China Expands Research Funding, Luring U.S. Scientists and Students
npr.org
npr.org
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/11/13/new-internati... https://cgsnet.org/first-time-over-decade-international-grad...
The number of returnees has risen, but so has the overall number of non-returnees (the result of a lot more Chinese students studying in the states).
Smart, ambitious Chinese students are now planning the right new work experiences in the US with an eye towards returning back to China as a junior VP at Tencent or Alibaba when they go back. The way to retain them in the US is to give them the same career opportunities here but a lot of Chinese students are realizing they can climb the ladder a lot faster and further in China and making the rational choice to go back.
There are many factors. One important factor which amplifies other factors is related to big number theory: quantity is translated into quality. Average Chinese are not quite different from other nationals.(Let's put down controversial conclusion for now) . However China has 1.3 billion people. With such a big number , a small shift of the average on the IQ bell curve doesn't matter. What you have met are a vary small portion of top talent from China. As analogy, you can image a typical top NBA athlete would be black. But with 1.3 billion people there exists a Yao Ming who is not a typical Chinese.
Then why it happened recently? That's related to last 30 years rapid development.But that's invisible part. China not only build road , bridge, bullet train, etc. more importantly which also matches Chinese traditional value: China invest heavily in Education. In 80's (i.e. my generation ) only 5-10% of high school graduate can be accepted by limited universities at the time. But money poured into Education increased year by year incrementally like crazy. Today there are enough universities to provide any qualified students an opportunity for education. The consequence is there's a big change on human capital. This is not limited to what you observed but also in other areas. For example, China is exporting the infrastructure building expertise all over the world. Quite often the builders have to bring whole teams from China because qualified teams are only available there. Those are experienced skill construction workers but not academically competitive students.
The significant increase in human capital is less visible than infrastructure improvement, yet it has a bigger impact
In my opinion, a successful education system is the one which can produce people who are capable of learn new knowledge my themselves, resolve problems by themselves and create new things by themselves.
So maybe, reading 800 Chinese words in a very young age is impressive, but there is more important things to do.
I welcome increased science funding regardless of who is doing it, particularly when we're talking about non-military scientific research.
If this makes the US feel competitive and they increase funding state-side then so much the better. We'd all benefit from that too.
The problem with US is for foreign nationals, there is a preset role for us to fit in, while in China, it offers more potentials. I won't say certain it is black and white question at this moment, there is trade-off in between. Living in US is no longer the non-brainer
My sample based on my circle of Chinese PhD students that have graduated in the last 5 years indicates a more willingness to go back and several have.
A very common path for Chinese scientists is to go to a western university for their doctorate and post-doc, develop a research program, and return to a faculty position in China.
Many Chinese grants include salary for the PI, so an investigator getting multiple grants can earn a lot of money. It's an attractive incentive that appears to be working quite well (from my limited exposure).
As for reliability, there are certainly some issues, but I hesitate to paint with a broad brush. Science is often very discipline-specific in terms of reproducibility, openness of collaboration, funding, etc. etc. There absolutely are fields where the Chinese are quite strong.
Ranking by the 1% most highly cited papers in math and computing for those published between 2013-2016:
6 of the top 15 universities are in mainland China,
6 USA,
2 Singapore, and
1 Hong Kong.
Tsinghua is at number 1. Singapore also seems to employ a number of researchers from China.
The article does state that MIT still leads in the broader STEM fields, but Tsinghua may soon take over.
“The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (mit) still leads in the top 1% of stem papers, but Mr Marginson says Tsinghua is on track to be “number one in five years or less”.”
https://www.economist.com/china/2018/11/17/tsinghua-universi...
Speaking as an American who worked as a researcher in China for almost 9 years, China is way late to the “leveraging global talent” game. They should catch up, it’s only natural.
Keep in mind that the number of foreigners in China is about the same as the number of foreigners in Tokyo.
I’m not really sure when someone would say bias has crossed over into xenophobia, they are not very distinguishable anyways.
No need to answer if you are still in China at the moment.
I presume that financial equivalents to options are allowed, but that China forbids foreigners controlling non-cash capital in China, since that complicates the Communist's Party's exercise of authoritarian power over the operation of the nation.
I used to be a researcher and writing proposals suddenly started taking up much more time around 2010 to 2013 because each grant became much smaller. Each grant also became more specific in what science you were expected to produce, which essentially made us all contractors for NSF plus DOE and winning a grant was sometimes more about politics than producing excellent scholarship. This pushed a lot of great scientists out of the field.
After I left research radical leftists started a more expansive politicized attack on science that is further politisizing who gets tenure or grants essential to making scientific progress.
- Biology as a subject is the most affected right now [1], because biology shows that there are biological differences that contribute to individuals choices in a way that invalidates the univariant equity doctrine political explanations. Women on average does are as capable as men in the sciences, but they differences in choices increase the more equal the societies are.
- Science as a competence hierarchy is under attack by the equity initiatives [2], making it so that the most important factors for getting grants and tenure is often not competence.
The fact is unfortunately that these programs have been shown to not increase the production of great science [3]. Moreover, these efforts further demoralize and alienate scientists.
We should at this point not be under any doubt that unless we defeat the politicization of science the US will not remain competitive. We should ask ourselves if we want to be equal on a sinking ship or make life better by allowing everyone to compete as individuals regardless of which identity you think they belong to.
[1] https://quillette.com/2018/10/18/trans-activists-campaign-ag... [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/when-wil... [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/when-wil...
This doesn't mean that one gender is more capable than the other, women actually do as well on average in the sciences as men, but it seems to indicate that the genders does not make the same choices if social or economic limitations are removed. Also, why are the choices women make in countries like Norway inferior to the choices they make in less gender equal countries?
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more... [2] https://phys.org/news/2018-10-personality-differences-sexes-...
In practice, of course, biology explains a large portion of differences between humans, both where it pertains to gender, and where it pertains to race.
There are a few "forbidden truths" for them:
1) That there are in fact biological reasons for some aspects of a gender gap.
2) More general there are reasons for discrimination in certain limited cases (it used to be the case that the law had specific exceptions for diversity regulations. The big example given was "no cripples in the emergency response team in the fire department" (I think you can imagine why). That was a valid discriminatory demand that could be put in job applications)
3) There can be no differences in the source population (because ... well if you calculate it out specifically, then the Bay Area is not racist in hiring at all. But wait ! Why are there soooo few blacks working for the Bay Area tech companies ? Why so many Asians ? Well ... those values are very close to what you'd expect them to be if well-established (but heavily denied) racial differences in intelligence are taking into account and one assumes that when silicon valley invites 10 people to compete for a job, they hire the smartest)
So in order to have "equality", defined as "distribution in the winners of competitions is the same as the distribution of participants" you can't have even tiny differences at all in the population beyond their proportion of the population, otherwise that'll never happen. Unfortunately there's another problem here (see next point)
Of course the whole reason different races exist is to have them be different. I mean from the perspective of evolution, which while it isn't a conscious entity, does have both the means to change humans and a reason to do so (a goal to achieve). This means races/genders don't just differ in skin color, they differ in anything. Obviously the skin is one important difference, but it is just one component of profound differences in energy regulation of the body, which affects nearly everything relating to energy use in the body, which ... even affects brain size. Specifically one big difference between races is how much energy gets dedicated to body temperature maintenance (cooling and warming are different systems, so that's 2 separate things), digestion, muscles/movement, and ... yes ... how much energy gets dedicated to thinking, and even the balance between cortex and neocortex. And if it favors the cortex, that is just not going to help out your chess game. It even affects how big you are on average (of course bigger = everything requires more energy, because the human body is not that different from a robot. Fortunately bigger requires exponentially more energy, so the differences there can't be that big)
4) The effect of average differences on competitions. Specifically, say you have group 1 and group 2, and they compete. Let's assume N(100, 10) distribution. Let's say group 1 has a x% higher average, how often would a one-on-one competition between a member of group 1 and group 2 end in favor of the member of group 1 ? Let's call that value y.
for x = 1%, odds of group 1 winning = 53.01% for x = 2%, odds of group 1 winning = 55.57% for x = 5%, odds of group 1 winning = 64.04% for x = 10%, odds of group 1 winning = 76.08% for x = 20%, odds of group 1 winning = 92.19%
And if you have repeated competitions (you only advance to the next round if you win round 1, and there's N rounds) ... it gets pretty bad pretty rapidly.
So unfortunately competition amplifies small differences in averages. Although this is to be expected, this is why natural selection works.
There are bigger differences within groups than between them, although there are also large differences between groups. For instance, people of jewish descent have an average IQ that is much higher than any other group. However, if you are trying to find the best person for a cognitively demanding job or to build a relationship with them then it doesn't matter what the average for any group you might perceive them as part of is as you might need an individual that belong to a small subset of any group.
That is why we in the west made the essential discovery that we are different amongst so many dimensions that we in the end are a group of one, the individual, and that we should aspire to judge a person as an individual on their merit in any situation.
Judging people as individuals goes against some of our basic tendencies as humans. Our natural tendency is to be tribal and to judge individuals for group "guilt". Our judicial and political system is intentionally adversarial to counter this tendency, and that is why we need to fight hard against anyone trying to destroy this process in the name of equity or because they think they deserve special treatment due to their group belongings.
> "distribution in the winners of competitions is the same as the distribution of participants"
(and sometimes even extended to the distribution of the population)
Like you say, an individual's performance, like any other individual data point in statistics, can be anything, or anyone in this case. I should probably have mentioned that.
Yes, only a small subset of people in general have a good understanding of statistics.
- People on the radical left without a good understanding of statistics are often outraged by how they misunderstand how statistical should be interpreted
- People on the identarian right make outrageous statements the statistics can't support.
I try to avoid both misunderstandings by explicitly stating the caveat.
I think, there's a very solid cause behind it. Most of "competing individually" is essentially making different decisions and benefiting/losing from the consequences. Except over the past few decades our society has automated/protocolized those decisions away. We follow rules and documented best practices (or just let a database search figure out the right thing for us) much more than we have to improvise. So the society is looking for alternative planes for people to compete and ironically, due to our sense of compassion, the competition shifted to demonstrating that you suffer more than your peers. I'm afraid, this is also responsible for declining willingness of westerners to make families/raise kids.
The equity agenda is inherently a very pessimistic agenda in the same way that communism is pessimistic. It assumes that our current tangible as well as intangible resources is a good approximation of what can be, and I think we over the last 100 years have proven that this is not true.
Lets dig more into evidence of suppression of biological research:
How would you then explain the reactions to anyone stating the biological fact that human gender is overwhelmingly bimodal with almost everyone being male/female [1], suppression of research into intelligence [2], or the diversity pledges some candidates now have to write before becoming professors [3].
The grievance studies hoax proved how grievance studies is acting like ideological whitewashing of extreme political ideas that would be unacceptable otherwise [4]. These ideas are used to justify political actions in universities and in culture to suppress sacrilegious ideas [5], and it is a concept of sacred only a small very loud minority of progressives believe in and these comprise 8% of the population [6].
Personally I find the radical leftist explanation of these two incidences unconvincing:
- it seems like the opposition to McKinnon’s paper was argued primarily from a moral angle due to his violation of some progressive sacred principles, and other explanation does not seem to explain the size of the response
- The reaction to the grievance studies hoax was that peer review is flawed and them still claiming that it is fair to use favored political views as a valid criteria of what should be publishing of papers of very poor scholarship. This does not engage with the real very disturbing conclusions of this study, and the fact that their hoax papers in addition to winning prices within grievance studies are also indistinguishable from other scholarship regularly published there.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6phePAZueQw [2] https://jordanbpeterson.com/transcripts/douglas-murray/ [3] https://www.thecollegefix.com/ucla-to-require-diversity-pled... [4] https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studi... [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gatn5ameRr8 [6] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majo...
My second follow-up claim is that if the response had been entirely based upon merits then the response would have not been anything remotely this severe. tptaceks claim is on the merits of the paper, which might or might not be correct to some degree, but does not address this concern with the response and how problematic it is that sacredness is now part of the academic review process.
Ideas should be engaged with and critiqued through scholarship, and basing any rejection of scholarship partially or fully on an idea of sacredness is dangerous to the integrity of our scholarship. We need to have zero tolerance of this, and McKinnon’s situation or the reaction to Charles Murray before it shows how sacredness stops us from properly critiquing ideas through scholarship.
And I think his response was severe exactly because sacredness had won over merits---reviewers accepting a sub-par paper for a political reason. He even explicitly stated that Mathematical Intelligencer could be a reasonable fit for the paper.
Therefore if a scientist when expressing an idea meet an opposition that;
- involves sacredness partially or fully as a principle for rejecting it
- threatens with severe social sanctions or exceptional actions if their favored sacredness isn't respected
Then we have hit something where the ones that have these sacred principles should have to justify their arguments as papers as well. There needs to be some negative response to using sacredness partially or fully as a way to reject ideas, because that is how we protect the scientific process from the corruption due to flaws in human nature.
If the only thing that stops that from happening is publishing the paper then we should err on publishing it when in doubt so that we can find the truth. If they believe so much that this is wrong, let them put their reputation behind their sacredness principles in another paper objecting to this paper and let us all criticize those as well.
Time to learn Mandarin I guess.
And the pretrained models it ships with are trained against a Mandarin corpus.
http://repoq.com/baidu/Familia/
I think a high star/open-issue ratio is only a very weak indicator, that you should only use when you have hundreds of repos to evaluate and no domain expertise to decide which actually solves your problem.
But I find that people closing issues without addressing them is actually a very rare thing. Far more common is for a project to be abandoned by the maintainer. And this heuristic is quite good at raising a red flag in that situation.
Taking a deep dive into a library is of course the most reliable option. But in my experience, really getting an understanding of a large project is a multi-day or even multi-week affair, and this thing serves as an excellent first pass filter.
Wonder if there are cross-cultural differences in starring/issue-opening frequencies, since the assumption here is that there are none
Stars can indicate interest where as issues are correlated with both usage and quality. A star is not nearly as strongly correlated with either usage or quality, it is most strongly correlated with interest. I star a thing because I think it is interesting and what to learn more about it.
If I'm writing an issue on a thing I never even have to star it because I am either actively using it (and thus perhaps watching it) or I'm a drive-by issuer that just stumbled on this thing and thus will either star the project because it interests me or not.
Stars to Issues is Interest to Usage, the more interesting a thing is an the least used it is the better it scores.
The original motivation behind this project was this: I wrote a script to take a screenshot of my desktop every 10 seconds and upload them to S3. I used boto to do the uploading (https://github.com/boto/boto). Boto leaked memory and eventually the background script would cause my laptop to crash. When I figured out the problem I noticed boto has a large number of open issues (http://repoq.com/boto/boto). This indicates that the project is not well maintained.
Obviously this is not a perfect heuristic. But it's a lot better than one might think.
If English isn't an easy language, what is? Is there any language that is universally easy?
I think that our collective understanding of how constructed languages could influence study is very lacking, but could probably take some hints from our experience with computer programming languages. Some languages could have grammars that lend themselves more easily to technical writing while others lend themselves to casual conversation. Historically, this took the form of having technical writing in Latin in English-speaking countries.
History also shows us that a world with "domain-specific human languages" might be a little too idealistic. Our minds cannot simply download the latest linter for Latin/Esperanto/English to keep the language consistent. However, the rise of the dictionary, and spellchecking/grammar software could be what prevents us from repeating history.
Probably because even most native English speakers don't know how to get it completely correct either (I count myself in that group).
'Hello World' is easy.
Even hacking your way through something is possible.
Even if the rules are weird and nobody seems to get it totally right.
Are you talking about Chinese or English here? It would apply to both. The hard part in learning Chinese is the script, which simply requires a lot of time spent memorizing. If you're willing to settle for the literacy of an uneducated villager, learning Chinese isn't that difficult.
1. Very analytical, wake in inflections.
2. No genders for nouns.(As an Eastern Asian, I have serious problem understanding the motivation of introducing such concept into a language.)
3. Reasonable number of tenses comparing with rest of European languages, with the exception of probably present perfect tense, which can be fairly confusing.
It CAN be hard for the following reasons:
1. Huge amount of French/Latin borrowed words that don't follow the orthodoxical way of word construction in Germanic language family, unlike German. This leads to a lot of cognitive overhead having to memorize those words since they tend to appear more often in advanced writings.
2. Related to the first argument, English pronunciation CANNOT be reliably inferred from its letter representation. Again leads to a lot of mistakes and force memorization.
I think English is easier as a language for everyday use. But to read and write academic text, it still requires years of training. Personally, it takes me about 10 years to reach a certain level of confidence in writing and conversation, for speaking it is even longer.
if there's anyone who learned both as additional languages I would be interested in hearing.
And evin bad spelers can riit undrstandabbel englush.
u ll maek urlself look dum tho
China has started the The Thousand Talent program to recruit professors from all over the world: http://www.1000plan.org/en/. Also, Chinese govt now offering international students scholarships to cover the cost if they enroll: https://www.scholarshipsads.com/china-scholarships/.
In English, we'd have a "Million Dollar Talent" program and a Chinese would say it unfortunately evokes "Millon Dollar Baby"
> I welcome increased science funding regardless of who is doing it
Would you say the same about Nazi science? The world depicted in the Man in the High Castle has some very impressive scientific achievements.
The idea that science and knowledge are an unalloyed good to humanity no matter who develops the expertise is a fairy tale. Scientific knowledge and the technical skill that flows from it are weapons. Weapons are tools that can be used for good or ill, so we want them to be in the hands of those who can be (more) trusted to use them for good and out of the hands of those who can be less trusted.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/prison-camps-in-china-th...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/china-is-creating-co...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/magazine/the-lonely-crusa...
No, I emphatically do not. That's the most false and inflammatory misreading of my comment possible. The Chinese people are not villains, full stop.
The point I was making is that political regimes matter when it comes to the desire for progress in science and technology, and the idea that it doesn't is naive. I'm glad the Nazis and the Soviets were technically and scientifically behind the Allies and the West, and I think the world would be better off they had stayed even further behind -- even if that meant that humanity as a whole has its scientific and technical progress retarded for the want of their contributions.
People just heard al Qaeda.
Why not?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio...
https://qz.com/906142/a-chinese-medical-study-is-being-retra...
They are conducting ethical cleansing right now.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18546130 and marked it off-topic.
If you weren't aware: Godwin has repealed "Godwin's law":
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/12/14/...:
> If you’re thoughtful about it and show some real awareness of history, go ahead and refer to Hitler or Nazis when you talk about Trump. Or any other politician.
Or any other regime.
My comment was not hyperbolic, as WWII is pretty much the perfect real-world example of the political ramifications of scientific and technological advancement. Far from "benefit[ing] all of mankind even if the benefits are initially felt closer to where they're conducted," if the Nazi's had invented the atom bomb before the allies, mankind would have suffered more than it has.
Braun was primarily interested in space travel, but it does lead to a good satirical quote, "I aim at the stars, but sometimes I hit London."
Back then, if people celebrated and supported Nazi science in the name of an idealistic concept of politically-neutral human scientific advancement, Europe and maybe even America may be subjugated under a Nazi flag.
Everyone who cares about liberal political institutions should hope that authoritarian regimes are scientifically and technologically backwards, and work to keep it that way.
The Nazis were a large part of the reason that our technological development accelerated like nothing before, or since. We went from having never even put a man in orbit to putting a man on the moon in less than a decade - which remains what I think is by far the greatest achievement in the history of our species. A great evil created resulted in the most unimaginable good.
The times since then remained dominated by yang. We've had relative peace, prosperity, and our greatest threat was literally just a threat. And so now we are in an era where after decades of technological devolution we struggle to even fly a rocket by the moon, unable to come even close to replicating what we achieved with seeming ease some 50 years ago.
Can you explain?
1) never had the need of this experiment, it was not to cure him but to test the effect of messing with a certain gene.
2) we never had its consent (obviously)
I don't know about US, but in EU we don't experiment with people, without their concent and in order not to cure them, but to find how to build a stronger race.
That's a whole higher level of screwed up that just happened in China.
This is non-consenting human experiment in order not to cure but to find how to build a stronger race. This is not (as far as I know) in any way comparable to what is happening in the West
"Involuntary Sterilization and Castration in Sweden and the Nordic Countries"
"In 1934, the first sterilisation act was enacted in Sweden followed by the first castration act in 1944. In 1972, Sweden became the first country in the world to enact legislation for the amendment of legally registered sex, however preconditioned on sterilisation. In the implementation of all these laws, voluntary and involuntary interventions have been made with legislative support... The involuntarily castrated [in the period 1972-2013] have still not received any reparations from the Swedish State [2018]"
https://www.soclaw.lu.se/en/node/394
It seems that authists and trans people were actively targetted for a long period of time.
There are plenty of practical grounds too. They don’t just turn off the cancer switch - gene editing ‘turns off’ some deep cellular function that is involved in cancer developing. But that function might regulate something else we don’t understand - we don’t yet know the consequences 40,50 or 100 years later of doing that.
To determine that some change is safe during the expected 150 year of life, you must measure the effects during … at least 150 years (preferability more).
How would be you sure that there are no tradeoff? Perhaps it reduce the chance of reproduction by a 1%. Perhaps it affect the ability to climb very tall mountains or very deep scuba diving. Perhaps it will make your grandgrandchildren more weak during a famine (sooner or later, some of your descendants will suffer a famine) or an epidemic. What are the good genes for surviving a war? How do you average the advantages and disadvantages of the normal times and the war times? And there are some adaptations that cause problems but makes you more resistant to malaria, how long you expect your descendants to live in a malaria free zone?
How are you sure that the proposed changes are real advantages and not just some fads? (Consider that it's not clear how many eggs should you eat weekly, the recommendation changes every ten years.)
What about exchanging 10 years of life for a 1% more chance of reproduction. Perhaps 1% is small, but it accumulates during the generations.
With respect to the topic under discussion: absent any particular reason to suppose that this kind of gene editing causes your hypothetical wartime probability difference or your hypothetical 1% fertility drop, there's no reason to use the possibility of these effects to ban the treatment, since there's as much reason to believe you're making these things less likely as reason to believe that you're making these things more likely.
Regarding changes being advantages: do you really believe, deep down, that being weak is just as useful as being strong? That being resistant to disease is just as good as being vulnerable? That being dumb is just as good as being a genius? Give me a break: I can't seriously entertain the idea that we don't know which traits we'd want our children to have, given a choice.