org/article/harvard-university-disc...

Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#652

Post by vkou »

cryptoegorophy wrote: post #642
AlexCoventry wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada, Europe, China.

Canada? For lower salary and lower life quality?

Higher intangible quality of life, lower spending power.

There are a lot of QOL advantages to living in a less violent, less polarized, less cruelty-driven society that isn't actively trying to dismantle all of its institutions and destroy itself. Especially if you're one of those people who are in the crosshairs of jack-booted thugs and their cheerleaders.

Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#653

Post by jatora »

tw04 wrote: post #568
drak0n1c wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many biotech startups and private research labs thriving and paying high salaries with excellent benefits for that specialty right now - focused on genetic testing, editing, and longevity. Before moving abroad, widening the search outside of academia and considering moving internally might be worthwhile.

Why would they want to stay in a country actively trying to dismantle democracy and science if they have another option?

Because it hasn't had as much time to dismantle democracy as all of the other democracies in the world have. lol

Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#654

Post by geodel »

epistasis wrote: post #493
geodel wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then there would be someone else who'd come. Considering they came to US and not to other places out of Europe. It would mean conditions were favorable in US.

I'm not sure what you're trying to imply, as I can't parse what you mean by "there would be someone else who'd come." Getting the world's 100 greatest plumbers won't fundamentally change the course of the course of the US economy for the better, getting the world's 100 greatest physicists to come to the US certainly puts the US on a path towards world economic domination. Point is, the 1950s had highly international…

My point is simple. Real world is highly complex and dynamic system. It is not a linear relationship e.g European scientists never came --> US remained backward.

US may have evolved differently, Asian scientists may have come, US progress may have started a few decades late, US may not have been super power but normal power (not such a bad thing) and so on.

> The US in 2025 and 2026 is extremely hostile to international scientists and is hurting greatly from it.

I never get this point how come these extremely smart scientist feel okay to come to US as long funding is there meanwhile US can continue thousand other extremely bad things all over the world.

These scientists seems like FAANG employees who don't look at what their employers are up to as long paychecks are huge. However once leaving or fired from job they become moral philosophers of our times.

Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#656

Post by thaumasiotes »

epistasis wrote: post #414
drak0n1c wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many biotech startups and private research labs thriving and paying high salaries with excellent benefits for that specialty right now - focused on genetic testing, editing, and longevity. Before moving abroad, widening the search outside of academia and considering moving internally might be worthwhile.

I'm surviving on consulting income for a wide variety of clients right now in this space, and let me tell you it's brutal and extremely difficult to get entry to this space for people that don't have a wide network and lots of industry experience. Academic experience typically doesn't count. In addition there's a severe "passion tax" for these sorts of jobs, the salary difference for a "Data Scientist, Computational…

> The high interest environment means that biotech investing has been hit extremely hard

I don't think this reasoning can work. To the extent these things are directly related, the relationship would have to be: returns on investment are at an all-time high --> more investing than usual.

Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#657

Post by Xixi »

jorblumesea wrote: post #506
crystal_revenge wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most American ex-pats don't really understand that the thing that makes ex-pat life so attractive is that, for most of people's lives, being American in a foreign country has traditionally conferred a wide range of benefits (this is most clearly exemplified by the way Americans living in a foreign country refer to themselves as "ex-pats" not "immigrants"). The ex-pat solution assumes American exceptionalism as its fo…

expat is usually synonymous with fire/retire early. most people move to spain or portugal and see their purchasing power multiply.

That sounds more like FIRE / geographic arbitrage than expat in the traditional sense.

What people often mean by a "true expat" is something completely different: someone sent abroad by their employer, usually with a generous expatriate package (home-country salary, local allowances, housing, private schooling for children, etc.)

More broadly, though, expatriate simply means someone living outside their native country. Ex means "out of", and patria means "native country" or "homeland". It's that simple.

So the word itself isn't limited to wealthy retirees or corporate transfers. All immigrants are expatriates, although not every expatriate is necessarily an immigrant.

Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#658

Post by esarbe »

logicchains wrote: post #519
lovich wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conservative views are very anti science, look at their consensus on climate change. Of course the universities were going to be mostly liberal. Like at their core conservatives are against change, that’s the “conserve” part of their name and science is a process that constantly updates our understanding of reality.

Liberal views are very anti-science on race. Some famous professors even lost their positions just for adopting the statistically correct position that the majority of the difference in outcomes between races is accounted for by IQ, which is mostly immutable after childhood, not some societal conspiracy against certain races.

Watson's comments are not based in scientific fact. First of - there is no such thing as a "race". Putting people in classes based on the colour of their skin is ludicrously simplistic, ignoring the incredible genetic diversity in the human genome. There's simply no viable scientific concept that is able to capture the features that "race" is supposed to capture.

Secondly there's no strong argument that links larger population groups genetic makeup to intelligence - that's what Watson claimed and what's so infuriating; it's plain racism. There's an inherited component in intelligence - that much is right. But population groups have enough diversity that this does not have a statistically relevant impact on these groups as a whole.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/13/james-watson-s...

Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#659

Post by Quekid5 »

titanomachy wrote: post #586
crystal_revenge wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most American ex-pats don't really understand that the thing that makes ex-pat life so attractive is that, for most of people's lives, being American in a foreign country has traditionally conferred a wide range of benefits (this is most clearly exemplified by the way Americans living in a foreign country refer to themselves as "ex-pats" not "immigrants"). The ex-pat solution assumes American exceptionalism as its fo…

Americans didn’t invent the term or the concept of “expat”, colonial Europeans have been doing it in Africa and Asia for centuries.

*Brits

EDIT: Don't get me wrong, my European nation did a lot of bad shit, but don't put the idea of an "expat" on us.

Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#660

Post by lonelyasacloud »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #614
rurp wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The American Empire is gone and not coming back. It rose in a very different world and once these competitive advantages in science and elsewhere have been squandered they won't ever get back to the same level; there's too much competition from other countries now and too little faith that the US won't do this again. As much as I hate it, we're heading into a more violent and less prosperous world. Whatever that morp…

> Our capitulation to Iran, a third rate military power that we chose to attack and then lost to, is really driving home the point at the moment. Uh....that's more the fault of a president who thought a totally normal thing (arms treaties with expiring restrictions) was a "scam" (not to mention, a black man he hates was responsible for said treaty) and ripped up said treaty. We literally were in a treaty, with Iran,…

> Uh....that's more the fault of a president

Who so far has been put into office twice by?

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