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Comment by insane_dreamer | Hacker News Reader

The fastest way for the US to lose its competitive edge and status as global leader is to reduce funding for scientific research and academic institutions. They are the Crown Jewels and the primary attraction for talent from around the world.

The damage for the next four years is done. The question is, even if there's a major shift back to sanity with the next prez elections, it'll take years to build up trust and the mechanisms, find and hire talented people willing to do the work, or even find enough talent because of all the grad students and post-docs that are _not_ employed by research labs in the next four years.

It'll take at least a decade to recover, and that may be optimistic. If others fill the gap (China will try but their credibility is low, which is the US's only saving grace), this could be a permanent degradation of the US's research capabilities.

Insane.

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> China will try but their credibility is low, which is the US's only saving grace

This is your incorrect perception. The credibility of China around the world (outside the US) as a technology leader is already higher than the US. The current government is only cementing this perception.

I was talking about scientific research and specifically academic institutions. China only has a half-dozen of top academic institutions with high credibility: Peking U, Tsinghua U, Fudan U, Zhejiang U, and _maybe_ one or two others (Renmin U in some fields). There a number of mid-level unis, and the rest are low credibility (for lots of reasons). By comparison, the US has 100+ (you could even argue 200+) well respected universities doing high quality research.

I think you are missing a bunch, and the average one of those probably has 10x the grad students of a US one, working on in average ten times as important things.

(And then frankly half the papers from these vaunted US institutions have author lists that could equally be from Wuhan or Peking university, and a bunch of those will inevitably return to professorships in their native country, not like anyone is funding professors in the US)

Unless they’ve gotten a lot better in the past decade I’m not missing a bunch.

But yes in terms of sheer quantity of graduates and and research papers China wins out but what matters is the quality. The US has problems with lousy and even outright false papers but in China it’s endemic.

And to your point, the reason people come to the US from Peking or Tsinghua to do their pHd or postdoc is because of the high quality research, which is why cutting it is so detrimental

Exactly, coliveira is either really out of touch of reality, or is parroting state-propaganda they have read. Both really bad looks for them.

You're being far too harsh. Yes, this post is about academia but they said "technological leader", strongly suggesting they're talking about it more broadly - "technology" usually implies business.

And China is absolutely the technology leader.

"China will try but their credibility is low"

Not in my field of engineering. Don't confuse China in 2005 with China today.

I'm talking about scientific research at academic institutions, not industrial implementation.

Other than the handful of institutions I mentioned, the best and brightest are _not_ going to China to do their PhD or postdoc. Sure they might be employed by industry there afterwards--there's good money to be made and China is cutting-edge when it comes to industrial implementation--but that's a different matter than what's discussed here.

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