8 ms·

The current admin does not understand that our lead comes from immigrants. Sorry, but most Americans are kind of mediocre academically. I do not understand why

The current admin does not understand that our lead comes from immigrants. Sorry, but most Americans are kind of mediocre academically. I do not understand why the "American First" MAGA crowd can't get it through their thick skulls that everything nice they have, including our technological lead, is built by immigrants that are just smarter than they are. This is just an ego problem I suspect. It bruises the ego of MAGA voters to realize that immigrants actually are smarter, they actually do get paid more (and not because they're "taking the jobs" but because they are actually more desirable.)

eecc 5mo ago
I’m not sure US academia is mediocre. It’s more like… normal? But America being what it is, it attracts those with most potential creating and sustaining a network effect. But there’s nothing intrinsically good or bad of the US, and it’s quite easy to mess up the equilibrium and go back to the mediocrity you mentioned
- seanmcdirmid 5mo ago
  It’s a numbers game. Taking the best from the world talent pool is going to provide better results than from the much smaller American talent pool. Unless your country has more than a billion people, you need to look at world talent.
  - genxy 5mo ago
    The US has to especially encourage immigration since we have gone out of our way to make the education system systemically broken. Our funnel is broken on purpose. Look at countries with strong showings in things like chess or running. Why is that? They encourage large populations of kids to participate, the larger the pool the more top performers.
jedberg 5mo ago
It's a simple matter of math. The USA has less than 5% of the world's population. It's statistically impossible for that 5% to be the smartest 5% in the world. Therefore, if we want the smartest people in the world, we have to allow immigrants.
- jerkstate 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - jedberg 5mo ago
    No? Not sure how you reached that conclusion. I'm just stating that the USA needs immigrants if we want to increase our median intelligence because we can't possibly have the smartest people in the world born here.
    - jerkstate 5mo ago
      so in order to increase our median intelligence, we should make the process super easy?
      - unethical_ban 5mo ago
        Yes. Why should immigration be kafkaesque? It is in the US interest to have a pipeline of smart, hard-working, innovative people come to this country. The US is/was in many ways a great country for them to come, but we are not the only international destination for such talent. Why would we want to put up such artificial barriers to entry, if we agree on the premises I laid out? The purpose of this is to discourage legal immigration.
        jerkstate 5mo ago
        So what prevents the incompetent and lazy from immigrating?
        solenoid0937 5mo ago
        Someone immigrating is almost certainly less incompetent and lazy than the median American. Immigration requires uprooting your entire life, and it requires entrepreneurial spirit and grit. That's why many immigrant groups dramatically out-earn American-born citizens. TBH most immigrants I've met better embody the American spirit than most Americans.
deeg 5mo ago
It's not an ego problem. It's a racial one.
hallole 5mo ago
Our lead does not come from immigrants. The American people, who are a distinct people, have shown time and again a potential for great things. Even if it were true, there are wider effects of immigration that you must consider. The purpose of life isn't to increase GDP. It reflects poorly on you that you must cast your opponents as being stupid and spiteful. Could it be that MAGA voters are humans with real motivations and rationales?
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- platevoltage 5mo ago
  > Could it be that MAGA voters are humans with real motivations and rationales? No, it couldn't. Trump tells them to vote a certain way, they do it. Look at Massie's primary as an example.
  - xp84 5mo ago
    Go on thinking that, but it really won't help the Democrats win if they persist in this attitude. Voters are just looking at what's on offer from both parties, and one party's platform has been judged to be both hostile to their interests and also actively scorns them as people. The other is mostly hostile to their interests and is super corrupt, but it cuts taxes[1] and doesn't belittle them. The Democrats squeaked out one miraculous win buoyed by the incompetence of Trump's band of corrupt idiots in the early COVID days. But now merely pointing out how incompetent and corrupt Trump is stopped working, as we saw in 2024. Do Democrats have anything left in the playbook besides derision and scorn toward those outside their tent? We will soon see, I guess. [1] I know the talking points say that the tax cuts "only benefit the rich" but I'm far from a 1%er and can tell you that I'm paying way more taxes in a blue state than I would be in a red state, and also the OBBB improved things for me. Voters in those blue states can see their tax bills and the one thing Democrats can't say is that they don't put a huge tax burden on those who work.
    - anon84873628 5mo ago
mandeepj 5mo ago
> including our technological lead, is built by immigrants That's my point to get the Constitution changed (Amendment #28) to allow an immigrant to run for POTUS. We love US more than natural-born citizens. Our interests are far more aligned with the betterment of the country than anyone else's.
- amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
  Oh boy! If we are talking about constitutional amendments I can probably think of a few that would be much more important than that.
- alterom 5mo ago
  >Our interests are far more aligned with the betterment of the country than anyone else's. Generally, yes. But then there's Elon Musk. Peter Thiel too: while a US citizen by birth, he defacto immigrated to the US from elsewhere (as in: moved from another country to settle in the US). Immigration for rich folks is a bit different, see.
  - mandeepj 5mo ago
    Peter Thiel is a naturalized US citizen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel Musk was (mostly) great until 2020; Something happened to him during the COVID timeframe. I'd not want Musk, Thiel, or Palantir guy to run for POTUS. Probably, there should be a clause that if your net worth exceeds the threshold, you shouldn't be eligible to run until you donate all of it to the government, with no option to get it back ever. Some more clauses can be added as well. Edit 1: I think another clause, maybe most important, a minimum one term public office service experience required only as a Senator, Rep, Governor, or a Mayor.
    - alterom 5mo ago
      >Peter Thiel is a naturalized US citizen Oops, my bad, somehow I thought his parents naturalized before he was born. Thanks for pointing this out; this helps the point I'm trying to make. >I'd not want Musk, Thiel, or Palantir guy to run for POTUS. Probably, there should be a clause that if your net worth exceeds the threshold, you shouldn't be eligible to run until you donate all of it to the government, with no option to get it back ever. Some more clauses can be added as well. Edit 1: I think another clause, maybe most important, a minimum one term public office service experience required only as a Senator, Rep, Governor, or a Mayor. Can I vote for you and your proposals somewhere? At this point, this reads like "I have a dream". But it's one worthy of trying to make a reality. >Musk was (mostly) great until 2020; Aside from running the Thai cave diver's life (and slandering him as a "pedo") for daring to rescue the children instead of letting them die waiting for Musk's non-existent submarine to rescue them. That, and being generally known for working his employees to the bone. And the whole "I need to spread my superior seed" conveyor belt approach to having children. And the "420 funding secured" nonsense. Oh, and the Hyperloop hype, which he did with the sole intent to kill high speed rail in California (which he succeeded in). And the Boring Company scam. And... nevermind, he was a known, not OK", great asshole before* he went full Nazi, but I can agree that he was "great" in comparison to what he's become. >Something happened to him during the COVID timeframe. It's ketamine. Ketamine happened.
JuniperMesos 5mo ago
> The current admin does not understand that our lead comes from immigrants. Sorry, but most Americans are kind of mediocre academically. > I do not understand why the "American First" MAGA crowd can't get it through their thick skulls that everything nice they have, including our technological lead, is built by immigrants that are just smarter than they are. Which specific Americans are kind of mediocre academically? Which specific immigrants are smarter than the average American and are therefore responsible for the nice things about America? Not all American citizens have the same level of intelligence, nor do all people attempting to or actually succeeding in immigrating to the US. To the extent that "everything nice" including technological development is grounded in the average level of intelligence of the people currently inhabiting a country (which I think is a substantial part of but not the entirety of the explanation), this doesn't necessarily imply that immigration which isn't specifically gated on the intelligence of individual immigrants will improve a country along this metric. And in fact the US has a huge number of legal pathways for immigration (including some like "immigrating illegally, having a natural-born-citizen child on US soil, and having that child sponsor your legal immigration decades later) that have nothing at all to do with how intelligent a given immigrant is. And of course, immigration itself changes how "mediocre academically" Americans are, by changing who Americans are - an immigrant might eventually become a citizen; or if they don't their children born on US soil will be.
- solenoid0937 5mo ago
  > Which specific Americans are kind of mediocre academically? Most of them. We have normalized getting Bs and Cs in our schools. Our school curricula are mediocre, and our culture around education is as well. It is distinctly uncool to care about education here. > Which specific immigrants are smarter than the average American and are therefore responsible for the nice things about America? Most of our best doctors, scientists, and engineers are all immigrants. Look at the ethnic breakdown of top AI researchers at the top labs. > which isn't specifically gated on the intelligence of individual immigrants will improve a country along this metric. It's not just intelligence. Immigrants overall have more grit, more entrepreneurial spirit, and more ambition and willingness to succeed than median Americans. It takes a lot to uproot your life and attempt to make it elsewhere. The vast majority of immigrants I've met embody the American spirit far better than most born-and-raised Americans I've met. > And in fact the US has a huge number of legal pathways for immigration That we are making harder and needlessly painful, which will in turn reduce the amount of highly intelligent and capable immigrants we get as well.
burnerRhodov3 5mo ago
This is a very racist comment, or atleast smells of xenophilia. "Americans are kind of mediocre academically". You can't use the term Americans are [all], followed by a blanket statement. If that was about any other class of people it'd be downvoted to oblivion, but for some reason Americans and white can always be talked shit on. This is the kind of shit US AMERICANS are talking about, this xenophilia bullshit that is infecting our nation.
- JuniperMesos 5mo ago
  A lot of American citizens are nonwhite.
- solenoid0937 5mo ago
  I'm born and raised in the US. I don't think it's racist at all, it's just true. Go to any high school and see how little American schoolchildren care about academics vs immigrant schoolchildren. Academic excellence being uncool is baked into American culture. You're a "nerd" if you do well and care. Getting a B is "good enough." And "C's get degrees." This mentality is plainly unacceptable in most immigrant cultures. I took almost two dozen AP classes in my day. In each one, the concentration of immigrant groups was far higher than the rest of the school at large. Expand this out to college. Look at the admissions for top colleges without affirmative action. How do their demographics compare to the rest of the country? - MIT, 47% Asian. Berkeley, 41% Asian. UCLA and Stanford, 27% Asian. 6% of the US population is Asian, and 75% is white, and these schools don't have affirmative action. If all groups were equally competitive, admissions would reflect demographics. (Ethnicity here is a crude approximation for immigration recency. I am not saying one ethnic group is better than another - simply that children of immigrants excel.) The same goes for top PhD programs, the highest paying STEM jobs, even C-suite positions at big tech. I am American and when I say that we have a problem where most Americans do not give a fuck about education, I am not being racist, I am just pointing out the truth. Over decades, our culture has bred an anti-intellectual attitude, one that prioritizes being cool and sociable over getting shit done. This is the antithesis of progress and ambition. It is great for sitting around and demanding handouts. Immigrants more closely approximate the culture the founding fathers intended for the US. They uproot their lives to build something great. They get off their asses, do exceptionally well, and are carrying the nation on their backs. The rest of our culture could learn from them, instead of blaming our problems on them and turning them away.
pickleRick243 5mo ago
I find it a bit hard to believe you actually think such a line of reasoning would be convincing. I think many MAGA voters in fact are aware that many of the immigrants are smarter than them, and hence they do the rational thing of trying to reduce competition. I don't understand why you wrote "taking the jobs" in quotes. That's exactly what's happening- superior immigrant applicants are taking jobs that would have been theirs.
bluecheese452 5mo ago
Why would I want an immigrant smarter than me? If I have a 120 iq and he has a 130 iq then he is going to take my job. You really aren’t convincing me here.
- tptacek 5mo ago
  You reasonably might not. We would though. Who prevails, the small-but-concentrated interest, or the vast-but-diffuse one? It's the central question of all public policy.
  - bluecheese452 5mo ago
    Why would the average us citizen want to import a smarter foreign competitor. There are far more workers than there are ceos.
    - akerl_ 5mo ago
      Because I want to work with talented coworkers and do business with talented counterparts and socialize with people who aren’t scared of immigrants.
    - tptacek 5mo ago
      An accountant wants better, more reliable, and cheaper software. They're not intrinsically motivated to subsidize native-born software developers.
      - bluecheese452 5mo ago
        No they don’t. They want to work 40 hours a week, go on vacation twice a year, drive a couple of cars, have their wife stay home and raise the kids. All things possible 70 years ago but no longer possible.
        tptacek 5mo ago
        Accountants and software developers do not in fact share a fate. I know it doesn't feel that way when you're commenting on HN, but there are whole lucrative professions that do not care at all what happens in ours.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]

eecc 5mo ago

I’m not sure US academia is mediocre. It’s more like… normal? But America being what it is, it attracts those with most potential creating and sustaining a network effect. But there’s nothing intrinsically good or bad of the US, and it’s quite easy to mess up the equilibrium and go back to the mediocrity you mentioned

seanmcdirmid 5mo ago
It’s a numbers game. Taking the best from the world talent pool is going to provide better results than from the much smaller American talent pool. Unless your country has more than a billion people, you need to look at world talent.
- genxy 5mo ago
  The US has to especially encourage immigration since we have gone out of our way to make the education system systemically broken. Our funnel is broken on purpose. Look at countries with strong showings in things like chess or running. Why is that? They encourage large populations of kids to participate, the larger the pool the more top performers.

jedberg 5mo ago

It's a simple matter of math. The USA has less than 5% of the world's population. It's statistically impossible for that 5% to be the smartest 5% in the world. Therefore, if we want the smartest people in the world, we have to allow immigrants.

jerkstate 5mo ago
[flagged]
- jedberg 5mo ago
  No? Not sure how you reached that conclusion. I'm just stating that the USA needs immigrants if we want to increase our median intelligence because we can't possibly have the smartest people in the world born here.
  - jerkstate 5mo ago
    so in order to increase our median intelligence, we should make the process super easy?
    - unethical_ban 5mo ago
      Yes. Why should immigration be kafkaesque? It is in the US interest to have a pipeline of smart, hard-working, innovative people come to this country. The US is/was in many ways a great country for them to come, but we are not the only international destination for such talent. Why would we want to put up such artificial barriers to entry, if we agree on the premises I laid out? The purpose of this is to discourage legal immigration.
      - jerkstate 5mo ago
        So what prevents the incompetent and lazy from immigrating?
        solenoid0937 5mo ago
        Someone immigrating is almost certainly less incompetent and lazy than the median American. Immigration requires uprooting your entire life, and it requires entrepreneurial spirit and grit. That's why many immigrant groups dramatically out-earn American-born citizens. TBH most immigrants I've met better embody the American spirit than most Americans.

deeg 5mo ago

It's not an ego problem. It's a racial one.

hallole 5mo ago

Our lead does not come from immigrants. The American people, who are a distinct people, have shown time and again a potential for great things. Even if it were true, there are wider effects of immigration that you must consider. The purpose of life isn't to increase GDP. It reflects poorly on you that you must cast your opponents as being stupid and spiteful. Could it be that MAGA voters are humans with real motivations and rationales?

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
platevoltage 5mo ago
> Could it be that MAGA voters are humans with real motivations and rationales? No, it couldn't. Trump tells them to vote a certain way, they do it. Look at Massie's primary as an example.
- xp84 5mo ago
  Go on thinking that, but it really won't help the Democrats win if they persist in this attitude. Voters are just looking at what's on offer from both parties, and one party's platform has been judged to be both hostile to their interests and also actively scorns them as people. The other is mostly hostile to their interests and is super corrupt, but it cuts taxes[1] and doesn't belittle them. The Democrats squeaked out one miraculous win buoyed by the incompetence of Trump's band of corrupt idiots in the early COVID days. But now merely pointing out how incompetent and corrupt Trump is stopped working, as we saw in 2024. Do Democrats have anything left in the playbook besides derision and scorn toward those outside their tent? We will soon see, I guess. [1] I know the talking points say that the tax cuts "only benefit the rich" but I'm far from a 1%er and can tell you that I'm paying way more taxes in a blue state than I would be in a red state, and also the OBBB improved things for me. Voters in those blue states can see their tax bills and the one thing Democrats can't say is that they don't put a huge tax burden on those who work.
  - anon84873628 5mo ago

mandeepj 5mo ago

> including our technological lead, is built by immigrants That's my point to get the Constitution changed (Amendment #28) to allow an immigrant to run for POTUS. We love US more than natural-born citizens. Our interests are far more aligned with the betterment of the country than anyone else's.

amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
Oh boy! If we are talking about constitutional amendments I can probably think of a few that would be much more important than that.
alterom 5mo ago
>Our interests are far more aligned with the betterment of the country than anyone else's. Generally, yes. But then there's Elon Musk. Peter Thiel too: while a US citizen by birth, he defacto immigrated to the US from elsewhere (as in: moved from another country to settle in the US). Immigration for rich folks is a bit different, see.
- mandeepj 5mo ago
  Peter Thiel is a naturalized US citizen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel Musk was (mostly) great until 2020; Something happened to him during the COVID timeframe. I'd not want Musk, Thiel, or Palantir guy to run for POTUS. Probably, there should be a clause that if your net worth exceeds the threshold, you shouldn't be eligible to run until you donate all of it to the government, with no option to get it back ever. Some more clauses can be added as well. Edit 1: I think another clause, maybe most important, a minimum one term public office service experience required only as a Senator, Rep, Governor, or a Mayor.
  - alterom 5mo ago
    >Peter Thiel is a naturalized US citizen Oops, my bad, somehow I thought his parents naturalized before he was born. Thanks for pointing this out; this helps the point I'm trying to make. >I'd not want Musk, Thiel, or Palantir guy to run for POTUS. Probably, there should be a clause that if your net worth exceeds the threshold, you shouldn't be eligible to run until you donate all of it to the government, with no option to get it back ever. Some more clauses can be added as well. Edit 1: I think another clause, maybe most important, a minimum one term public office service experience required only as a Senator, Rep, Governor, or a Mayor. Can I vote for you and your proposals somewhere? At this point, this reads like "I have a dream". But it's one worthy of trying to make a reality. >Musk was (mostly) great until 2020; Aside from running the Thai cave diver's life (and slandering him as a "pedo") for daring to rescue the children instead of letting them die waiting for Musk's non-existent submarine to rescue them. That, and being generally known for working his employees to the bone. And the whole "I need to spread my superior seed" conveyor belt approach to having children. And the "420 funding secured" nonsense. Oh, and the Hyperloop hype, which he did with the sole intent to kill high speed rail in California (which he succeeded in). And the Boring Company scam. And... nevermind, he was a known, not OK", great asshole before* he went full Nazi, but I can agree that he was "great" in comparison to what he's become. >Something happened to him during the COVID timeframe. It's ketamine. Ketamine happened.

JuniperMesos 5mo ago

> The current admin does not understand that our lead comes from immigrants. Sorry, but most Americans are kind of mediocre academically. > I do not understand why the "American First" MAGA crowd can't get it through their thick skulls that everything nice they have, including our technological lead, is built by immigrants that are just smarter than they are. Which specific Americans are kind of mediocre academically? Which specific immigrants are smarter than the average American and are therefore responsible for the nice things about America? Not all American citizens have the same level of intelligence, nor do all people attempting to or actually succeeding in immigrating to the US. To the extent that "everything nice" including technological development is grounded in the average level of intelligence of the people currently inhabiting a country (which I think is a substantial part of but not the entirety of the explanation), this doesn't necessarily imply that immigration which isn't specifically gated on the intelligence of individual immigrants will improve a country along this metric. And in fact the US has a huge number of legal pathways for immigration (including some like "immigrating illegally, having a natural-born-citizen child on US soil, and having that child sponsor your legal immigration decades later) that have nothing at all to do with how intelligent a given immigrant is. And of course, immigration itself changes how "mediocre academically" Americans are, by changing who Americans are - an immigrant might eventually become a citizen; or if they don't their children born on US soil will be.

solenoid0937 5mo ago
> Which specific Americans are kind of mediocre academically? Most of them. We have normalized getting Bs and Cs in our schools. Our school curricula are mediocre, and our culture around education is as well. It is distinctly uncool to care about education here. > Which specific immigrants are smarter than the average American and are therefore responsible for the nice things about America? Most of our best doctors, scientists, and engineers are all immigrants. Look at the ethnic breakdown of top AI researchers at the top labs. > which isn't specifically gated on the intelligence of individual immigrants will improve a country along this metric. It's not just intelligence. Immigrants overall have more grit, more entrepreneurial spirit, and more ambition and willingness to succeed than median Americans. It takes a lot to uproot your life and attempt to make it elsewhere. The vast majority of immigrants I've met embody the American spirit far better than most born-and-raised Americans I've met. > And in fact the US has a huge number of legal pathways for immigration That we are making harder and needlessly painful, which will in turn reduce the amount of highly intelligent and capable immigrants we get as well.

burnerRhodov3 5mo ago

This is a very racist comment, or atleast smells of xenophilia. "Americans are kind of mediocre academically". You can't use the term Americans are [all], followed by a blanket statement. If that was about any other class of people it'd be downvoted to oblivion, but for some reason Americans and white can always be talked shit on. This is the kind of shit US AMERICANS are talking about, this xenophilia bullshit that is infecting our nation.

JuniperMesos 5mo ago
A lot of American citizens are nonwhite.
solenoid0937 5mo ago
I'm born and raised in the US. I don't think it's racist at all, it's just true. Go to any high school and see how little American schoolchildren care about academics vs immigrant schoolchildren. Academic excellence being uncool is baked into American culture. You're a "nerd" if you do well and care. Getting a B is "good enough." And "C's get degrees." This mentality is plainly unacceptable in most immigrant cultures. I took almost two dozen AP classes in my day. In each one, the concentration of immigrant groups was far higher than the rest of the school at large. Expand this out to college. Look at the admissions for top colleges without affirmative action. How do their demographics compare to the rest of the country? - MIT, 47% Asian. Berkeley, 41% Asian. UCLA and Stanford, 27% Asian. 6% of the US population is Asian, and 75% is white, and these schools don't have affirmative action. If all groups were equally competitive, admissions would reflect demographics. (Ethnicity here is a crude approximation for immigration recency. I am not saying one ethnic group is better than another - simply that children of immigrants excel.) The same goes for top PhD programs, the highest paying STEM jobs, even C-suite positions at big tech. I am American and when I say that we have a problem where most Americans do not give a fuck about education, I am not being racist, I am just pointing out the truth. Over decades, our culture has bred an anti-intellectual attitude, one that prioritizes being cool and sociable over getting shit done. This is the antithesis of progress and ambition. It is great for sitting around and demanding handouts. Immigrants more closely approximate the culture the founding fathers intended for the US. They uproot their lives to build something great. They get off their asses, do exceptionally well, and are carrying the nation on their backs. The rest of our culture could learn from them, instead of blaming our problems on them and turning them away.

pickleRick243 5mo ago

I find it a bit hard to believe you actually think such a line of reasoning would be convincing. I think many MAGA voters in fact are aware that many of the immigrants are smarter than them, and hence they do the rational thing of trying to reduce competition. I don't understand why you wrote "taking the jobs" in quotes. That's exactly what's happening- superior immigrant applicants are taking jobs that would have been theirs.

bluecheese452 5mo ago

Why would I want an immigrant smarter than me? If I have a 120 iq and he has a 130 iq then he is going to take my job. You really aren’t convincing me here.

tptacek 5mo ago
You reasonably might not. We would though. Who prevails, the small-but-concentrated interest, or the vast-but-diffuse one? It's the central question of all public policy.
- bluecheese452 5mo ago
  Why would the average us citizen want to import a smarter foreign competitor. There are far more workers than there are ceos.
  - akerl_ 5mo ago
    Because I want to work with talented coworkers and do business with talented counterparts and socialize with people who aren’t scared of immigrants.
  - tptacek 5mo ago
    An accountant wants better, more reliable, and cheaper software. They're not intrinsically motivated to subsidize native-born software developers.
    - bluecheese452 5mo ago
      No they don’t. They want to work 40 hours a week, go on vacation twice a year, drive a couple of cars, have their wife stay home and raise the kids. All things possible 70 years ago but no longer possible.
      - tptacek 5mo ago
        Accountants and software developers do not in fact share a fate. I know it doesn't feel that way when you're commenting on HN, but there are whole lucrative professions that do not care at all what happens in ours.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]