ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
while Harvard is very good, it’s not as if their institutions primary purpose is supporting ground breaking work in the physical sciences
Harvard's graduate programs are top tier in basically every science. Schools like Harvard and Yale may think of themselves, and wish to be seen as, liberal arts institutions that act as finishing schools for America's future elite while letting the eggheads at MIT and Caltech do the dirty work of science and engineering, but in practice every elite university has the same set of R1 research programs in STEM, and trying to shut down any of the top ~20 will do approximately the same amount of damage to American science as any other.
More broadly I don’t think that people have really thought through how corrosive having tons of international students is to the us university system (this comment applies to state schools as well as elite institutions). Put succinctly, academics advance their careers by getting grants, and publishing papers. This means paying talented post docs and graduate students. Having an essentially open boarders system for this means that academics can access foreign labor at a fraction of what it would cost to hire us students, so instead of having one or two students who are paid slightly more, you end up with academics who have 8-10 students, 2 of whom are domestic and the rest are international.
Domestic and international grad students and postdocs are paid the same and receive the same benefits. It's not as though you can accept a bunch of Indian PhD students and give them half the normal stipend, at least at any institution I'm familiar with. The size of a lab is usually dictated by how much grant money a particular professor can bring in, with salaries for each position fixed by the university. A new assistant professor might only have enough funding to support a handful of students, while an academic superstar could have dozens of lab members and spend very little time with each one as he jets from one conference to another or advises startups on the side. Some immigrant professors may prefer to bring in people from their home countries, which is annoying, but their labs tend to stay small because they are recruiting from a more limited pool and they write worse papers without native English speakers to assist.
In my experience, a decent fraction of international students at the undergraduate level are spoiled rich kids who could not have gotten into an American university on their academic performance alone, but at the graduate level you get students who are much less concerned with empty prestige (not even Asians would get a PhD just for bragging rights) and are on average smarter and harder working than their domestic counterparts. The ability to brain drain the rest of the world is the superpower that has enabled American dominance in science and technology ever since Operation Paperclip, and destroying it out of spite (at what, I'm not even sure) would be an act of such catastrophic stupidity that it would make a communist dictatorship green with envy.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
Dark chocolate truffles for something sweet and Korean BBQ pork jerky for something savory.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
I think expecting a city-state to have the same sort of industrial manufacturing capacity as nations 4 to 20 times its size is a bit unfair. It's precisely for this reason that Singapore, and Hong Kong before it, intentionally specialized in finance and not in building cars or integrated circuits. The UAE is in a similar position and has chosen the same path. Perhaps being a bank is in some moral sense inferior to being a factory, but if the choices are between that and remaining poor I know what I'd pick.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
No middle eastern countries except perhaps Iran and Turkey have the native human capital to sustain a competitive modern economy. If I were them I would rather copy the Emiratis and bootstrap my development by importing foreign talent and becoming a financial hub than simply coasting on oil money until it runs out. At least the former would have a slightly higher chance of durably improving the living standards of my people.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
I would say the argument for Chinese immersion over Spanish immersion is that it's a lot easier for an adult English-speaker to pick up Spanish down the line if they have a need for or interest in it, whereas they will be unlikely to ever master Chinese pronunciation unless they were exposed to the language at an early age.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
Whose definition of eudaemonia are we using here? Surely a risk-averse conformist with low agency is more likely to be happy with whatever their lot in society is than an iconoclast burning with ambition who chafes at authority? Even if what you value is a life lived in service of humanity's expansion into the cosmos, the differences between men and women derive from women's role in childbearing, which absent artificial wombs is an essential part of any society (and is not well-served by them taking on dangerous tasks and getting killed). If you were in fact able to eliminate this role through technology, then there would be no reason for women as a separate category to exist at all.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
There isn't much research on 3rd generation Asian-Americans, which would be necessary to answer your question, but this study seems to show some convergence in educational outcomes with Hispanics (although it includes all kinds of Asians). I was unfortunately not able to locate another paper I recall reading that showed incomplete convergence of several personality traits between 2nd and 3rd generation Asian immigrants with American averages e.g. something like 25% of the difference along any given axis between 1st generation immigrants and the average American is still present in the 3rd generation. Studies on Asian adoptees will also tell you what the floor is on differences attributable to culture.
Now if I were to guess based on my own observations, I would tell you that 2nd generation immigrants have the highest educational attainment due to parental pressure, followed by a decline to a level somewhat higher than the white average. Criminality, on the other hand, I would expect to increase with each generation, eventually hitting an asymptote somewhat lower than the white average.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
Why do people like you keep acting as though there is a Russian offer of a ceasefire along the current line of control on the table that Ukraine is rejecting out of nationalist spite? The only terms offered so far that I am aware of have included demands that Ukraine cede vast swathes of territory never occupied by Russia, including the city of Zaporizhia, as well as Treaty of Versailles-style demilitarization and Finlandization. Maybe you still think that Zelensky should have accepted those terms because an unjust peace is better than a just war, but surely there is a difference between rejecting those specific proposals and the generalized unwillingness to cede territory under any circumstances that his detractors attribute to him?
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
I don't see any way to do Venus faster than Mars. Even if you cooled it down very quickly with orbital mirrors it would take a long time for the atmosphere to condense out. You can get Mars to a partially terraformed state i.e. stable bodies of water on the surface much faster, although if you wanted to bring in enough nitrogen for an earthlike atmosphere and surface pressure it would take you a lot longer.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
You could stick a giant shield at the L1 point and call it a day.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
The argument for IQ differences between castes in India as I understand it is that Brahmins and Brahmins alone were selected for higher verbal intelligence because they were expected to memorize, recite, and discuss long and complex religious texts, and that those who were better at this were rewarded socially, financially, and by implication reproductively. If this were true, one would expect a bimodal distribution, with the 10% of the Indian population that are Brahmins having higher intelligence and the remaining 90% of all other castes clustering together (however, since each Brahmin jati was itself reproductively isolated from the others, this would introduce additional variation based on how strong the selection was in each case). I don't know enough about ancient Indian culture to know if this is a reasonable assumption, but it is analogous to arguments about Jews being selected for skill at making Talmudic arguments or interpreting the Torah.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
I was referring to Kiev, the first capital of the original Rus state from which modern Russia claims cultural, linguistic, and religious continuity. To the extent that one can claim that Russia itself is ancient (which is debatable), Kiev was a part of it. It is true that the territories that comprise "Novorussia" in the southeast of Ukraine were seized from the Crimean Khanate over a thousand years later, but they are peripheral to the importance of Ukraine in the Russian mind, despite having been easier for them to conquer in the current war on account of their terrain and their population not having gone through the cultural separation from Moscow and St. Petersburg that the rest of Ukraine has.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
I did not mean to imply that there were no historical ties between Taiwan and China, only that Taiwan is not thick with collective memory for Chinese people the same way that Ukraine is for Russians or say Kosovo is for Serbians. No Warring States philosophers, Three Kingdoms generals, or Tang Dynasty poets ever lived, fought, or even set foot there, and Han settlers only arrived in Taiwan in large numbers at about the same time the US (i.e. a country "with no history" according to most Chinese) was being colonized by the British.
For what it's worth, while I feel the need to point out that the cultural, linguistic, and political differences between Taiwan and mainland China are already greater than those between the 13 colonies and England on the eve of the American Revolution, I don't have any firm position on Taiwanese independence, only that fighting a major war in East Asia would be a catastrophe and probably lead to at least a half dozen of the greatest cities in the world being blown to pieces by missiles and drone strikes, since Japan, Korea, etc. would likely be dragged in. However, I can tell you that my relatives in Taiwan have in the last five years gone from being dyed-in-the-wool Chinese nationalists (as in they would be insulted if you called them Taiwanese) who wished for reunification to basically the exact opposite position (China is the enemy, we are not the same). I don't consume enough Chinese language media and news to be able to tell if this is based on an honest assessment of PRC statements and positions in recent years, or whether they have been sucked down a social media/propaganda rabbithole of some sort, but presumably the latter is at least a contributing factor, and this does not bode well for the future stability of the region.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
I think if you focus on old-school forums you will miss out on where a lot of discussion is happening these days, namely Twitter/X, Substack comment threads, and private Discord servers. The first two in particular host a growing collection of in some cases relatively influential Motte alumni that you could follow or whose networks you could poke around in to curate your own feed. If you don't like any of those guys, then it may take a little longer to get the recommendations you want, but the algorithm is a hell of a thing and will get the job done eventually.
As to your more fundamental point, I don't see how this moment in particular is much different from any since the creation of the internet (I wasn't around for them, but maybe early reddit and some previous iteration of 4chan were really that great?). It takes a very particular sort of high IQ, high-decoupling, politically-interested wordcel to be a successful rules-following contributor here and I think it's to be expected that there are less than a dozen places online where such individuals congregate in sufficient numbers to be noticeable.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
Russia and China's positions on Ukraine and Taiwan are first and foremost based on nationalism and what you could call ethnic sovereignty, and only secondarily based on pragmatic security concerns. You can read Putin's essay on the topic for a pretty clear description of what motivates him. Some excerpts below:
Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are all descendants of Ancient Rus, which was the largest state in Europe.
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Most importantly, people both in the western and eastern Russian lands spoke the same language. Their faith was Orthodox. Up to the middle of the 15th century, the unified church government remained in place.
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The incorporation of the western Russian lands into the single state was not merely the result of political and diplomatic decisions. It was underlain by the common faith, shared cultural traditions, and – I would like to emphasize it once again – language similarity.
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At the same time, the idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians started to form and gain ground among the Polish elite and a part of the Malorussian intelligentsia. Since there was no historical basis – and could not have been any, conclusions were substantiated by all sorts of concoctions, which went as far as to claim that the Ukrainians are the true Slavs and the Russians, the Muscovites, are not. Such ”hypotheses“ became increasingly used for political purposes as a tool of rivalry between European states.
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But in 1991, all those territories, and, which is more important, people, found themselves abroad overnight, taken away, this time indeed, from their historical motherland.
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In essence, Ukraine's ruling circles decided to justify their country's independence through the denial of its past, however, except for border issues. They began to mythologize and rewrite history, edit out everything that united us, and refer to the period when Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union as an occupation. The common tragedy of collectivization and famine of the early 1930s was portrayed as the genocide of the Ukrainian people.
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Step by step, Ukraine was dragged into a dangerous geopolitical game aimed at turning Ukraine into a barrier between Europe and Russia, a springboard against Russia. Inevitably, there came a time when the concept of ”Ukraine is not Russia“ was no longer an option. There was a need for the ”anti-Russia“ concept which we will never accept.
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It would not be an exaggeration to say that the path of forced assimilation, the formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state, aggressive towards Russia, is comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us.
You can see that while the idea that Ukraine is a springboard for foreign powers to threaten Russia geopolitically makes an appearance, issues of national identity take precedence, including the idea that Ukrainian identity itself is a weapon that threatens Russia. This is not the kind of essay an American could or would write about Cuba in 1962, which is a case when there was a strategic threat from a foreign power without any shared ancient history or blood and soil concerns involved.
As for Taiwan, while it is not an ancient part of China the way Ukraine is an ancient part of Russia, its significance is that it is the last piece of territory (with a Han majority) taken from Qing China by foreign powers during the Century of Humiliation that remains outside of PRC control today. The CCP justifies its rule to a domestic audience by claiming that only they can undo the damage done by the Western powers and Japan during those years, firstly by making China too rich and powerful to be invaded or subjugated ever again and secondly by getting back all the territory that was stolen from them, including Taiwan. The fact that Taiwan is part of the First Island Chain with the potential to strangle Chinese naval trade in the event of a war is certainly of interest to their military planners, but it is a distant second in terms of motivations for invading or blockading the island.
I think Americans often have trouble understanding the way nationalists in other parts of the world think because it is quite alien to their own thought process, but imagine for a moment if most Anglo-Canadians were still diehard royalists who held a grudge against the US for expelling their ancestors during the Revolution and for being traitors who deny their true English identity, and would seize on any opportunity to punish them and force them back into the imperial fold. Sure, there might be offshore oil wells, cod fisheries, or Great Lakes ports of strategic importance involved in any dispute, but that's not really what it would be about.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
For the most part, they don't understand how immigration works, imagining they can just go to relatives in e.g. Norway (surely, only the US has immigration laws!)
The ones I know seem to at least be very well-informed about the exact paperwork and criteria needed to claim citizenship by descent in a half-dozen EU nations, and have hired genealogists and translators to track down the appropriate documents. Either that or they're applying to Master's or PhD programs in the Netherlands, Germany, etc.
What do we do now (that we "won")? What interesting projects do we have to move forward?
Did we win? I suppose I'm tired of winning then, just as promised. Regardless, everyone's project should always be to build a functional community in whatever way you see fit: befriending your neighbors, starting a club based around your favorite hobby, learning practical skills and teaching them to others, starting a family, and so on.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
ARM
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
I mean, perhaps some people are concerned about brain drain solely from the perspective of a zero-sum competition with other countries, but I think that letting these people's talent go to waste is a loss for humanity as a whole.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
France was demonstrably the first country in Europe to undergo the demographic transition and has a higher fertility rate today than its neighbors (I picked a source from before the recent migration wave to eliminate that confounder).
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
In my experience, there are a substantial number of ideologically captured researchers working in hard science fields where it doesn't affect their output very much, but who would consider moving to Europe if they felt the government was sufficiently hostile to their politics. Losing these people would result in serious brain drain, even if it would probably make the social sciences more productive.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
Any country that passes through this population bottleneck experiences immediate and intense natural selection for increased fertility, which means that those nations that started earlier (France in the case of Europe and Japan in the case of East Asia) will revert sooner to a more sustainable birthrate. There is also more variation within Japan itself than Korea, with minorities such as Okinawans bringing up the average fertility. Lastly, Japan has in recent years implemented a more liberal immigration policy, with large numbers of Vietnamese, Filipino, Chinese, Indonesian, etc. workers (or mail-order brides) moving in to maintain the integrity of the labor force and having more children than the natives.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
I think some people certainly conflate "rule of law(s), which happen to have been established by a democracy" and "rule of law(s), which are by their nature inherently democratic", with the latter paving the way for tyranny. This intersects with disagreements over the definition of democracy, where one side claims it means "following the set of prescribed rules we have established for maintaining a representative government" and the other claims it means "the majority get to dictate policy with absolute unconstrained authority (at least whenever I agree with the majority)".
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
This is the latest report, but I first came across these details on Twitter last month.
I think your LGBT and mental illness criteria are too strict, as they would exclude many young women who identify as bisexual or mentally ill due to peer pressure/social contagion and not because they belong in those categories as traditionally defined. For most of them it's just a phase they will grow out of, just as being an online edgelord with political opinions it would be unwise to discuss in polite company is for most of the young men here (no offense intended, I count myself among you).
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