site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32498 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

9
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The libertarian Cato institute points out that the US has been losing international scientists in recent years whereas not only has China gained but so has "non-US OECD" countries. The latter is code for Europe and AU/NZ/CA.

The immediate cause is probably the misguided and arguably racist "China initiative" which essentially led to a witch-hunt against ethnic Chinese people. But I suspect domestic factors in China and Europe are also responsible. Both have been ramping up R&D spending in recent years and visa policies in Europe are often more favorable for researchers than American policies are. Easier to get and easier to stay.

It is no exaggeration to say that most of STEM innovation in US academia is now being carried out by foreign-born people. So this development should worry Americans. I also think many people in the West underestimate how much genuine innovation there is in China. Viewing data from the Nature Index, which tracks elite science production, it isn't clear that China is far behind anymore. If at all. In areas like EV batteries, China is now ahead of the West. Progress in their semiconductor industry has been faster than even many insiders had expected.

I still think the US has a series of unique advantages over its competitors, but falling prey to scare-mongering campaigns and McCarthyite tactics isn't going to capitalise on them.

A simpler answer is Affirmative Action. It's notoriously hard for the Chinese of American descent to get into a university once, let alone repeatedly, and then get hired by one. They're the least favored demographic for admissions and hiring. Why wouldn't they return to China?

Why wouldn't they return to China?

Twenty or even ten years ago they probably wouldn't because the opportunities back home would have been meager, so instead of the US they'd likely move to Western countries without such a racial system of institutionalised discrimination. That may still happen to some extent, but the difference today is that their domestic research ecosystem is already world-class. That makes all the difference, so there is not only a pull-factor but it's combined with a push-factor (China initative).

Don't forget the anti-jihadist immigration stance that excluded a lot of talent.

If I am a scientist that has an option to work in China or in the US, what would be my incentive for the US? I guess money can be an incentive, but China could match that if they wanted now, they're not poor anymore. Living in a free country and not being subject to the whim of the oppressive fascist regime and having to censor one's speech and scientific inquiry constantly - could be a huge factor. And there was time where the US held a huge advantage on that. But combined air of suspicion (may be in some small part even justified) towards Chinese-born scientists and widely-publicized cases of wrongful prosecution, with the general air of ideological conformity (of a different kind, but similar fervor) in the academia in general, where liking a wrong tweet could get you hunted by the mobs and fired from your job - makes one question, how big is the difference now? Sure, there is some, you won't be jailed yet for saying men can't get pregnant (though many members of Congress are already writing "hate speech" laws which would make it happen), but you can very well be made unable to work as a scientist - the distance is decreasing rapidly, and with increased politicizing of science, one may reasonably conclude that the choice is not between freedom and political control anymore, but between two forms of political control. So, if the US is no longer the shining beacon of freedom on the hill, it comes back to who could offer more. And I imagine, to some people China would be willing to offer more.

On the other hand, by working in the US you get to live in a quirky but very pleasant first world country in which you can generally do whatever you want. By working in China, you get to live in a middle income industrial zone(you will notice that industrial zones in the US are not very popular places to live) under a brutal dictatorship, where the sky is literally blotted out with pollution.

I'm a scientist working in the US and I got one of these offers to work in China for a ton of money and family and school support. I didn't even consider it except to laugh about it with friends and family.

China sucks, up and down. I am convinced that the people who think that life in China is in anyway as good as life in the US are too young or too poor to know what high quality life in the US is like. My quality of life in China would be so much worse than my quality of life in the US even with all these financial and status inducements. The food sucks. The housing sucks. The culture sucks. Frankly, the people suck too. The best stuff is a bad imitation of western culture. Westerners that go to Shanghai and think its bright and shiny honestly have peasant taste or have never experienced the actual high-quality things that New York has to offer. And despite all the kvetching on here about increased politicalizing of science, soft limits on free speech, and so on, this is basically all negligible and only noticeable because the baseline is so good. I teach at a big progressive university and "cancelling" is basically made up and not something that actually happens, and when it does, the administration clamps down on it hard and the cancellers shut up.

The on-the-ground reality in China, that I hear from Chinese colleagues, is factually and materially a million times worse. This million talents thing, or whatever the latest version is called, is an absurd joke that only attracts the very worst scientists and academics working in the US. You might not know this from pure numbers, but when you look at the mature researchers who go, or the PhD students who go, we are not, as they say, sending our best.

This isn't just US chauvinism, I would 100% consider a similar offer in Korea or Japan or the UK or France or even Hong Kong 10 years ago. China is just uniquely bad in ways I find almost impossible to overstate.

I teach at a big progressive university and "cancelling" is basically made up and not something that actually happens, and when it does, the administration clamps down on it hard and the cancellers shut up.

Can you please expand on this because I find it hard to believe but maybe I'm just too online.

Probably nobody gets cancelled because they all know what to say and what not to say and keep their mouths firmly shut.

I think the truth is somewhere in between.

There are unique advantages and drawbacks to both, but if you are a credible and accredited scientist working in a high-value field such as medicine or AI, I would say the US still offers more money and opportunities. Quality of life is, in both countries, exceptionally dependent on where you go. There are places in both the US and China that I would not want to ever visit, or even pass by, without a heavily armed personal escort that would suffer no repercussions for shooting bystanders.

People is a tossup. I think in America the variance is higher, it's a culture and society that says one thing and does another and lionizes exceptionalism of all sorts. China tends to squash everyone down into the same paste by design.

Food is again, exceptionally dependent on where you go.

I definitely do think the attitude towards foreigners has gotten significantly worse in China over the last decade and a half. 2013 China and 2023 China are, for foreigners, quite different.

The food sucks. The housing sucks. The culture sucks. Frankly, the people suck too. The best stuff is a bad imitation of western culture.

I think these are worth elaboration. It’s not an obvious given.

It probably sucks to be an average Chinese person, but if you are coming in with a PhD from an American university and are offered a tenured professorship with guaranteed funding and a lab full of peons to order around I don’t think it's so unbelievable that some would take the deal.

While some aspects of the material culture are noticeably worse, the people and food are going to be a plus for any returning Chinese or Chinese-American. You don’t have to walk over human excrement and watch your back at night like you would in California, and if you're in the dating market the women are skinnier and quite fond of foreigners or those who have been abroad.

I'm not sure quite what you mean by "peasant taste," but I don’t really see the point in having a ton of opera houses (or your choice of cultural amenity) if you have a decent chance of getting mugged or shot leaving them as though you were in the prologue to a Batman movie.

Most of the US is not San Francisco.

I'm not sure quite what you mean by "peasant taste," but I don’t really see the point in having a ton of opera houses (or your choice of cultural amenity) if you have a decent chance of getting mugged

That was exactly my reasoning when we decided to leave California. Yes, we have all those museums and operas and ballets, but what is the use of it if we don't want to set the foot in the city they're located in, and if we do, we have to think whether our car will be broken into (the answer is - yes) and whether we will step into poo on the way back to it. Of course, one can say this is still the peasant thinking - real high-quality people have a chaffeur that drives them to a private entrance (or maybe a private helicopter that lands them onto the roof of the opera house? I admittedly too peasant to know such things) and they don't have to experience any of the peasant problems. But I wonder does the sciencing really pay that well for a common scientist?

The housing sucks. The culture sucks. Frankly, the people suck too

Are you Chinese-born? I think the perspective would be different for someone who was born into the culture and somebody who comes from outside. I mean, it is not necessarily one-sided, as I've seen Chinese-born people resenting the culture, and immigrants loving the culture, but I think there's still a difference. For me, it'd take literally millions (many, many of them) to even consider going to China (and I probably won't agree anyway), because I think the whole culture would be so alien for me (and I'm not even a scientist). But for somebody that feels at home in that culture, it may be a different calculation.

I teach at a big progressive university and "cancelling" is basically made up and not something that actually happens

You seem to be in a good place. I am not sure though your personal experience covers the whole US - from what I am seeing reported, cancelling is definitely something that happens, at least in some places, though maybe not in the place where you work. Don't get me wrong - I am nowhere near saying US got is as bad as China. Just that US it moving closer to China, and by that losing its relative advantage.

TvTropes calls this “acceptable ethnic targets,” although that article is “under discussion in the Trope Repair shop” for reasons.

It’s always been amusing to me while browsing Reddit subs or having irl interactions to see the types that would normally shriek and pearl-clutch at racial crime/IQ statistics bang the drum and go on rants about Chinese students/researchers being soulless, uncreative, cheating drones and possible spies.

It's depressing because it implies their anti-racist veneer is mostly a function of status-seeking rather than conviction. I suspect that is the case for many if not most such people.

I agree wholeheartedly with your overall point. Bringing top-tier scientists to the US, keeping them here and convincing them to buy into our system should be a national priority. That being said, depending on precisely what you mean, I disagree with:

The immediate cause is probably the misguided and arguably racist "China initiative" which essentially led to a witch-hunt against ethnic Chinese people.

Chinese intelligence services are clearly targeting Chinese-born nationals who have joined firms doing cutting-edge work not only in defense but any economically valuable industry:

Although China publicly denies engaging in economic espionage, Chinese officials will indirectly acknowledge behind closed doors that the theft of intellectual property from overseas is state policy. James Lewis, a former diplomat now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, recalls participating in a meeting in 2014 or so at which Chinese and American government representatives, including an officer from the People’s Liberation Army, discussed the subject. “An assistant secretary from the U.S. Department of Defense was explaining: Look, spying is OK — we spy, you spy, everybody spies, but it’s for political and military purposes,” Lewis recounted for me. “It’s for national security. What we object to is your economic espionage. And a senior P.L.A. colonel said: Well, wait. We don’t draw the line between national security and economic espionage the way you do. Anything that builds our economy is good for our national security.” The U.S. government’s response increasingly appears to be a mirror image of the Chinese perspective: In the view of U.S. officials, the threat posed to America’s economic interests by Chinese espionage is a threat to American national security.

In the life sciences, it's relatively easy (or was relatively easy, once upon a time) to win investment from Chinese VCs but you might notice a Chinese firm doing the exact same thing as you materialize soon afterwards. Unfortunately, it's difficult for me to find quantitative data on the subject to convince you that it isn't a witch-hunt, but it certainly seems quokka-ish to imagine that the Chinese want to play fair in this one single economic arena - particularly given that their stated goals say otherwise.

I suppose the argument is that one shouldn't treat all ethnic Chinese as a giant blog of Borg working in perfect co-ordination. While the Chinese government and some of their VC firms do act like you describe, many ordinary Chinese people have nothing to do with it but were unfairly targeted in a broad campaign that often was remarkably crass in its target-selection - as even former administrators of the program now admit.

The immediate cause is probably the misguided and arguably racist "China initiative" which essentially led to a witch-hunt against ethnic Chinese people.

Isn't the more obvious trigger to losing foreign academics the multi-year Covid travel problems? People couldn't get in, or they were worried they couldn't get back home if they came, or they needed a vaccination that not all of them wanted in order to travel. Throw on top that a ton of research was interrupted by Covid closures, and it's not surprising to see this.

College closures and/or absurd social restrictions during covid also probably had an impact on attracting talent. I've written before about the role of college as a cultural Rumspringa. American colleges offer a pretty great environment for grad students to hang out, eliminate that and a lot of value of studying in the USA is eliminated. Get rid of foreign grad students in 2020, and they aren't doing pathbreaking doctoral research later? Idk I'm not as familiar as I'd like to be with this stuff.

Isn't the more obvious trigger to losing foreign academics the multi-year Covid travel problems?

Well, the issue with that interpretation is it doesn't describe how not only China but also "non-US OECD" countries have gained. In other words, what's being measured aren't domestic citizens not going abroad but non-citizens coming in. Certainly China's zero covid policies were brutal yet they still gained folks from abroad and so did countries in Europe, Australia, Canada etc.

It is no exaggeration to say that most of STEM innovation in US academia is now being carried out by foreign-born people.

This may be true overall, but I think it's somewhat exaggerated because what we discuss as "STEM innovation" is colored by high-profile tech companies that generally broadcast their research far and wide. If you're talking OpenAI and Google, sure. But there are significant classes of employers that are restricted to either citizens or at least permanent residents (green cards). SpaceX isn't hiring Chinese nationals. The largest employer of mathematicians in the US only hires citizens and generally holds its research very close to the chest, as do the national labs.

I think an unbiased sample of "STEM innovations" is harder to measure in real-time than it sounds. But also that concern about US research output is not necessarily misplaced.

You didn’t argue your main point, though, at all. Why is it McCarthyite tactics, a witch-hunt, and scare-mongering?

The opposing side’s argument is simple. Our geopolitical rival, which is close to an ethno-state, benefits from the education we give their students, who then go back to China. Those slots could be taken by American students. There’s another argument: forcing universities to hire Americans to compete globally (and while we’re there, forcing companies to hire Americans) means forcing a cultural shift where leaders now have to start seriously considering how education can be improved. On this last point, maybe the “Imperial Examination” style educational model is a better fit for Chinese and not Americans, and Americans uniquely benefit from teacher-pupil relationships for cultural or genetic reasons.

Those slots could be taken by American students

Does America have enough smart people? Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of smart Americans but the rest of the world combined has more. Way, way more. So it is a smart idea to select the very best for the most prestigious STEM institutions - which is precisely what the US has been doing. It'd be foolish to stop or even put a damper on it.

forcing universities to hire Americans to compete globally

This would mean the US loses about 85% of available scientific resources. OK, let's say it's not equally distributed, and for one reason or another having Einstein come from Germany is much more likely than from Central African Republic, but "Americans" cuts off both venues.

With that, is "American" here? American citizen? You'd get an immense pressure to have fast-track citizenship in order to compete, and you're back to square one, minus talented scientists that for some reason don't want to accept American citizenship (likely because they don't need to, having plenty of other offers) - so you just handicap American resources.

means forcing a cultural shift where leaders now have to start seriously considering how education can be improved

The "leaders" have been "considering" ways to improve education for many decades now, and the conclusion so far is that the fact that the public schools output people that can't read and count is because the society is "systemically racist" and we need more DIE indoctrination and possibly reparations, and maybe just abolish tests and grades altogether because it's all white supremacy culture anyway. Why do you expect that banning non-Americans would make it go any better is a mystery to me.

Your latter argument is wholly correct but also misleading, since it concerns commercialisation where America's capitalist system easily beats the one-party state of China. While some go into academia to make money, preferably in start-ups, a lot of researchers don't dream of making big money but of making a big scientific impact. Having a comfortable but not wildly high salary is sufficient.

If you're a Mandarin-speaker it isn't at all clear if the US has a clear advantage over China at the elite level in fields like chemistry or physics today. In fact, it is unlikely.

The reason I see American-trained researchers returning to China is that they can get a tenured professorship (or whatever their equivalent is) out the gate instead of grinding away as an adjunct for seven or eight years with little job security. Even with less grant money, many are happy to take the sure thing. That combined with being locked out of certain fields in the US for national security reasons has led to the majority of them choosing to go home starting around five years ago.

The highest value research is always going to happen in the US because US pay for top academics is 3-5x what it is in Western Europe

I see this perception changing among my peers. The H1b, Green card and general immigration annoyances are finally getting to people. The increased anxiety every time you leave the country and the stamping process has being to wear on them.

I know quite a few top researchers who decided to move to Europe because of the better laid out immigration process. It's funny. Technically it is faster to get a green card in the US (except Indians, Chinese and Mexicans), yet the process is the most painful. Your visa can rejected for any reason, and you are left with no recourse. Anecdotally, every single one of my peers who moved to Europe (Taking a more than 50% pay-cut, around 70% pay-cut post tax) is happier for having moved than staying in the US.

Money doesn't help much when you're living in NYC / SF / Seattle / Boston. Not like you can afford to buy a house anyway.

Note: I am not talking about academics here. My experience is that the most exciting work in any field worth talking about is happening in industry labs. Pharmacy, Genomics, CS, AI ..... all in the industry.

I see this perception changing among my peers. The H1b, Green card and general immigration annoyances are finally getting to people. The increased anxiety every time you leave the country and the stamping process has being to wear on them.

Ridiculous that it has to be this way when the whole immigration problem in America is illegal crossings on the southern border, not skilled talent doing awesome stuff here. Like way to just completely miss the point (I am saying this not to you but to those who determine US immigration policy)

Housing in Europe is much more expensive than in US, so this is hardly a reason to stay in Europe.

For a concrete example, apartments in Paris are something like 12k EUR/square meter, so a one bedroom 600 sq ft (55 m^2) apartment will set you back 660k EUR. Meanwhile, in NYC, you’ll pay something like $1500/sq foot, so comparable apartment will be $900k.

Now let’s compare wages. A postdoc in Paris will be lucky if he makes 30k EUR a year, so it’s 20 years of toil to buy a one bedroom. A full professor will take 50-70k EUR, so that’s 10 years for 1 bedroom apartment. Meanwhile, in NYC, a postdoc will make at least $50k (typically more like $60k), and full professor will make at least $100k.

And that’s the worst place in the country! Most places are much cheaper than NYC, whereas most European cities have atrocious ratio of pay to housing cost.

Money doesn't help much when you're living in NYC / SF / Seattle / Boston. Not like you can afford to buy a house anyway.

Note: I am not talking about academics here. My experience is that the most exciting work in any field worth talking about is happening in industry labs. Pharmacy, Genomics, CS, AI ..... all in the industry.

If you can't buy a house in the NYC, Seattle, or Boston areas as an industry PhD in the hotter industries, you definitely screwed up your salary negotiations. I don't even think SF is so expensive that taking a 70% pay cut is going to be worth it to live in a major city in Europe.

The immigration stuff is true though; US immigration sucks, no doubt about it.

I think this overestimates the extent to which top academics are willing to move countries based on money alone. To begin with, top academics almost always could earn more by doing something other than being academics, which should already strongly suggest that there are other important terms in their value functions. Europe has remarkable gaps in academic pay between adjacent and similar countries (I'm aware of Sweden (laughably low) vs. Denmark (quite respectable)), without a corresponding research quality difference being apparent. I myself am an academic who is currently taking a basically voluntary pay cut to be in a European country I had no preexisting ties to rather than staying in the US. Based on my own preferences and those of others I know, the main reasons invoked for going to the US are network effects (everyone else is there, most top conferences are held there), for which money at most seems to take a seeding role (which failed to manifest in my field, resulting in me being where I am for the same networking reasons among others).

You're both dancing around the real issue IMO, which is not salary but research funding. If you offer a professor a million dollar research budget, access to the best students/postdocs and a $75,000 USD salary the vast majority would leap at the opportunity. Besides, there's always the option of commercializing your research and serving on boards and such in the USA.

In aggregate China spends quite a bit on research, but when you look at the actual grant size people are receiving it's quite low. Compare the US situation to Canada; in Canada most labs subsist on a single CIHR grant that awards less than 200k per year, and while the paylines (rates of success) for a single grant are higher, it's very hard to win multiple of the main CIHR grants. In the US, R01s (the bread and butter grant for a research lab) pays 400-500k per year and many people have multiple R01s, program grants, R21s and access to a huge amount of private and philanthropic capital. The same scenario plays out at the postdoc/PhD level; do you want access to that capital to do actual cutting edge work surrounded by the most motivated gunners in the world? Move to the US.

I had the misfortune of going to grad school. I can hardly exaggerate the sneering contempt for Chinese research papers among American researchers. I've evaluated quite a few Chinese papers since graduating and confirm their general lack of quality and rigor.

I'm pretty blackpilled on Chinese research output. They can't be all wrong, but if you were evaluating research papers a great rule of thumb would be to blindly assume that Chinese papers were all wrong.

This was true ten years ago, but there are a number of fields where they have since mostly closed the gap, especially in biology. Even if their overall hit rate is still much lower, they don't need to match ours to get the same research output, given their population.

Chinese undergraduates and Masters students are this way, but future scientists in a PhD program usually aren't. If all they cared about was cheating their way to status and money they wouldn't waste five or more years of their life working 80 hour weeks for $20k a year stipends. At worst they're incompetent or untrained, particularly if coming directly from China instead of having spent years in an American university already.

This is pretty much true. Maybe in a sign of things looking slightly up for them, I did recommend publication for one Chinese paper this year, for the first time ever. It wasn't great, but it wasn't wrong. So, maybe they're starting to trend in the right direction?

Civilizations innovate in the areas in which one can get ahead in. A militaristic society will innovate militarily, a country with a large mining industry will innovate in the military domain etc. The US innovates in media, law and finance. China is an industrial power and therefore that is where innovation will happen. China currently has 26 nuclear reactors under construction with many more planned. Clearly innovating in nuclear power is a great way to get ahead in China while a nuclear power researcher in the west is more likely to produce power points as the final product.

It is no exaggeration to say that most of STEM innovation in US academia is now being carried out by foreign-born people

The plan to have Americans do marketing strategies, finance, write legal documents and do sales while the foreigners do the boring technical stuff was doomed to fail. The US taught the world its secrets, created a rift between the people and the elite, and lost its ability to innovate. Pakistanis at Stanford have no connection to most of America and will see the country as a vehicle for their own personal success. Top people are the ones who need the most loyalty, instead the WASP-elites are surrounded by foreigners while much of the elite are actual foreigners. This puts the elite and the people in different universes, while dismantling any sense of noblesse oblige.

Importing tens of thousands of Chinese people into the university system, getting China up to speed, and then trying to keep them making plastic toys won't work. They were obviously going to bring a lot of that know how home. Specifically banning Chinese isn't going to work either. People who moved to Boston at age 25 to do a PhD at MIT never having been in the US before are going to have a much easier time accepting a high paid position in China than American would if that is banned. The US isn't going to be able to police former international students and researchers.

Top people are the ones who need the most loyalty, instead the WASP-elites are surrounded by foreigners while much of the elite are actual foreigners. This puts the elite and the people in different universes, while dismantling any sense of noblesse oblige.

This is an important argument but it would be difficult to combine it with recruiting the best from the world. You'd have to essentially put in practice an officially-sanctioned discriminatory system that tells the best and the brightest from abroad that they will always operate under a glass ceiling despite their abilities. That in of itself would act as a great repellent for any prospective talent. Why work hard in a society where there are limited avenues for personal growth?

So in my view, you'd essentially have to make a choice: either you welcome the best from the world over but with differing loyalties or you aim to consolidate a very homogenous elite but accept that their capabilities will be less. You can't have both. The US elite apparently chose the former and so far, at least, it isn't obvious to me that the US has suffered from it. That may change, then again, it may not.

Importing tens of thousands of Chinese people into the university system, getting China up to speed, and then trying to keep them making plastic toys won't work. They were obviously going to bring a lot of that know how home.

True, but a lot of them also ended up staying. A non-trivial fraction of top AI talent comes from China. Almost 90% of Chinese postgrads choose to stay in the US. In my view, the US has benefited more than China from this exchange. Just as the US has benefited more than India from their brain drain.

I don't understand where you get these claims. It's not like white people are just marketing while pakis are just doing research. Immigrants are getting all sorts of jobs (see all the indians in trumpland / on the right), not just technical ones. See table 8 here (you need to ctrlf table 8 then click the link) - "Asians" do all sorts of jobs. They're overrepresented in stem stuff, sure, eg (baseline: 6.4) "category - Computer and mathematical occupations" (23), "Medical scientists" (37). But they're still overrepresented in finance and marketing, if a bit less - "Market research analysts and marketing specialists" (8), "Financial and investment analysts" (21), "Gambling services workers" (25), "Business operations specialists" (11.3). And for every occupation they're specialized in, whites are still a majority - even in the most stark one, medical scientists, whites are 58.7.

So

The plan to have Americans do marketing strategies, finance, write legal documents and do sales while the foreigners do the boring technical stuff was doomed to fail

Doesn't make sense. Whites/Americans never stopped doing 'boring technical stuff', they're still doing more than half of it. (I think OP's "It is no exaggeration to say that most of STEM innovation in US academia is now being carried out by foreign-born people" is exaggerated - probably not too much than half is done by non-whites, some of whom were native-born).

Interests of Americans are American interests.

Interests of Pakistanis are not interests of Pakistan.

The world ends in the US. It's where you resign yourself to pay taxes after looting and cheating at home to get a chance at a better life.

I don't think Americans can appreciate how incredibly cynical the rest of the world's elite is, how shallow all that patriotism and «geopolitics», and how fanatically loyal they themselves are.

Pakistanis at Stanford have no connection to most of America and will see the country as a vehicle for their own personal success

Yes, but, I work with many of these sorts and they ultimately marry, buy a house and make American kids. They may be selfish foreigners, but our society gets them to make new high performing American kids.

In some larger sense I think America is looting the world of high performers and giving them the resources needed to make future upper middle class Americans.

I think the China initiative is stupid for a different reason you do--there is no innovation going on in American academia, so there is no reason to worry about the Chinese stealing it. The most useful function of academia is not the academic research, but the training of scientists who can plausibly be reassigned from their highly cited meme projects about quantum nano-solar graphene batteries to actual useful research if a war breaks out. The real reason the Chinese work in US academia is not espionage but to gain the skills necessary for setting up university research groups in China.

With that in mind, it is probably a good idea to limit the number of foreign researchers in the US and ensure Americans are trained for those roles instead.

Are there non-Manhattan Project examples of scientists being reassigned to a project of great importance for national security during a crisis? As far as I know even that was voluntary. There wasn't much for covid either that I can recall.

Kidnapped Germans for the Soviet nuclear weapons programme, kidnapped Germans for the American rocketry programme.

Were they really "kidnapped," at least in the case of the Americans? "Come work for us and we won't hang you for being part of the Nazi Party" was probably the offer on hand, and it was probably a pretty damn decent offer for those German scientists.

I strongly agree with the second point, I work for a national lab and it is so hard to find US citizens/green card holders to do scientific work. I believe universities bear a lot of the blame for this situation, because they so aggressive use international students to keep graduate student compensation down (I myself dropped out of a PhD to make more money, this option simply isn’t available to international students)

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats