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Comment by qoez | Hacker News Reader

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Its not anything about genetically superior foreign students. Its the fact that we take the BEST foreign students, educate them and hopefully capture a % to stay. We are able to both make America stronger AND everyone else weaker. They also subsidize our schools by paying large sums of cash, at least for the wealthy foreign students.

> make America stronger

Well, there's an argument to be made that importing talent doesn't necessarily make _America_ (or its citizens) stronger, but just the owners of a handful of mostly privately owned American corporations.

> there's an argument to be made that importing talent doesn't necessarily make _America_ (or its citizens) stronger, but just the owners of a handful of mostly privately owned American corporations

I can argue that cows are hats, that doesn't mean the evidence [1] supports it.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09275...

These people become citizens. There's this distinction people make between American people and then immigrants. Er... no. The immigrants are the American people.

My parents were immigrants. Most people I know had parents or grandparents who were immigrants. America, as a whole, is built off the backs of people from not-America. That's our entire thing, we're the melting pot.

The other half of this coin is that it suppresses graduate student wages. This could be a huge boost to American grad students, potentially.

> other half of this coin is that it suppresses graduate student wages. This could be a huge boost to American grad students, potentially

Raising taxes and cutting funding to universities will almost certainly require the graduate-student population to be culled.

Well yes, but that's not what this discussion was about.

> that's not what this discussion was about

Disarticulating the effects is a statistical, not practical nor even potentially empirical, exercise.

So you think, in order to attract better talent, we should exclude roughly 95% of the world?

If "there's an argument" to be made, then make the actual argument. Don't just lazily reference it and expect everyone else to fill in the gaps.

So your argument is that instead of using the vetted talents of everyone in the world we would be better off shutting everyone out and using only the talents of a tiny percentage of the world?

Well, obvious they are widening the pool for top tier talent so you can expert more exceptional minds capable of launching unicorns with a broader talent pool of applicants. This is just basic numeracy and knowledge of statistical distributions.

Agree. Buying a thousand lottery tickets every week is how folks more likely to become rich. Basic numeracy all the way.

That's not comparable because you have no way to look at lottery tickets before you purchase to try to figure out which ones are more likely to be winners.

A university on the other hand does get to look through the applicant pool and decide who to admit.

That sounds clever!

But buying more lottery tickets does in fact improve your odds of winning. So your comparison breaks down because it undercuts your point.

The fact that you have no a priori knowledge of what is a winning ticket is not the case with college admissions. It's actually the complete opposite! You have a great deal of prior knowledge and odds of academic success. So, the lottery is a poor comparison in that regard.

Further, the lottery will always bankrupt you because the tickets have overwhelmingly negative expected value. In the case of education, every single study on it indicates extremely positive outcomes. So in fact, adding more seats and getting more students in college, all else being equal, is likely to have a positive economic outcome. If $1 dollar lottery tickets paid out $3 on average, the more you buy, the richer you would be. So again, the lottery is a poor comparison.

What if someone else does the work of validating that 10% of the tickets are most likely winners, you’d be a fool to pass on that.

If you buy enough lottery tickets you're guaranteed to win.

It's not that they are genetically superior. We have top minds in America, but not enough. Top people in the world don't all live in America, but we'd like them to come here and study at least. Many of them stay and start huge corporations here which enriches America. Now they'll go somewhere else and we will not benefit from their brilliance.

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