Comment by ISL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ISL | Hacker News Reader

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On the Chinese research question: Just wait a decade.

In all likelihood, I am permanently departing academia in about a month. The underlying reason is structural -- neither our funding agency nor our institution is willing to yield on a fundamental sticking point that is causing all of our young researchers to leave. I am about to join them. There is literally no path forward.

In the decade that I have watched my world-leading research group wither, our Chinese colleagues have expanded their laboratories by 4-5x, appear to be well-resourced, and are poised to lead the world on all fronts within the decade.

An excellent colleague of mine, who had done excellent work for US particle-physics experiments, went to China for a high-energy physics faculty interview. On arrival, he was surprised to find that there appeared to be another candidate competing for the position. He did his best, as did the other candidate. As he prepared to depart, he asked whether or not it had been a competition for the open position. The reply? "We had one position, but we liked both of your talks so much, we are extending offers to both of you." There was no matching US offer of which I am aware: he accepted.

That essentially never happens these days in the United States. It is a story the likes of which one might have heard from 1950-1970.

Chinese physics results are continuing to gain in reliability. Where once we saw quite a bit of copy-catting, Chinese fundamental science research is beginning to transition into regularly breaking new ground.

Wait a decade.

We should welcome this development with open arms. A billion smart people, with equal potential, should be able to turn out roughly three times as much research as the 0.34 billion smart people in the US. We can encourage that research at the same time that we must stand against the regime's attacks on democracy in Hong Kong, the atrocities occurring in Xinjiang, their surveillance state, threatening the independence of Taiwan, enabling North Korea, and more. ( The US has dirty laundry, too: Our President is incompetent. Vote! )

Something else to mention - the pipeline of attracting smart students from all over the world (especially China and India), educating them, giving them green cards and having them continue researching at US universities or working for US companies is basically done. It might not be immediately apparent, but we are going to see a significant change in high-skilled labor availability and output in America over the next decade.

A good chunk of the young top talent in the last 2-3 years in my area have returned home (India, China, Europe, Canada). I expect them to produce top notch work wherever they are.

If we just think of something that is part of the fabric of a prominent university like a university press - MIT Press was formed in 1932. Oxford University press was founded in 1586.

Tsinghua University Press was founded in 1980. The university probably wasn't even open during the cultural revolution. This is where Xi Jinping graduated, it is considered by many to be the best university in Asia, and its press didn't open until 1980. I know a CS professor who published a book via TUP about 15 years ago, and there were all kinds of problems, they just didn't know how to publish a textbook in the manner that MIT Press or some equivalent university press could, the publication process was much more amateurish. But - at the end of the day - the textbook was published, the content was good, and the printing was adequate. I have a feeling that they will get there.

I think about this a lot as well. To a scientist, funding more science and scientists seems like a no brainer. It's not like everything's worked out, we are inured against all the reasonable existential threats, and we all live to 150 in perfect health. There seems like a clear line between scientific discoveries and almost everything that is good about the world. If everyone in the world took military spending for one year, and made a huge fund to give money to scientists, it at least has a chance to be one of the most beneficial actions in human history. It would also be an eye-watering waste of money, as in literally money disappearing into the void.

This is the thing. Science is a massive waste of money. It is the most important waste of money there is, but it is still a waste of money. If you try to make it less of a waste of money, it stops being worthwhile. To any sort of accountant, it looks like setting money on fire. Academia has shown the ability to proliferate and essentially soak up as much money as they can. Now at the moment, China can see that line between funding and future good. They can tolerate the huge wastage it entails. They are also a functionally permanent regime.

In western countries, my opinion is that science funding will contract over time. I think one of the reasons is that society is ageing. This is partly an economic effect, where the cost of caring for the elderly goes up, the number of people working and paying taxes goes down, and there is less money to fund science. In my country, the biggest government spending ticket is aged care, not including healthcare. But I think the main effect is psychological - more elderly leaders and a more elderly society have a harder time seeing the point of funding science. I'm not saying this is good or bad, only that it is there. In the end, a society decides on the appetite it has for funding science.

If academia is structured the same way in China as it is in the US, that situation won't be sustainable for long there, either. If each professor produces ten new PhDs, the only way for them to all find academic jobs is through very rapid growth in faculty size, which can't be sustained for that long.

Agreed -- one can only hire like crazy in a growth phase. The frequently promulgated expectation that every new PhD can become an R1 professor is incorrect, unwise, and unhealthy. If that expectation alone were altered in the undergraduate consciousness, a lot of sadness could be averted.

The contrast here is that the US (in particular -- the EU seems to be more thoughtful) doesn't seem to be maintaining its robust research program, while China seems to understand that leadership in basic research has compounding benefits on decadal timescales.

I got my physics PhD in 1993. By this time, this expectation was already held in disregard. Most students were aware of what we called the "birth control problem." My dad got his PhD in the 1950s, and told me that it was common knowledge back then too.

But while students vaguely knew that most of us would not end up on this path, we got little or no guidance on what else we could do. A common aspiration was to teach at a lower tier school, but the academic job market was saturated from top to bottom. I was ready to go into some kind of engineering. A lot of us became programmers.

I got lucky -- a friend of a friend owned a company, and hired me.

My experience is that the understanding of the problem is apparent to post-graduates and older, as well as a number of people outside of academia. Among my undergraduate class and my entering first-year graduate class, understanding of that reality -- that many of them (which, probabilistically meant you) would not become professors -- was limited at best.

That's fair. It may be something that students have been told but don't really internalize. Everybody at the tournament wants to believe that they stand a chance. I know this is true of students in the humanities too. Everybody is actively putting off facing the reality.

One thing I do remember is that as undergrads, we were advised to maintain a pretense of wanting to pursue an academic career, even if we had other plans. If you told them that you intended to finish with a masters and go into industry, you would probably not get accepted, would not get funding, and would be treated as a second class citizen. So students were pretty much told to inflate their expectations. That was a long time ago, and I don't know how it is now.

I didn't become a good enough research scientist to compete for a trophy gig in academia. What I saw is that my own university was hiring up, i.e., only considering applicants from higher ranked schools. That meant my chances were somewhere close to zero. I got to know the post-docs and understood their grind. But also, I became more interested in gadgets and making things work, than in directing fundamental research.

I recall reading here, within the past month, that China had blown up its' academic institutions, and they were considerably behind the rest of the world as late as 1990, and perhaps even later. They may in fact have lots of room to grow. They can't grow exponentially forever, but maybe they can for a while.

Your answer resonated with me a lot. Can you elaborate on this? What is that structural reason?

> The underlying reason is structural -- neither our funding agency nor our institution is willing to yield on a fundamental sticking point that is causing all of our young researchers to leave.

The National Science Foundation (for good reasons) will not fund more than a month or two of a Principal Investigator's annual salary. They'll fund many other types of position, but not that one.

Our University (for good reasons) is reticent to hire into faculty positions, where the state/university would fund a PI's salary. Furthermore, any research professors must fund themselves through grants.

NSF is the only serious game in town for our grant funding.

Even though we have the country's best infrastructure for these experiments, are leaders in our field, can attract grants, and have done so since 1987, we haven't been institutionally capable of retaining promising early/mid-career researchers since ~1999.

The big losers in this situation are the country's experimental capability and science in general. We easily have at least another decade's advances ahead of us. The issue isn't really one of total amounts of funding, but rather whether we are allowed to invest in retaining skilled and knowledgeable leadership.

What changed in ~1999 in your Dept? I've heard similar stories too many times and I'd be curious what the solution was before.

Also do you have any insight into the NSF's resistance to funding PI's?

1999 was roughly the last time we made a faculty hire into our group.

My understanding is that NSF doesn't want PI salaries to be dependent upon grants -- that way, your job isn't (directly) on the line for a specific line of research. It removes at least a little bit of bias toward proposing research just to stay funded.

Moreover, the policy is an incentive for universities to hire faculty, which is generally good for research/teaching.

The hard thing, from the university's perspective, is that a faculty hire is, assuming tenure, very expensive. There is generally a ~$0.5-1M laboratory-startup package, plus a commitment of a professor's salary until ~2055. For this reason, our Department is generally allotted ~1 faculty hire/year. Only exceptional events, like the appearance of a huge and sustained source of money or winning the Nobel Prize (UW Physics: 1989 and 2016) will permit extra hires in targeted fields.

Furthermore, because faculty hires are so rare and each professor gets a vote, each hire has an impact on internal politics. Our department is comparatively friendly, but faculty-hire slots are the most precious commodity in any department.

All of this is to say that it is difficult to find a path that, in this case, would help to retain knowledge and talent in our group. The meeting of the minds that needs to happen is between national funding policy and the status quo among most universities. It is so far above my pay-grade that I've not yet found a reasonable angle from which to attempt to solve the problem.

The obvious issue is whether you can think openly when you can get in trouble for it.

Einstein was not a conformist. Could he have survived such an environment? Or would they beat him down, or would he leave?

Consider Li Wenliang, who first noticed covid19, and was interviewed by the police, and investigated after his death for disrupting public order.

OTOH the PRC have been very astute in adopting capitalism. If they can, they will find a way for research. I'm just not sure if it's possible to reconcile thought-control in one sphere, and not in another.

> I'm just not sure if it's possible to reconcile thought-control in one sphere, and not in another.

On Slate Star Codex, there is an interesting article about this topic:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-...

In my informal searches, a surprising number of the really interesting new catalytic materials seem to be coming from Chinese researchers.

Did you consider leaving the US to continue in academia? What industry are you joining?

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