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Comment by constantcrying | Hacker News Reader

How is 25 American takings jobs in Austria newsworthy?

Not many people walk away from Harvard, MIT, Princeton, etc. If you had tenure there (a big if, since the article is unclear), or even were tenure track, that was viewed as one of the most prestigious and desirable jobs in the world.

25 people leaving is a sea change.

>25 people leaving is a sea change.

25 Academics leaving is not "sea change".

>If you had tenure there (a big if, since the article is unclear), or even were tenure track, that was viewed as one of the most prestigious and desirable jobs in the world.

Some very major ifs there.

For numbers, it's nearly 1% of all post-docs (~3400) in those three universities, leaving at once, to a single destination. You can do the math. It's a fact that the USA used to attract this talent, not export it.

Academics have always been leaving the US, just like Academics have always been coming to the US. A turnover in staff is normal, it has happened everywhere, always.

>It's a fact that the USA used to attract this talent, not export it.

And where is the evidence that it does not? People leaving is normal. Post-docs leave institution's all the time.

One additional thought. If you think this is about a right wing political shift in the US, why would these researcher go to one of the strongholds of the far right in Europe?

Articles like this are the evidence. The news is not the specific number, but the growing trend [1] of academics looking to leave the US due to turmoil, cancelled grants, visas and the general political climate.

There are at least a half dozen other EU countries with right wing governments. Austria’s current chancellor is centre-right, and thank god most “far right” parties in Europe are still kilometers away from their US counterparts, and would not dare interfere in academia in any way similar to Trump’s doings.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00938-y

That's a very reductionist way to describe it. According to the article, these are key researchers from some of America's most prestigious universities.

Because it gets a lot of response, there's a lot of traction, many with positive sentiment, support, and "take me with you" equivalents.

Because its a sign significant numbers of people, institutions, disciplines, and demographics are thinking that way. In stock market terminology it would be a signal to investors.

Thread on Reddit 1mo ago about biotechnologist Wali Malik leaving his lab in Boston developing mass testing of active ingredients for pharmaceuticals got a decent amount of visibility. Also mentions the APART-USA grants. https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1mzlk04/us_rese...

>Because its a sign significant numbers of people, institutions, disciplines, and demographics are thinking that way. In stock market terminology it would be a signal to investors.

How is something incredibly common a signal for anything? Academics move to other countries all the time.

On its own it isn't, but I suspect if all of these were reported you might think it quite significant.

Why do they not make an actual story out of this, do some research and publish whether there was some unusually high outflow of academics over the last two years?

25 people can not be an indication of anything. Academics especially are moving around often and take up work in different countries.

Either it's too hard or it would show a nothing-burger. Anecdotes are better for spreading misinformation when you're constrained by being factual.

Can you point out the misinformation?

Calling it a "brain drain" when it's only 25 people. You can probably find 25 Austrian academics going to America and write the same brain drain article about that at the same time.

This Reuters article is based on a press release that was issued earlier today. The type of research you’re proposing would take weeks to be done, written and edited.

These are researchers from Harvard, Princeton, and MIT. Sometimes there are only a handful of people worldwide in a particular field doing top level research.

And sometimes there are tens of thousands or these fields are tiny for a reason.

Need to start somewhere. In 2024 how many researchers did the same?

Not an academic so there could be some context I don’t know but upon reading it it’s even worse, grants for 2 years, looks more like a secondment than a coup.

According to primary sources, the program is actually for four years. The press release stated 48 months but that got printed in Reuters as two years.

That’ll definitely make it harder to go back which does make it more meaningful.

A nation doing a 180 from its longstanding strategy of gaining talent to pushing away talent is newsworthy. But it's easy to overlook without reporting on tangible examples.

Academics move around countries all the time for many reasons. It is ridiculous to assume that 25 people moving to different work places is any indication of a "shift in strategy".

It's an example of the result of the shift in strategy. The shift in strategy has been widely reported elsewhere, and we are already well aware of it.

Because it's a reason to bash Trump.

Trump gives plenty of reasons to be bashed, but this news article seems like a stretch.

Taking a less cynical view, it's just successful Austrian PR.

It's right in the first paragraph:

"Austria has lured what it calls 25 "top researchers" away from U.S. institutions including Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton with grants set up in response to the Trump administration's funding cuts targeting universities."

This article is missing key info. Which research areas are we talking about?

> Recipients of the grants of 500,000 euros ($587,000) each over two years range from post-doctoral researchers to professors and work in fields such as physics, chemistry and life sciences, the Austrian Academy of Sciences said in a statement on Thursday.

It’s narrative building by the media owners. We get to see how they fight rhetorically through headlines.

But when it's one guy being hired by Meta, it's a landmark in private enterprise and irresistible reporting. Hmm...

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