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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

#371

Post by Nasrudith »

TacoCommander wrote: post #291
adev_ wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

European researcher here. There is an other thing that should make America worry. Research grants have been cut everywhere in the US. That cuts deep and terminated many scientific collaborations between USA and the EU Horizons projects in many STEMs research fields. That created a void.... and sciences is like nature: it hates void (and the lack of money...) My perception in the domain is that the resulting void is b…

[flagged]

Creating huge inequalities among people as opposed to highlighting them? Seriously? That doesn't sound like something derived from reasoning, it sounds like rationalization from feelings first.

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

#372

Post by Nasrudith »

weirdmantis69 wrote: post #155
amelius wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is because China has a meritocratic system.

I'm very curious about this because even tho we need to preserve democracy, some elements of meritocracy also seem needed. Obviously as Xi's latest purges show, there is some politics to it as well, but China does seem to do a fairly good job of meritocracy in the bureaucracy.

It is important to remember that meritocracy isn't a binary, it is a spectrum. Just having exams based upon literacy and ability to understand poetry about flowers for bureaucratic positions that do paperwork is more meritocratic than just a literal aristocracy and ensures literacy, but it still isn't necessarily the most relevant ability to actual ability to perform the job. Then there is the question if office politics qualify as actual job skill or is just a derailment of merit.

Furthermore there are complications with unequal resources and means of training. Not just from some families having more money, but also from more knowledge. Children who are read to are more likely to be literate, family businesses, and all that. The unequal resources raises deeper questions about what is the origin of merit.

The real world is messy like that.

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

#373

Post by yndoendo »

Hammershaft wrote: post #286
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.

The %55 budget cut is proposed, it fortunately hasn't happened yet and it might not survive congress.

Damage has been done. I working on de-investing in the USA companies and investing in the EU. USA executive branch, legislative branch, and judicial branch are a complacent in stupidity. There is no stability in the USA and no longer rule of law.

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

#374

Post by Nasrudith »

mmooss wrote: post #201
pixl97 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Listen, if they actually had the ability to detect bots perfectly just from owning a big tech company, then we wouldn't need spam filters. Perfect bot detection would be a very valuable product. It is one thing to hold responsibility to those with power, it is another to ask the literally impossible of them.

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

#375

Post by mmooss »

Nasrudith wrote: post #374
mmooss wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Listen, if they actually had the ability to detect bots perfectly just from owning a big tech company, then we wouldn't need spam filters. Perfect bot detection would be a very valuable product. It is one thing to hold responsibility to those with power, it is another to ask the literally impossible of them.

> Perfect bot detection

Detection doesn't have to be anywhere near perfect to be effective, though I expect that they can do it pretty well at this point. Remember they have visibility into far more than users do.

> we wouldn't need spam filters

? Spam filters rely on spam detection, and do a sufficient job.

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

#376

Post by betty_staples »

Insanity wrote: post #293
GuestFAUniverse wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you kidding? Currently I wouldn't dare to enter the US, while I'm sure I would be relatively safe in China. And: even before Trump the TSA had elements of despotism. All the while I never heard of Europeans being treated like shit in China -- simply the better hosts!

100% this. I keep mentioning that to people when they bring up a quite anti-China narrative (or paranoia). Most people in the western hemisphere are way more likely to be negatively impacted by the US than China. Europeans, Canadians etc are less likely to travel to China so of course Chinese media spying would be less immediately detrimental than the spying of US companies. But even when traveling to China, it's les…

[dead]

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

#377

Post by relaxing »

Herring wrote: post #342
relaxing wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re right to be thinking of second- and third-order solutions to these problems, which unfortunately the commenters in these threads aren’t prepared to engage with. But the “economic anxiety” angle is well debunked at this point. Grievance, stoked by the right wing takeover of the media, is the answer. And we’ll need to go a lot further along the vector of solutions you’ve started down to fix that.

Any sources on that debunking? I can't say I've seen anything like that, but I'm open to read about it. Intuitively any societal problems like cost of living will feed into the far-right recruitment narrative that the elites are incompetent. All kinds of incumbents lost ground worldwide after Covid. And last I read the consensus is housing is a big contributor to the far-right issues in Denmark and the Netherlands. B…

https://scholarship.depauw.edu/politicalscience_facpubs/1/

Re: regulation Ah but you’ve forgotten to think higher order, for how can a right wing government financed by big tech break up big tech? Such action will have to come from beyond the government regulatory bodies…

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

#378

Post by Hizonner »

periodjet wrote: post #205

My heavens! Because we don’t need to focus on getting people into government who we can trust to represent our interests as their prime duty. No, what we really want to focus on is finding MORE PEOPLE WITH DOCTORATES. Yes.

It turns out that there are some government jobs in which it is necessary to know what the fuck you are doing.

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

#379

Post by mmooss »

lynndotpy wrote: post #348
mmooss wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a tale as old as time. > But the Project 2025 changes we saw were unique. I'm not sure what you're saying. Until the last paragraph, you seem to say that it's just the same thing continuing. As an academic you know that such claims are irrelevant without quantifying them. For example, the US has had inflation continuously for decades; does that mean recent inflation is not significant? How about 1980 compar…

> As an academic you know that such claims are irrelevant without quantifying them. This is a principle which means nothing and it's not one I share, and I don't think you share it either. HackerNews is not academia, and academia does not deal exclusively in quant, (even though my corner of academia was indeed 100% numbers 100% of the time). I'm only expressing the impression I have from my perspective as someone who…

As I said, your comment didn't make sense to me. Now it does, thanks.

> This is a principle which means nothing and it's not one I share, and I don't think you share it either. HackerNews is not academia, and academia does not deal exclusively in quant, (even though my corner of academia was indeed 100% numbers 100% of the time). I'm only expressing the impression I have from my perspective as someone who still has ties to academia.

I do have that principle. The evidence in your comment wasn't meaningful to me because we can find a few examples of anything. A commonplace claim about today's many problems are, 'it's always been this way' - that's what I thought you may have been saying.

Maybe you didn't mean it as evidence but as an illustration, but that wasn't clear to me.

> To extend this analogy, I am saying "We've always had rain, we've even had floods. This is the first flood to wash away much of my town. I am sad about that and I don't think it will recover."

That makes sense now, but as I said it was unclear to me. And the first part makes more sense in that context.

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

#380

Post by bossmandarin »

esseph wrote: post #353
Insanity wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an outsider as well, I think the damage done will be hard to reverse in just a decade. You lost trust of your closest allies. Even after the current presidential term, why would we (Europeans, Canadians, ..) invest in ties with the US, when the _next next_ president can be an entire shitshow again? The American people have shown that they are okay voting for the same nationalistic rhetoric twice. If it was just on…

Closer to 27%

rightttttt
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