As an outsider not in academia, your system has poisoned your well.

We trusted in you to do the Right Thing, yet a significant sub-system of your culture has entirely successfully undermined your 'Checks and Balances' - a sub-system which has clearly been in action since at least the eighties.

I don't know how you get rid of that. It's You.

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I get that America/the West is far from perfect.

Right now I'm not sure there is a country where young people are generally satisfied and optimistic about their future. America is a mess, Europe is generally a mess, China is struggling with too many grads who aren't able to find jobs matching their qualifications... From what I've heard things aren't exactly great in India either.

Every country has its problems.

Where did you move? I understand you're retired: that changes the situation somewhat.

When I lived in Amsterdam, we were renting a flat. The gentleman we were renting from told us our rent easily covers all his expenses in South East Asia.

Sorry to hear you got priced out :( Unfortunately i am also quite pessimistic about the future of europe and the us, too.

But why did you left if you had a great QoL?

Yeah, I was chatting with a friend living in Spain once, and ascending the ladder in responsibility didn't make sense, as whatever salary increase he got would be heavily taxed, and it didn't make sense to bear much more responsibility for just a little bit of extra money a year.

As you say, avg workers are "fine" there, but for anyone trying to standout or grow in their career, they will hit an income ceiling very fast due to the high taxation, so it doesn't make sense to keep on growing as you are not properly rewarded for it.

The Netherlands had effectively full employment until a few years ago, last I checked.

Unless things got dramatically worse in the past 3 or so years, I think you are massively overreacting.

I happen to have a few personal friends that live there, for that matter.

The episode was based on the book Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang (Amazon: China's Quest to Engineer the Future)

Very interesting read, with a lot more depth and details to this short (but accurate) summary.

Not just lawyerly society, special kind of asshole lawyer, as he was a protégé of Roy Cohn.

Maybe. I would like to think that is true but i don't have much evidence.

I think what we can see provably is that China is investing in the development of STEM contributors at the primary school level through advanced degrees and the central government is directing the economy to spend huge amounts on the work that they do.

I'm very curious about this because even tho we need to preserve democracy, some elements of meritocracy also seem needed. Obviously as Xi's latest purges show, there is some politics to it as well, but China does seem to do a fairly good job of meritocracy in the bureaucracy.

Would you have said the same for folks doing NLP circa 2015?

Knowing current administration anti-science approach to things like climate and health, I wouldn't be all at surprised if many of those who left academia were ones producing quality work that just didn't align with Trump admin's ideology.

> 'm not claiming that this is a step in the direction of fixing academia; I'm claiming that, because academia is currently broken, we shouldn't assume that the

Why?

If you go that far then

- senate

- scotus

- violence

- SV

- tech bros

- lies about AI

What is not broken.

The idea of academia is it is an investment. Look at internet, DoE, Genome, vaccines - a lot from academia. Companies barely do that.

Yes.

I think well meaning people in the west are looking for a silver lining and in the process overcomplicating a rather simple issue: the US government is cutting spending everywhere while its electorate demands even deeper cuts. The money has dried up and people are leaving.

(One of my best friends was a nuclear medicine phd who left his cancer research lab after covid to work at a VoiP company, so i too have anecdotes)

China is famous for low-quality research and bad papers, which is exactly what you'd expect from a system that grants an expanded number of formal credentials to people who aren't actually doing good scientific research.

Which breakthroughs, specifically? There are no Chinese institutions pumping out nobel prizes. Zero.

> for high performers.

Like $40k bonuses for ICE agents. Incidentally, $40k is about the stipend for a typical PhD student. I'll take a smart student doing nothing but eating food and digesting theorems over the absolute chaos that is being funded by our tax dollars.

> There is little to no evidence that the people leaving aren't the top performers, let alone the bottom.

According to the article, the majority of the losses were voluntary (people quitting or accepting buyout offers) and not people who were directly laid-off.

While this isn't direct evidence of where these people sit on the spectrum from top to bottom performers, my anecdotal life experience suggests that when losses like this are voluntary its far more likely they are top performers who have plenty of options elsewhere (either in the private sector, or in other governments).

Also (and also anecdotally) this brain-drain doesn't just apply to direct government workers. I know of several people who worked in (and in some cases headed up) prestigious university research labs in the US who have left in the last year after massive funding cuts. Most of them were immigrants who went back to universities in their country of origin, some after having been here for decades.

There's reason to suspect that the one's leaving are more likely to be top performers. First, top performers are the most likely to be able to find another job easily so they would take the voluntary buyout or just leave when things get crazy. Also, some of the DOGE cuts targeted probationary employees which include those that have recently been promoted or recently hired, both are classes of employee that the department explicitly wanted to keep.

We have definitive proof of that viz a vis, trump and his idiot magats.

That is kind of my point. That party has been attacking the education system in all forms for decades (imo) for exactly that reason. They have razed everything from school lunches to loan programs. This affects everyone.

I agree with this. I guess you already believe they follow a bell curve.Then from your former comment you also believe it's worth it to lose many PhDs that don't contribute to also lose the few that do.

I guess the conflict is my value judgement that it's good to keep PhDs that don't contribute if it allows US to keep the ones that do contribute. I believe so for 2 reasons.

- Distinguishing between contributors and non contributors at scale is difficult.

- the value of research can be large from a few contributors.

I think your comment is more a refutation of the top level than the person you're responding to. I think people are right to assume there is already a serious throughput issue with scientific research, especially so-called "basic" research in the US and seeing a mass exodus from the government is troubling because public funding is what, historically, generates the big breakthroughs.

What the person you're replying to was likely trying to say is that once you get into this size of layoffs its no longer about the individuals and their performances and a claim that all 10k of them are on one side of a theoretical "bell curve" (which btw i havent seen evidence can actually be measured) is big and needs evidence.

It’s a separate question not arbitrary. How many PHD’s the government should employ is debatable, but saying we should have fewer such people says nothing about who was let go.

It’s always tempting to say ‘This was a good decision therefore all the consequences are good’ but in the real world good and bad decisions will have both positive and negative consequences. Understanding individual consequences is therefore largely separated from the overall question of should we do X. However in politics nobody wants to admit any issues with what they did so they try and smokescreen secondary effects as universally beneficial/harmful.

One metric you could use is how often publications are mentioned by patents, and how often those patents lead to economic value. By this metric, it is valuable.

The number of PhDs we have is currently too many given the amount of money we have for project grants. But there is no evidence that the money we allocate to research is too large. If anything, you could argue the opposite.

I would be delighted if the private market funded basic research - the seed ideas that lead to patents.

You’re confusing two different questions. ‘Should we have more STEM PhDs in government?’ is a reasonable policy debate. ‘Is losing 10,000 STEM PhDs in weeks a problem?’ has a clearer answer… yes, because institutional knowledge doesn’t rebuild quickly. Also, there’s no evidence this was performance-based attrition. Lastly, recruitment becomes harder after mass departures signal instability.

The burden isn’t on critics to prove some theoretical optimal number. The burden is on defenders of this exodus to show it improved government technical capacity rather than hurt it.

I think you're saying "how do we know this isn't the normal amount of Phd people who leave every year/administration

While we don't have PhD numbers the Trump administration fired a large amount of people so no matter some portion of those had Phds therefore it must be higher than the previous administration

This doesn't match my experience at all.

Mid last year I helped run a workshop on AI explicitly for laid off federal science workers. The people involved were clearly extremely intelligent and knowledgeable, passionate about their research areas, and harboring an immense amount of institutional knowledge. They showed great curiosity and adaptability in the workshop. It was obvious that they were a set of very bad fires.

How can your limited experience make any claims about the government workforce as a whole.

It requires a decent amount of time to understand if someone is talented and that talent is being used to better their job.

>but is doing exactly what they want to do with their life in a role that generates measurable utility for the taxpayer is not packing up and leaving

How would you know? Some people have very strong convictions and as another comment stated if a person is talented it increases the chances they could find another job similar to their desired work

what you are saying is idiotic. people who are in demand can find work anywhere, they are the kind of people who will leave as soon as they feel their work environment has become even remotely uncomfortable. people who stay are more likely to be those who can't find job elsewhere.

Really think about this claim: "private sector does some things better." What evidence is there of this really that isn't anecdotal? There are so many things tossed around like this which sound plausible but for which I can't think of a definitive, conclusive, account.

For example: the public sector literally send humans to the moon with technology vastly inferior to that which we currently have at our disposal. Heck, the Soviet Union put a probe on the surface of Venus and sent back images. To me, it is not at all clear that "private sector better" is a foregone conclusion. At best you could make the strong claim that contemporary economic theory predicts that private sector companies do better.

This is not a good thing.

> Is it not a good thing that these folks could do something more productive in the private sector?

That's assuming that they could do something more productive in the private sector. I don't think that's true in a whole lot of cases. The private sector is about maximizing profit, but there's a whole universe of productive and necessary things that don't lead directly to profit. The private sector is terrible at doing those things.

And, depending on what exactly we're talking about, it's very often the case that the private sector is much less efficient in terms of bang for the buck.

> Wouldn't it be better if companies like these had a larger pool of PhDs to pull from?

The pool they're pulling from isn't getting larger. It's getting smaller.

I think your "every fusion startup that raised $100m" link answers that question. Fusion startups haven't been bottlenecked by being unable to afford to poach talent previously administering grant programs or working in government-funded plasma physics labs. Shutting the labs and programs down on the other hand does slow down the fundamental research that leads to those startups

> Private sector does some things better, see Rocket Lab, Blue Origin, SpaceX, et al.

The private sector is good at doing more efficiently what the government already figured out how to do.

citing rocket companies feels funny when most of the research and some non-trivial % of contracts comes (came?) from gov’t (mostly defense) spending

Your phrasing "something more productive in the private sector" is taken from the DOGE emails to federal employees. Note that in this sense "productive" means "makes money for corporations". If your utility function is different, these jobs are no longer more productive.

For a very concrete illustration, I know a Veterans Administration physician who got the DOGE emails. He's been underpaid by $50k-100k per year compared to private market rates, for the last twenty years. He is happy to take that discount because the mission of caring for veterans is something he cares about, and because he feels he can practice better medicine if his goal is patient outcomes rather than billable procedures. He also values the education and research priorities of the VA.

It is absolutely true that he would make a lot more money for a private provider maximizing procedures and billing.

But is that what we should be optimizing for as a society? Is that what you personally aim for from your doctors?

I don't think this is necessarily a good thing. I'm in favor of the private sector, but these public sector research and scientific institutions also do very important work.

Some of the most brightest and accomplished scientists out of academia elect to forgo a higher paying private sector job in order to go into the civil service and work on even higher impact, lower paying jobs that don't necessarily chase an obvious profit motive. Ask yourself why.

Tell me have you thoroughly researched where all of the NOAA or NIH products go? The private sector has given us AccuWeather for the former and nothing for the latter.

I rely on NOAA forecasts to stay safe a lot and no private company gives me the kind of volume of information about the weather, hydrology, and sea conditions that they do. Call me when the private sector maintains flood gauges on all the rivers where I live or weather stations on peaks or satellites overhead.

I’m just thoroughly sick of hearing people repeat Reagan like he’s some kind of prophet.

Incredible false dichotomy. I don’t even know where to start dissecting this "argument".

> I think the Apollo program for example was a massive waste of money that didn't improve anything for the average person

i mean, sure, that makes sense if you've never gotten on a plane, eaten food, used a space blanket when camping or in an emergency, been in an earthquake prone area or had hearing aids (non-exhaustive list)

https://www.nasa.gov/technology/tech-transfer-spinoffs/going...

> It was mostly just a dick-swinging contest with the USSR to see who had the biggest rocket and could get people to the moon first.

just because this was the primary political goal, and i'm 100% in agreement with you there, it does not mean that there were no other benefits to humanity. sometimes, humanity can accidentally do a good thing for everyone because we're trying to beat the other guy in a race. it does happen, sometimes.

In mainstream media, public consensus is bought by the highest bidder, or the whims of the board of the company.

In social media, general consensus is owned by those that control the best and most bots to direct the conversation.

Unfortunately most people are too lazy/busy to seek out trusted information, and many if not most have no ability to understand if the answer they get should be trusted or not.

That’s an odd description