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We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science

theguardian.com

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Re: We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science

#321

Post by zaptheimpaler »

torstenvl wrote: post #233
direwolf20 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idk, I think a much more effective way to destroy the US would be to send armed gangs through the streets and have them kidnap people from their houses at random. That would cause far more destruction than merely telling people you were doing that without actually doing it.

[flagged]

The people doing the arresting have no ID and wear masks, arrest people without any evidence, throw them in detention centers and then deny them their legal right to a bond hearing and instead detain them indefinitely. Even someone like you should understand, police are not the judges, they can arrest someone but detaining them for a long period of time requires ascertaining their legal status and offering a chance for bond. The judges also overwhelmingly ruled the same thing, while ICE is directly disobeying their legal orders. If they were law enforcement, they would be following the law not breaking it.

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/ice-detainees-succe...

Re: We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science

#322

Post by gyomu »

tsunamifury wrote: post #307
jjmarr wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chinese is too difficult of a language. I have spent 5 years learning it part-time and have gotten to a level I can understand 30% of a TV show and 20% of a newspaper. Unfortunately it's two different languages and both are unlike almost anywhere else. The spoken language is tonal and the consonants don't easily match English. If I have a heavy English accent, I just don't speak Chinese instead of sounding like a for…

I have worked in with the Chinese now for two years in technical fields. I have a strict requirement that they learn English as it is a more technical and specific language and less prone to the use of metaphorical weasel words that slow progress. I have openly stated that it is a strictly less technical language and often draws teams in to vague specifications and much more verbose language to find specificity. I ha…

Chinese engineers clearly have no problems building specific, technical things; just like Chinese surgeons have no problems carrying out specific, technical surgeries, etc.

So how is the language "strictly less technical and specific"? Can you give specific and technical examples?

Re: We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science

#323

Post by tombert »

paulddraper wrote: post #179
tombert wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure who told you that the Nazis only killed German citizens, considering that they famously invaded Poland (a sovereign nation at the time) and started executing Jews there. I also don’t know who told you that they’re only putting illegal migrants in Alligator Alcatraz. It’s not hard to find examples of people who had legal visas being rounded up because of the Trump administration’s idiotic quota policy.

And you don't see a difference between detaining visitors versus invading other nations? They are quite literally opposites.

Of course there’s a difference. I’m not sure I understand your point.

Re: We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science

#324

Post by notatoad »

rayiner wrote: post #224
jmcgough wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really not about this - it's that for decades we've been able to draw top global talent to the US. We've cut research funding so heavy that we can't even support post docs who are American citizens now. My friends are going to Europe, Canada, Hong Kong.

How important can that be? America’s only real competitor technologically is China. And they’ve had essentially no immigration of “top talent.”

>America’s only real competitor technologically is China

this is a very shortsighted view. america's only real competitor technologically right now is china, because america has typically attracted the top talent from everywhere else.

if america is no longer capable of attracting top talent from everywhere else in the world, and other countries can start attracting american talent, it won't be long before america has a whole lot of real competitors.

Re: We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science

#325

Post by csomar »

Arainach wrote: post #147
e40 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile, China has "genius camps" for young people, to skim off the cream of the cream of the crop, so they can go on to do amazing things for their country. It blows my mind what we've done in the last year, to damage our ability to compete on the world stage.

It bears repeating: for everyone who insists that the US Executive Branch isn't compromised by our enemies, what different actions would someone who was compromised and trying to speedrun the destruction of American power, influence, and hegemony have taken?

You are massively under-estimating the destructiveness of idiocy. It's more destructive than whatever your enemy or a compromise could achieve.

Re: We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science

#326

Post by torben-friis »

p-e-w wrote: post #286
King-Aaron wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China I don't think this is the case at all.

People already said that 25 years ago when the US started officially torturing prisoners. And 25 years later, highly qualified immigrants are still lining up to move to the US.

The Middle East wars were a reputational hit. The current issues are personal risks. Wildly different.

Do you want to go be an immigrant to a country where the media shows masked agents rounding up suspected immigrants to disappear them in vans?

Do you want to depend on research grants in a country where scientific institutions are being dismantled? Where the administration openly opposes established science? (Medicine, carbon, etc).

Re: We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science

#327

Post by galangalalgol »

King-Aaron wrote: post #316
p-e-w wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People already said that 25 years ago when the US started officially torturing prisoners. And 25 years later, highly qualified immigrants are still lining up to move to the US.

Maybe you've missed the things happening in the last year or two, but already most of the world is pivoting to China for stability, and there is presently a sharp and historic decline in US immigration now.

The sad situation is that neither is stable. China could be the new hegemon, but they would have to make decisions leading to the creation of a domestic consumer middle class that is not directly or perhaps even indirectly dependent on the goodwill of the party. Not to mention it would make some ridiculously wealthy people less so. They will not do that. So we are going to have no hegemon. No deep safe sink to store value. If you want stability you will have to pay a premium for gold or Swiss francs because neither can handle the volume demanded. The world will get messy and who knows how long it will last.

Re: We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science

#328

Post by [deleted] »

141205 wrote: post #148
mtsr wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are forgetting that tenured researchers often need lots of PhD students to actually do their research. So that ratio of 8 PhDs to a tenured researchers could actually be pretty good.

You would forget that this would cause exponential growth: in a couple decades, a single lab could produce more people seeking tenure track than an entire country's worth of positions; there need to be smarter ways to provide the requisite labor for science, since this is clearly unsustainable praxis. Running a pyramid scheme of this magnitude is only going to cause an implosion—which we may already be witnessing.

[deleted]

Re: We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science

#329

Post by zbentley »

almosthere wrote: post #295
autoexec wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over half of the adults in the US can't read at a 6th-grade level. They aren't all immigrants. Clearly American education is not actually good.

They should have gone the voucher route many years ago - competition for the best schools.

Or train (and appropriately credential) more teachers and pay them like the critical specialists they are.

Re: We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science

#330

Post by fc417fc802 »

materielle wrote: post #298
jojomodding wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on if the Chinese can get over foreigners messing up the tones all the time. English has the advantage that it already had a lot of different ways of pronouncing it before becoming the world language, so the expectations for how perfect people's pronunciation should be was lower.

That’s just not true though. Sure English doesn’t have tones, but there are other tricky parts of the language. Additionally, Russian is another “difficult” language, but all the satellite nations had no problem picking it up. The real reason people learn English isn’t because it’s easy. It’s because they need to. As someone who is married to an immigrant, it’s not easy for them. They’ve just worked really hard over…

It's not easy to become highly proficient in english but it's quite easy to speak just barely well enough to communicate effectively in a professional context. Importantly, the written form follows naturally from the spoken. You won't get all the edge cases right (that's incredibly difficult even for native speakers) but getting in the ballpark can be done purely phonetically with a fairly small set of rules. Combine with modern spellcheck and I expect it's pretty difficult to beat for ease of practical use.

I think at least a few of the latin based languages are in the same ballpark but for inane historical reasons it's english that won out.

Compare with chinese where even if you sweep tones under the rug you've got a bunch of idioms (difficult) followed by one of the most difficult writing systems in existence. Don't get me wrong, I think the writing system is quite elegant and has a truly impressive history, but neither of those things has anything to do with ease of mastery.

A tangential thought is that if you intentionally set out to come up with a rule following yet maximally difficult language I think a reasonable approach would be to fuse the equivalent of latin grammar with chinese tones and then fuse a chinese style writing system with arabic style contextually sensitive ligatures.

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