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U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office

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Re: U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office

#201

Post by mmooss »

pixl97 wrote: post #92
mecsred wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the current social climate I would absolutely not trust public media to understand general consensus. Ask specific people you trust or seek out their opinions.

In mainstream media, public consensus is bought by the highest bidder, or the whims of the board of the company. In social media, general consensus is owned by those that control the best and most bots to direct the conversation. Unfortunately most people are too lazy/busy to seek out trusted information, and many if not most have no ability to understand if the answer they get should be trusted or not.

> In social media, general consensus is owned by those that control the best and most bots to direct the conversation.

Isn't it owned by the owner of the social media platform? Do you think Zuckerberg, Musk, etc are neutral? There is an enormous amount of evidence otherwise.

If some bots proliferate, it's because the owners allow those bots to do so.

Re: U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office

#202

Post by gopher_space »

morelandjs wrote: post #70
JuniperMesos wrote: post #22

The implicit assumption that this is a bad thing is grounded in the assumption that anyone who is a STEM PhD is automatically someone the US government should want to employ, which I don't think is true. Academia is a badly broken system, and many people with formal credentials like PhDs have wasted huge amounts of time and effort on producing what is ultimately low-quality scientific work. This is a pretty uncontrov…

The tail of the distribution justifies the entire distribution. I agree that a large percentage of PhD research is inconsequential, but a small percentage is massively consequential. It’s ok to whiff on a thousand STEM PhDs if you pick up one Andrej Karpathy (for example).

The number of people capable of identifying potentially consequential research is smaller than the number of people performing consequential research. And they’re all busy with their own projects.

Re: U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office

#203

Post by thegreatpeter »

That exodus was only 3% of the 335,192 federal workers who exited last year but represents 14% of the total number of Ph.D.s in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) or health fields employed at the end of 2024 as then-President Joe Biden prepared to leave office.

Would be interesting to see the age of these STEM or health fields employees. What if they were all over the age of 70? Would that still bother everyone?

Do you think this article was framed to cause outrage and frustration?

Re: U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office

#204

Post by retired »

mjuarez wrote: post #173
retired wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Netherlands is taking action against the brain drain by rapidly importing highly skilled migrants through various tax lowering schemes in the first five years of living here. However plenty of those people leave after that period. Especially with the upcoming 36% unrealized capital gains tax on all your savings and investments. Feels a bit like ISPs giving discounts to new customers only.

This is misleading. It's actually taxing 36% of _assumed gains_ of say 5% on all assets. So if you have $1M in savings, you'll end up paying 1.8% or $18K/annum, regardless of the actual investment return. I can see it would be painful during down years, but most of the time it would be ok.

That is the current system. In the new system it will be 36% on all capital gains, no more assumed gains. And an €1800 a year tax-free threshold.

Also it's a bit more, right now you are looking at 36% on 6% or 2.16% per year with a €59k threshold. So a bit over €20k a year on that €1M.

Re: U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office

#206

Post by Herring »

The problem with these threads is everyone wants to complain about Trump, but support drops drastically when you talk about policies that actually help buffer against the far-right. Eg implementing robust safety nets and low inequality, to reduce status anxiety and grievance. How many of you software engineers want to sign up for high taxes? It's basically tragedy of the commons.

Economics on its own is probably not sufficient either. You probably also need widespread unionization, a Cordon Sanitaire, and probably German-style intelligence surveillance of the far-right too.

Re: U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office

#207

Post by ajzushzb »

titzer wrote: post #163

It's harder to recruit PhD students and it's harder to fund them. NSF budget was cut 55% in the first year. The administration is doing everything possible to make it clear that no foreigners are welcome here. America is stabbing itself directly in the brain.

[dead]

Re: U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office

#208

Post by Hikikomori »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #181
ixtli wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the opposite is happening in China. I saw an article the other day ( https://fortune.com/2026/01/14/china-graduates-1-3-million-e... ) that showed how the amount of engineers being produced there is orders of magnitude greater than the US. Way above what you'd expect given the different sizes of population. Now, i realize an engineer isn't the same as a PhD but i think we're seeing a dramatic brain drain ha…

There was an interesting Freakonomics podcast a few months back that pointed out an interesting divide in how the US and China thinks about its leaders[0]. > China is a country that is run by engineers, while the U.S. is a country run by lawyers. Engineers, he explains, are driven to build while lawyers are driven to argue, and obstruct. Even Trump: > And even though Donald Trump is not a lawyer by any means, I think…

Not just lawyerly society, special kind of asshole lawyer, as he was a protégé of Roy Cohn.

Re: U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office

#209

Post by [deleted] »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #181
ixtli wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the opposite is happening in China. I saw an article the other day ( https://fortune.com/2026/01/14/china-graduates-1-3-million-e... ) that showed how the amount of engineers being produced there is orders of magnitude greater than the US. Way above what you'd expect given the different sizes of population. Now, i realize an engineer isn't the same as a PhD but i think we're seeing a dramatic brain drain ha…

There was an interesting Freakonomics podcast a few months back that pointed out an interesting divide in how the US and China thinks about its leaders[0]. > China is a country that is run by engineers, while the U.S. is a country run by lawyers. Engineers, he explains, are driven to build while lawyers are driven to argue, and obstruct. Even Trump: > And even though Donald Trump is not a lawyer by any means, I think…

[deleted]

Re: U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office

#210

Post by dmoy »

jleyank wrote: post #90

STEM people in science (used to) populate places like NIH, NSF and other granting agencies. Theh were project managers responsible for funding decisions, or actual researchers. Remember that people used think that pharma just did marketing with all the new drug ideas coming from academia or government labs? Well, these people were either the ones paying the academic labs or actually generating what pharma marketed. T…

NRL et al do a lot more than just weapons research too.
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