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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

#411

Post by mr_00ff00 »

deaux wrote: post #401
p-e-w wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China has a global reputational problem that will take decades to fix. The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does. Nobody sane is going to believe rhetoric claiming that the US is somehow worse than a country that keeps 1.5 million people in concentration camps, and where people work 70 hours per week, no matter how many times…

> The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does. Whatever makes you sleep at night. > no matter how many times Reddit tells them so. Oh god, are we still stuck in that "Reddit is a niche US nerd cave" mindset? In most countries where the youth speaks good English you'll see more under 30s on Reddit than on Facebook or Twitter. On…

This is untrue: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/reddit-us...

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/facebook-...

Reddit has far fewer users in most countries outside the US than facebook.

Also, I don’t like the current US administration, but you cannot make the claim somehow China is better, especially to minorities.

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

#412

Post by tensor »

9rx wrote: post #89
xienze wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, if the US restores their democracy We don’t have elections anymore? When did this happen?

China also likes to claim it is a democracy because it holds elections. It is fair to say that the USA is still a democracy, but not because of elections. Elections have little to do with democracy. In fact, if the majority of the population hold the view that elections equate to democracy, you don't have a democracy.

I wouldn't say that elections have little to do with democracy, they are necessary. Though I agree that merely having an election isn't sufficient. A lot of modern dictatorships have "elections". And that's not to even begin to get in to how representation works.

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

#414

Post by [deleted] »

rayiner wrote: post #343
koito17 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more importantly, there's just a lot of people in China. New York City's population is approximately 8.8 million; that is the scale of a mid-sized Chinese city. The population exceeds 1 billion, which is difficult to comprehend in terms of scale. The reference I like to use is: 1 million seconds is ~11 days, whereas 1 billion seconds is ~31 years. To put it bluntly, China quite literally doesn't need (nor wants)…

Size isn’t that important either, or else India would be rich and Taiwan wouldn’t be. It’s just not a numbers game.

[deleted]

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

#415

Post by rossjudson »

p-e-w wrote: post #239
lateforwork wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is trying. Around the time the US announced restrictions on the H-1B visa, China announced the K visa for attracting immigrants [1]. At this point in time, I don't think people are lining up to get K visa to go live in China. But if the current trajectory continues in the US, who knows how things will be in 5 years? [1] https://www.china-briefing.com/news/chinas-entry-exit-k-visa...

China has a global reputational problem that will take decades to fix. The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does. Nobody sane is going to believe rhetoric claiming that the US is somehow worse than a country that keeps 1.5 million people in concentration camps, and where people work 70 hours per week, no matter how many times…

We're close to the tenth year of the era of Trump, so a decade of reputational loss has already taken place. It's the tenth year of leadership by men who should be home yelling at televisions and cheating on golf courses, not leading countries.

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

#416

Post by alex43578 »

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…

There’s also the fact that a huge portion of foreign immigrants to the US don’t and won’t learn English, but can still operate just fine (or even have the system cater to them - press 1 for Spanish).

Look at the uproar over requiring commercial drivers to be able to read road signs in English.

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

#417

Post by FooBarWidget »

neither_color wrote: post #364
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…

It's not just about language. There's no common practical path to becoming "Chinese", either in a legal or cultural sense. Save for a few rare exceptions, you cannot move there, join the culture, become a citizen, etc even if you're fluent. The western systems arent perfect but they allow a greater number of people who really want to assimilate do so regardless of background.

You can by marrying a Chineze citizen. It won't make you a citizen, but you can get long term residence permit, and your children will be Chinese citizen.

They don't do naturalisation of foreigners, that's true. You can only give that to your children.

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

#418

Post by RupertSalt »

alex43578 wrote: post #416
materielle wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There’s also the fact that a huge portion of foreign immigrants to the US don’t and won’t learn English, but can still operate just fine (or even have the system cater to them - press 1 for Spanish). Look at the uproar over requiring commercial drivers to be able to read road signs in English.

Along Interstate 5 in 1980s-90s Southern California, there were large signs, black-on-white, which showed a pictogram of a family running.

The English text above read "WATCH FOR PEOPLE CROSSING ROAD"

The Spanish text below read "PROHIBIDO"

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

#419

Post by tsoukase »

lateforwork wrote: post #112

In all important areas such as clean energy, fusion energy, biotechnology and AI the Chinese government is heavily investing in and pushing Chinese companies to lead the world. China Is Outspending the U.S. to Achieve the ‘Holy Grail’ of Clean Energy: Fusion See: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/13/climate/china-us-fusion-e... America's lead in biotechnology is slipping, while China has made synthetic biology a nation…

China doesn't want as a prime goal to become world leader. They just want to expand their infrastructure, science, production, everything for their own prosperity. If there is no other competitor left, then world leadership will be a by product. They don't suppress foreign countries for that goal (see military presence, coups and secret diplomatic deals in foreign countries that the US was doing after WWII in order to remain at the top by all means). They don't want (until now) to spread their culture worldwide (see language, movies, video games etc) due to the language difficulty. They do want to expand their productive capacity by financing projects in foreign countries, but in a business-as-usual way not in a I-am-the-boss way.

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

#420

Post by alex43578 »

autoexec wrote: post #392
chaostheory wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way it works now is that 20% of the bottom students eat up 80% of a teacher’s time and resources. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing depending on what your goals are. What I am saying is that you can’t have everything. You have to choose. This system this comment describes and the system your comment below describes cannot coexist.

That just means that we need to move the bottom 20% of students into their own classes where they can get the extra attention they need. That means they can get a high quality education and so can everyone else. You do not have to choose. You can have both.

No, you do have to choose because money for education (or anything) isn’t unlimited.

There’s a real question of how many resources and what kind of ROI you’d get from trying to educate that bottom 20% to the same level.

I saw this play out when I was in school: profoundly intellectually disabled students getting 1:1 or even 2:1 teaching, trying to get an 18 year old to be able to read 3 letter words, while AP classes were bloated to 30+ students.

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