Well deserved.
We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science
461–470 of 606 posts
Re: We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science
#462Earlier 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?
> US Executive Branch isn't compromised by our enemies
Or maybe the rots are within? It's tempting to trivially assume it's outside. I'd say they are mostly come from within and beyond Trump admin.
Re: We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
How important can that be? America’s only real competitor technologically is China. And they’ve had essentially no immigration of “top talent.”
Ask this again in 40 years. The people we're losing are early career researchers, so this is really a generational loss of talent that we've created. Brain drains can become self-perpetuating once they start.
Germany was in almost this exact situation. It was a self-perpetuating machine for centuries, where ambitious students came to study under the best professors, leading to top students, many of which stayed at those universities to become top professors themselves. Then WW1 put a bit of a damper on that, and the 1930s and 1940s broke it. Germany is still not insignificant in science, but really a shadow of its former self
And that was despite putting an emphasis on education, and the 1930s and 1940s having a lot of science funding. Remove the people and the flywheel stops
Re: We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
China has 3X more people, and America has a relatively terrible education system, so they have to import talented people who were educated elsewhere.
America has a very good education system against the backdrop of challenging sociological factors and mass low-skill immigration. In the PISA exam, white American kids outperform kids in Hong Kong and Korea, as well as western european kids of non-immigrant ancestry. The American education system has major and important challenges, such as how to educate the large share of kids whose parents are economic migrants fro…
> against the backdrop of challenging sociological factors and mass low-skill immigration
I'm pretty sure that poverty is the issue here. Kids who don't get enough to eat, don't get enough time (or perhaps too much time in some sad cases) with their parents, kids who don't have many opportunities tend to do worse at standardised testing.
This is entirely fixable, but it's not (unfortunately) just a matter of funding schools more.
Re: We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science
#465>"Billions of dollars have been wiped from research budgets, almost 8,000 grants have been cancelled at NIH and the US National Science Foundation alone, and more than 1,000 NIH employees have been fired." ---------------- Scientists go where science is funded. A large proportion of U.S. scientists are also immigrants, who will tend to go where immigrants are welcomed.
Not everything is about money. The killer app of the US used to be that the US was rich and welcoming to foreigners and politically quite free. China or Saudi Arabia can wave their money around, but at least some people will be repulsed by the obligation to keep their mouths shut and praise the Dear Leader. Their cultural insularity does not help either. You can live in China, but you will never be accepted as Chines…
US State Department already asked for social media accounts. Chinese visa applications dont.
Re: We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science
#466In 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…
But related to this article, is China winning in terms of accumulating talent? I don’t think people all over Europe/Asia/Africa migrate to China. If they succeed, it’s purely with their own talent. The US still has that advantage even if it has less of it, unless I am mistaken.
>>I don’t think people all over Europe/Asia/Africa migrate to China.
All over? No. But I know several software engineers who went to China to work in tech and they can't stop raving about how good they have it there - one came back to work for a US company(remotely from his EU country) and is now desperate to find some more work in China again, he liked it that much. The language barrier is a problem sure, but then again I also know software engineers who went to work in Germany and after years they don't speak a lick of German. It's not an insurmountable problem.
Re: We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science
#467This kind of Level 1 analysis misses what is really going on. "Brain drain" is not really a concern. There is a tremendous glut of talented biomedical researchers. We have been overproducing them for decades. Even before the cuts, it was incredibly hard to go from a PhD to a tenured professorship. 5-15% would achieve that, depending how you measured. The cuts have made things worse, but European/RoW funding is even s…
> We need to produce fewer PhDs and provide better support for those we do produce.
You'll have gluts of Masters then and so on.
Re: We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science
#468Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. And what is the EU doing to attract American talent that doesn't want to live under the Trump regime with his ICE stormtroopers? Nothing really. Meanwhile, highly accomplished people in the US with Chinese ancestry are being wooed to China to do important R&D there.
Did you just compare Chinese immigration enforcement favorably against "ICE stormtroopers"? Foreigners in China have to tell the police where they live, even if it's just a stay in a hotel, and they get deported very quickly for minor crimes. There isn't a problem of illegal immigration in China because the police are so strict, nobody can get away with it!
>>and they get deported very quickly for minor crimes
As compared to that Irish guy who has been in the US concentration camp for 5 months now, the court ordered his release which ICE just ignored and they won't deport him either. Yeah, definitely sounds much better than what China is doing.
Re: We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science
#469Earlier quoted context omitted.
But related to this article, is China winning in terms of accumulating talent? I don’t think people all over Europe/Asia/Africa migrate to China. If they succeed, it’s purely with their own talent. The US still has that advantage even if it has less of it, unless I am mistaken.
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…
[flagged]
Re: We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science
#470Earlier 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…
[deleted]