Comment by onetimeusename
6 hours ago
I think this is an offensive and self fulfilling view. Americans are too dumb to do science so we need to rely almost entirely on foreigners from almost entirely the same two countries to do it for us. There's lots of holes in this scheme. I don't really want politicians to control funding for science but then again we've become somewhat of a degree mill and there's a lot of useless careerism in academia.
I will give an example. Did we need years and years of funding for a lab to work on an obscure programming language for multiprocessing that basically only that lab ever used? Probably not. How much of funded science is just useless waste for a group of people to play with things like this? A lot, I would speculate. There isn't really a good way to spot what's useful and what isn't but let's not pretend academia is a purely selfless institution.
A story Steven Kotkin recently told in an interview:
"And so the anecdote goes that Xi Jinping bragged that they were going to — China - was going to win the competition because they had 1.3 billion people to choose talent from. They had the biggest talent supply.
And the elder statesman, Lee Kuan Yew, said, 'You're wrong. You have 1.3 billion to draw from, but the United States has 8 billion to draw from, and so they have the upper hand, and don't forget that."
R&D is hit or miss. And a lot will miss. It's really no different from the VC model where 90% of their startups will fail but the 10% that succeed will make up for the rest.
Pointing out a few examples that didn't go anywhere is a meaningless argument. You need to look at it holistically.
I am not arguing that all R&D must succeed. That's hugely different from someone who deliberately builds obscure nonsense and masks it behind publications and tenure. What you're saying is there is no waste in academia. If anyone questions the merits of some research, they are anti-science. I think people who think academia is a bastion of science would be disappointed with the reality.
The majority of your argument has little to do with your initial complaint about China and India. What does poaching less of the world's best and brightest to contribute to our market and universities have to do with ensuring people are working on meaningful projects?
They are about 50% of all foreign grad students. Can you explain why the disproportionate representation? Why aren't more US citizens in grad school for STEM if it is so valuable to us?
The thing about the academic job market is it's paper thin. I argue we produce too many PhDs. People seek out prestigious degrees. Our immigration system rewards more highly educated foreign students, sensibly, but that means there's more incentive to get advanced degrees. There's absolutely not just pure science going on in academia. Grad student wages are depressed and more foreign grad students does not help that.[1] There's a lot of careerism. I would argue some people exploit grad students. I don't think this is even very debatable. So I think put together, we likely print too many PhDs. One could argue that's not true relative to the overall job market but relative to tenure track positions, it is absolutely a fact.
[1]: https://www.nber.org/digest/dec06/impact-foreign-students-ea...
> Why aren't more US citizens in grad school for STEM if it is so valuable to us?
Graduate research in the United States is often an exercise in exploitation of cheap labor.
China and India have a large pool of highly educated workers who can qualify for graduate research. Their visas specifically prohibit them for seeking alternative employment in the United States.
You can demand long hours and very low pay. The payoff to them is a chance at long-term employment in the US for more money than they could earn at home, and in any event increased status and employment opportunities when they return.
The payoff for native-born kids is not at all the same. Even for those who can afford graduate school, opportunity cost may be prohibitive.
The US has decided that creating new scientists out of its own citizens has no economic value.
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The same is roughly true for Silicon Valley investments once the herd mentality sets in. Yet it is celebrated as being the best way for commercial progress.
Almost all advances in deployed PLs come from academic research. Not sure what kind of point you’re trying to make
Even with perfect information regarding R&D outcomes, capitalism is competitive.
Capitalism is duplication of effort.
I've never been particularly convinced by the crusade to eliminate alternatives to capitalism in the name of eliminating a society's wasteful behavior.
Because I criticized academia does not mean I support political types ripping up funding nor scrapping it altogether. My thought is that academia has had a reckoning coming for some time because their practices are not sustainable. It relies on a huge number of foreign grad students to prop itself up, it's costs have become very expensive for Americans. There's a number of credible arguments to be made. The nicest way I could put it is that the impact of a lot of work that academics do is not that high. But it's prestigious being a professor and there are high incentives to keep publishing for some, gaming citations with mediocre results is perhaps a path to tenure.
At some point this was not going to continue to sustain itself, something would give. Now, I think it's unfortunate that it became political. That means that my criticisms will be viewed through partisan lenses. I am not a fan of political types deciding what to fund. But I also think academia can be full of itself and this shield they can hide behind of "just doing pure science" is baloney. Some are. Definitely not everyone. So I personally think there should be a reduction in the number of PhDs granted and the overall size of academia but that is not in favor of getting rid of it or the way it's being done presently.