Comment by JuniperMesos
5 hours ago
The implicit assumption that this is a bad thing is grounded in the assumption that anyone who is a STEM PhD is automatically someone the US government should want to employ, which I don't think is true. Academia is a badly broken system, and many people with formal credentials like PhDs have wasted huge amounts of time and effort on producing what is ultimately low-quality scientific work. This is a pretty uncontroversial statement among people I know in academia - or who were in academia but left - and this should absolutely affect the degree to which federal government agencies are willing to hire people who have formal credentials like a STEM PhD.
It sounds like you're saying that this is a step in the direction of "fixing" academia. I don't see any evidence of that, all i see is fewer scientists receiving decreasing funding in a state where weve already been slashing basic research investment for generations. Also, there is no evidence that the ones that are leaving are the least productive. Intuitively it's likely the opposite: the ones who have the most potential will find work elsewhere and will be the first to leave.
EDIT: I would also like to say that i have never seen evidence that we can measure the performance of 10k PhDs in a single dimension at all. So a claim that this could be good for scientific research and development seems unprovable at best.
I'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 ~10k people who got PhDs under the current system are people doing actually-valuable work for the federal government and ultimately the American people.
Would you have said the same for folks doing NLP circa 2015?
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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.
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> '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.
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It also flies in the face of China's currently accelerating pace of research and breakthroughs by producing insane numbers of STEM majors and PhDs
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)
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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.
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Which breakthroughs, specifically? There are no Chinese institutions pumping out nobel prizes. Zero.
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You are assuming there is meaningful work for them in the federal government. There might be more productive work for them in industry. Their contribution to the workforce could put pressure on inflated salaries, if that is the case.
If their credentials exceed their defacto responsibilities in the government, they might be blocking someone else from being promoted or otherwise "growing" or whatever.
People start being inventive when tight on resources, so a bit of evolutionary pressure is not a bad thing.
The tail of the distribution justifies the entire distribution. I agree that a large percentage of PhD research is inconsequential, but a small percentage is massively consequential. It’s ok to whiff on a thousand STEM PhDs if you pick up one Andrej Karpathy (for example).
The number of people capable of identifying potentially consequential research is smaller than the number of people performing consequential research. And they’re all busy with their own projects.
People have really messed up views about hiring in general. I wish more people understood what you are saying here.
Maybe this is true for academic institutions granting the PhDs (although even this I am skeptical of, training a PhD costs a lot in terms of time, money, and human effort). But that doesn't mean it implies that the federal government needs to employ a thousand STEM PhDs just to get someone like Karpathy - indeed, Andrej Karpathy does not work for the federal government! He made his name working in the private sector!
Picking only the tail ends of the distribution also tells me you don't understand how the bulk of progress is made.
It isn't always Eureka moments but also a slow grinding away at assumptions to confirmations.
Maybe, let's see if AI overall is a net positive or net negative to the US overall. If AI turns out to be a net negative (which seems likely) maybe we don't want this type of AI research being funded by taxpayers.
The US doesn’t have enough money to fund the entire distribution
And as a tax payer I prefer discretionary spending for high performers.
> 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.
Can we agree academia is the worst system, except for all the others?
In the last century, the US led so many tech fields because of both academic and corporate research and the people to do it. Let's fix that system if needed and keep it well stocked.
The alternative is ignorance, leading to unskilled industries and an easily misled electorate.
10k PhDs lost isn't a step in the direction of fixing anything, though. There is little to no evidence that the people leaving aren't the top performers, let alone the bottom.
> 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.
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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.
Academia critics usually think it was pretty great until the last 3-5 decades.
Wouldn't an easily misled electorate benefit the political party that lies the most?
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.
Why wouldn't stem PhDs follow some bell curve of quality? I'm sure many PhDs that are leaving don't contribute but some of them do. I personally don't see a reason for it to be skewed for only PhDs which don't contribute to leave.
These things are not in conflict. It's possible that PhD quality has a regular distribution, and that most of them aren't contributing much.
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.
Saying "oh these are just the bad STEM PhDs" seems like a ridiculous exercise in sour graping.
> The implicit assumption that this is a bad thing is grounded in the assumption that anyone who is a STEM PhD is automatically someone the US government should want to employ,
No, you're making a completely illogical jump there, that is absolutely not assumed in any way.
The assumption, if there is one, is that the position that the work PhD was doing in the government served the public good, more than they were being paid.
US Government science positions are not academia, so your second sentence does not even apply to this! Unless your assumption is that if the person was trained with science that did little then their training can not be applied to anything that is worthwhile, which is an obviously false assumption.
Arguments with these sorts of gaping logical holes are the only defenses I ever see of cutting these positions. I have searched hard, but never found a defense that bothered to even base itself in relevant facts, and connect through with a logically sound argument.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it sure is damning when in a democracy there's not even a fig leaf of an intellectually sound argument backing a drastic and massive change in policy.
Most PhDs don't move the needle because the point of a PhD is to learn how to do research, not to produce ground-breakingly original work that reinvents the entire scientific order.
That's orthogonal to domain expertise and general ability.
If you can survive a PhD there's an adequate chance you know more about your subject than an undergrad and are more capable of focused independent work.
That's what employers are buying. Which is why STEM PhDs still get more attention from the private sector than generic mass-produced undergrads.
People have tabulated the value of the academic pipeline, from grant to paper to patent to stock valuation. It is overall very valuable, even if you grant the very real issues with our hyper-competitive grant system.
This intellectual capital is valuable, despite whatever the latest populist memes about professors claim.
Academia may be broken, but a lot of bright students still pursue PhDs and it's better to have them in your pool of candidates rather than not.
You may be right in the general sentiment that not everyone with a PhD is a desirable candidate, but even if half of them were, that would be 5,000 fewer and that isn’t insignificant, especially in STEM fields.
>Academia is a badly broken system,
Why do you feel like you can state this like its fact?
Just to save you energy, state that you are conservative first before writing fan fiction fantasy like that, because it will save people a lot of time assuming that you are speaking some sort of facts.
I have yet to hear a criticism of academia where it sounds like we're better disproportionately losing people with PhDs than without them, particularly since most of those people got their PhDs quite a while ago.
PhDs seem to be quite employable by private industry, where competency is still valued.
You don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just because some PhD students make "low quality science" doesn't mean we end academia. After all, who is going to do the high quality science if you get rid of all the scientists?
Lots of scientists work in industry. Look at AI, rocketry, semiconductors, drug design, robotics, anything related to manufacturing. Academics are in the minority in these fields. You could eliminate all such jobs and there'd be plenty of science being done.
That's applied science. You don't have companies doing basic research because it isn't immediately profitable. You have to do both, basic research to learn things, and applied science to utilize it and make it commercially valuable.
No, the implicit assumption is that losing these 10k PhDs is worse than not losing them.
I fail to see how any of that is relevant to what the article is about, which is people who were already employed by the government leaving.
> The implicit assumption that this is a bad thing is grounded in the assumption that anyone who is a STEM PhD is automatically someone the US government should want to employ
No, not really? That would be true if we were talking about hiring anyone with a STEM PhD. Or 1 random person.
In this case we have people leaving, and it's a group. So it's more like: The assumption that 10k PhD's, that we saw fit to hire in the first place, as a collective, are worth the cost.
Seems likely that they are: The cost is low, let's say $2 billion per year? For reference, Trumps Big Bill includes $300 billion in new defense spending and "over a ten-year period is estimated to add roughly $3 trillion to the national debt and to cut approximately $4.46 trillion in tax revenue".
Also, let's say there were too many, and you should get rid of 10 000 of them. I doubt the guy who keeps rambling for 1 and a half hour [1] and keeps getting "Greenland" and "Iceland" mixed up, is going to do a good job with it.
1: Seriously, I dare you to try to watch it, I tried. At least hes "draining the swamp" /s https://www.youtube.com/live/qo2-q4AFh_g?si=Hwu3MSXouOfEfJCa...
hmm, I was thinking >The implicit assumption that this is a bad thing is grounded in the assumption
that in a large enough set of something there should be considered to be a normal distribution of high quality, medium quality and lower quality members in the set, unless one can show the distribution is biased in some way.
The problem with this framing is that it treats a mass exodus as if it were selective pruning. Losing 10,000+ STEM PhDs in weeks isn’t a quality filter. We’re hemorrhaging institutional capacity. We lose researchers who understand decade-long datasets, technical experts who can evaluate contractor claims, and people who can actually critique scientific literature when making policy decisions.
Where’s the evidence these specific 10k were the low performers? The more likely scenario is that better performers left because they have options, while weaker performers stayed. If the issue is quality, you’d want systematic performance review, not mass departure driven by factors unrelated to competence.
10k PhDs would mean 10k dissertations. I thought the popular narrative is that finding new knowledge has become too hard or much harder than in the past, so how are these grad students finding stuff that is new? Are these dissertations extremely incremental or just repackaging/regurgitating stuff?
You're kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. Sure, some PhDs are in underwater basket weaving and barely warranting the title. However, most PhDs are extremely valuable. They are pushing the boundaries of our knowledge to improve society.
Some part of the hatred for the current academic system stems from legitimate concerns about how it operates. However, I think this hate is mostly driven by rampant anti-intellectualism. Fueled in part by pseudo scientific scammers trying to sell you supplements on TikTok and religious demagogues.
foxyv says "most PhDs are extremely valuable"
Can you defend this statement?
That’s a straw man argument. Losing 10 people becomes a question of their individual qualifications, losing 10,000 people and this is no longer about individuals.
Some of the people who left where underperforming but a significant percentage where extremely underpaid while providing extreme value to average Americans.
The number seems arbitrary. Maybe we should be subsidizing until we have 100,000 more.
I'm always skeptical when something is presumed to be a universal good in a way that's unfalsifiable. What metrics would you expect to see if we had too many STEM PhDs? What metrics can we expect to improve if we had more of them?
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.
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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.
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One would also have to consider the calibre of the individuals hired to replace them, or not, and whether functions such as the National Science Foundation add more or less value to the government than functions the government has chosen to increase its spending on...
> Add more or less value to the government than functions the government has chosen
Talking about average government spending isn’t a reasonable argument because you can only spend money once. If these people cost ~1B/year you aren’t paying for 100+B in spending by cutting them. Instead you get to add exactly 1B in government spending and thus the yardstick is the least efficient billion you’re paying out vs keeping these people.
Not that we actually balance the budget making the idea of short term saving meaningless. Instead it’s about long term consequences.
What's the correct level of STEM PhD employment in the government? Maybe those levels were way too high. But on a different note, we can't tell from the article what normal fluctuations look like. It only shows 2024 as the baseline, but ideally we'd look at a larger window than that as well as look at the percentage rather than nominal figures.
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
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Do you believe that 100% of the people who left were useless?
Do you think that's what is going on here?
In my experience legitimately talented people are staying, and the guy whose impressive education credentials seem to train him mostly how to write very wordy excuses for his shortage of actual work product is going back home. Maybe you have a different experience, but my experience is something that seems to be echoed among a lot of people in my social circle.
My experience is that people with talent are both driven and valued. Someone who might disagree with the current administration politically 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, nor losing their job. But many pieces of gristle are getting trimmed off the American government.
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.
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Usually, when a system is broken, the correct course of action is to fix it. Not destroy it utterly.
Ahh yes, clearly any government would greatly benefit by having way fewer highly educated conscientious people working for them /s
Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B
We should round up and reeducate people with glasses. /s
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Peter Gregory reincarnated.
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