3 ms·
Good. The US is reaping what it sows, and other research institutions will become the new leaders. Stinks for Americans, but the world will be better off overal
by mrhottakes 5mo ago
Good. The US is reaping what it sows, and other research institutions will become the new leaders. Stinks for Americans, but the world will be better off overall.
- epistasis 5mo agoNo, everyone is worse off. There is nothing good that comes from this.
- mrhottakes 5mo agoIf you live outside the US, there is.
- idontwantthis 5mo agoIf everyone loses but you lose less than the people you don’t like, does that make you a winner?
- j_maffe 5mo agoWhen an aggressor loses their weapons, everyone else is a winner, yes.
- epistasis 5mo agoMIT is not a weapon. The scientific community is not an aggressor.
- j_maffe 5mo agoThe US is an aggressor. The research conducted in MIT and elsewhere in the US is literally used for weapons.
- DaSHacka 5mo agoIs open research a weapon? I think there are many more things the US spends its money on that could be argued to be weapons, much more convincingly than publicly accessible research.
- loudmax 5mo ago[flagged]
- KerrAvon 5mo ago[flagged]
- madars 5mo agoSpeaking as a European who did his PhD at MIT: that's destructive zero-sum thinking and "outsiders benefit" is backwards. Knowledge spillover benefits everyone - would there be ASML (Dutch) without DARPA's monumental fundamental research investment in EUV? BioNTech (German) without NIH-funded mRNA research? Without American investment this research likely wouldn't have happened or would have come a decade later.
- epistasis 5mo agoThis is exactly right, the massive benefits of sticking a bunch of people with very abstruse interests close together is basically impossible to replicate. Labs, where people interact with each other daily and every week, where there's in-person exchange and chance encounters, is pretty difficult to simulate even with chat like IRC or forums or social media. I browse science-focused social media and forums all the time. But the time spent doing that is never as good as going to a seminar presentation from somebody I've never seen before on a topic I never would have thought to investigate. The world becomes poorer when these aggregation points are disaggregated. Reducing MIT's aggregation does not increase aggregation effects elsewhere. I don't care if this happens at MIT in the US, or somewhere in Paris. Actually, I take that back, if the US continues its current authoritarian anti-open immigration policy, then I do care intensely that Paris or England or Berlin or wherever should become the center of academic innovation. Just as China's authoritarian closed policies make China unsuitable to be the academic center, Trump's authoritarian closed policies make MIT unsuitable. However Trump is weak, losing power, and in two years we can begin prosecuting all the people in his administration for their lawlessness, cruelty, and inhumanity. The US will rebuild, but it will take a while if we want to rebuild according to our constitution and laws.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago> other research institutions will become the new leaders Or the knowledge just goes away, the talent wasted.
- mrhottakes 5mo agoYou sow, then you reap. That's how it goes.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo agoHistory is filled with episodes where collapsing empires took their knowledge centers with them, where for centuries thereafter the work was in recovering that lost knowledge versus advancing the frontier. It may seem self serving coming from an American. But I wouldn’t cheer on the collapse of an academic institution anywhere.
- j_maffe 5mo agoI wouldn't either. But the world is a better place with I would cheer the of an academic institution to lose its lead when it has deep ties with a military that terrorizes the world.
- shimman 5mo agoTalent wasted in the US maybe, but plenty of professors across the world are doing equivalent work. To think only the US is capable of doing ground breaking research is extremely foolish and an insult to humanity.
- fearmerchant 5mo agoElite human capital isn't normally distributed.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo agoAnd neither is the capital equipment of research. The same mind will be far more effective with more resources than without, and when surrounded with similarly-enabled colleagues. (To explain it any other way requires some pretty racist reasoning around why scientific progress was dominated by a small group of countries over the last century or so.)
- alberto467 5mo agoNot at all, the US is still the world leader in research institutions. And I say this as an European, we’re miles behind really. You have to make a lot more fuck ups for us to catch you.
- chvid 5mo agoI think the highest ranked technical universities by the end of this decade will be Chinese. Things are accelerating more than I expected.
- mcmcmc 5mo agoSome people would argue they’ve already taken the lead
- electrondood 5mo agoMaking America great again, again.
- malshe 5mo agoI've my doubts. Chinese researchers are publishing a lot but their papers are getting retracted at even higher rate. Currently, they account for 50% of all retractions across the publishers. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.19197v1 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.19197v1
- geodel 5mo agoAnd there is no clamor Chinese green card either in politicians in China for students coming from other countries or in people outside coming to China. And if China will be having highest ranking technical universities, it means immigration is not a necessity for technical excellence or ranking as many keep alluding to.
- Gimpei 5mo agoIf Europe wants to pick up the slack, it needs to start pumping an order of magnitude more money into its universities than it currently does. US universities dominate because they are rich. As a holder of a PhD from a European university, I don’t see this ever happening. But I would love to be proved wrong.
- deepsun 5mo agoIt needs to "start pumping" more money everywhere. Defense, for one.
- mainecoder 5mo agoNo this is not good for the World in case you have forgotten America is part of the world and though I hate what is happening just as much as anyone I will work to make this nation better. We are in a tough time and I genuinely do not know if things will get better but we will try.
- mrits 5mo agoThe world will catch up around the same time research institutions become obsolete.
- epolanski 5mo agoWhen there's less competition and opportunities for talent the whole community, globally, is impacted. There's really nothing good about it.
- j_maffe 5mo agoThat's very funny because up until very recently there was very little competition because one nation was dominating research using talents from other countries. Consider it as a weakening of a monopoly
- Levitz 5mo agoYou say that as if talent was kidnapped and dragged against their will. People go to the US because of an abundance of infrastructure and money. Which now goes down. It's a loss.
- j_maffe 5mo agoThose great minds will go to other nations where they're more appreciated.
- epolanski 5mo agoI don't think you've ever worked in academia or research. If you want to do cutting edge research you need money. Try to do it in Italy, where an entire university has only one MRI working at 400 Mhz. Then you go to EPFL, Switzerland, and a single lab has 15, I repeat, 15 .8 GHz MRIs. Each of those instruments is in multi million $ range and requires expensive staffing and maintenance. Then you need chemicals, you need an order for 6'000 $ worth of chemicals. In Italy that's a lengthy and bureaucratic process. When I was in EPFL, Switzerland, not even as a grad, but master's student, all it took was a half assed email and I would get everything I needed. No questions asked. Zero. Need lab equipment? Every researcher and student had a "credit card", you'd go to the university shop and buy whatever you needed, no questions asked. Hell, when I was in EPFL all it took me to get a GTX Titan X from Nvidia was to fill a form with my university email stating I needed it for research (I didn't, I used it for gaming), I had one one weeks later. Do the same with the university email from Tor Vergata? When you truly need it for research? Laugh. In US this abundance of resource is even higher, and it compounds. Need some grad to help you? Her'es the budget. Need this? Have it. Need the most precise instrument of some kind on the planet? Book it. I don't want to be harsh, but you're taking stances and having opinions on stuff you simply do not understand. This isn't researchers being greedy, this is researchers understanding that if they want to do meaningful work, unconstrained, or less constrained, by budget reasons there is just a handful of places on the planet, half of them in the US.