Earlier quoted context omitted.
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What if I feel terrible for the children, but feel a smug delight over watching their parents mourn the loss that they could have easily prevented?
Then you are a psychopath. I truly feel sorry for you.
We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science
511–520 of 606 posts
Re: We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science
#512Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Meanwhile the written language has almost no correlation with the spoken language. Oh, just like English! /s sorry I'm only half-joking but written English makes no sense
I've been learning Greek at the same time my son has been learning to write. By my count, Greek has like 40 basic pronunciation rules; English has something like 500. But I also spent over a decade learning Mandarin and am still trying to maintain it... the characters are just another level. My son at least can take a stab at reading words he hasn't seen before; having to look up basically every new character is quit…
My favorite recent oddity:
I was driven to the store, so I drove to the store. The store drove me there.
My passenger was driven to the store so he asked me to drive him to the store. So since the store was driving us to the store, I drove us to the store. We've become good friends since he was driven to the store. I'm glad the store drove us to the store.
Even though I usually prefer to drive cattle.
Re: We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science
#513Earlier quoted context omitted.
Saphire-Worff is dead; but I think language matters more than we usually assume. My favourite example is Arabic, which is both an old and hard to extend language. In Arabic you would have a hard time to express the concept of „a foreigner who is citizen but resides out of state“. Not that we often speak about this concept in English, but the word used to refer to „citizens“ carries the connotation of „nation“ and the…
Can you be more specific about what makes it "hard to extend?"
It has a Root-pattern morphology in which words optimally derive from a set of 3 or 4 consonants.
To some extend those roots can even be grouped into meta roots.
Loan words do not easily slide into this. New words are less easily made up than e.g. in German, where you can just concatenate.
Lots of words have been around for a long time, since quranic Arabic influences the language still, and as a result have layers of meaning.
Re: We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science
#514Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you suggesting that anyone who lives and works here in the US can be accepted as “American”? Are you also implying that in the US anyone is free to speak negatively of “dear leader”? There are a multitude of current examples to the contrary.
> Are you suggesting that anyone who lives and works here in the US can be accepted as “American”? Whether you're born in Moscow and named Sergey Mikhailovich Brin, or born in Pretoria and named Elon Reeve Musk, or born in Hyderabad and named Satya Narayana Nadella, born in Frankfurt and named Peter Andreas Thiel - America has a place for you. Maybe even your own government department. In America a man can find accep…
Does it apply just to billionaires?
Re: We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science
#515Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Meanwhile the written language has almost no correlation with the spoken language. Oh, just like English! /s sorry I'm only half-joking but written English makes no sense
I've been learning Greek at the same time my son has been learning to write. By my count, Greek has like 40 basic pronunciation rules; English has something like 500. But I also spent over a decade learning Mandarin and am still trying to maintain it... the characters are just another level. My son at least can take a stab at reading words he hasn't seen before; having to look up basically every new character is quit…
It's like learning to read English after speaking fluently for a few years. You may only need the letter sounds and then you can guess the rest. Learning Chinese works that way. You learn some basic characters and then you can guess the rest. (Learning to write without a computer is definitely more of a challenge though.)
Re: We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science
#516For an American startup/technology forum, this place is remarkably anti-America, anti-capitalism, anti-AI, anti-crypto.
There’s a massive difference between being patriotic and being pro-Meta or pro-Google. And given recent bribes from tech leaders to Trump, I’d argue being anti-BigTech is actually patriotic.
Re: We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science
#517Earlier 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…
> 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.
Do I wish I spoke English natively? Not really, but these anecdotals are... interesting.
Re: We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science
#518Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> In the PISA exam, white American kids outperform kids in Hong Kong and Korea, as well as western european kids of non-immigrant ancestry. Translation: rich kids have better access to top education in America. Got it.
White people in the U.S. aren’t just the “rich” subset of the whole population. They are reflect a complete spectrum, from poor to rich. They’re equivalent to Koreans in Korea or Japanese in Japan. Other groups in the U.S. aren’t just economically different, they’re sociologically different in dimensions that don’t really exist in Korea or Japan.
For example, 71% of hispanics speak Spanish at home. That reflects a group that’s comprised mostly of immigrants and their children. That poses additional challenges to education, beyond the economic differences. Poor whites in the U.S. and poor Koreans in Korea may have educational challenges from being poor. But that poverty isn’t layered with being raised in a household with immigrant parents who are in an unfamiliar country and probably don’t speak English fluently. That’s an additional layer of challenges that needs to be accounted for in comparing across countries.
Re: We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science
#519Earlier quoted context omitted.
China’s pool is smaller than it seems. China has pursued a development trajectory that focuses on the leading provinces first. That is reasonable. Better to get Beijing and a few other key places to the leading edge first, instead of trying to incrementally move all 1.4 billion people together at the same pace. But the flip side of that is that China’s talent pool is a lot smaller, in practice, than 1.4 billion. Beca…
US pool is also smaller than it seems. US doesn't have world / 8B to draw from, it has ~1B English speakers where 400-500m where EN is primary, another 600m where English is proficient. Shared with other advanced economy / Anglo institutions. Vs PRC has 1.2B Mandarin. US pool is also immigration gated, even with PRC's shit TFR, PRC will still knock ~2x new births for the foreseeable future vs US 3m newborn+immigratio…
> tertiary enrollment (currently 60%) or tertiary (40%
E: sentence meant 60% tertiary enrollment of which 40% is STEM... aka they're "only" throwing 1/4 of cohort into STEM with 2 denominators to raise.
Re: We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science
#520Earlier quoted context omitted.
This suggests that our executive branch has fallen under the influence of foreign agents through blackmail or coercion of some sort. Whereas the simpler and more obvious explanation is that the US President shares the general outlook and values of America’s enemies and thus naturally acts in their interests without persuasion needed.
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The U.S. is under control of the Israel? We all know what you really mean.
How do messages like this end up on HN? Is it the Reddit sub we have that's attracting these types of people?