this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2024
120 points (98.4% liked)
chapotraphouse
13473 readers
1 users here now
Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.
No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
Vaush posts go in the_dunk_tank
Dunk posts in general go in the_dunk_tank, not here
Don't post low-hanging fruit here after it gets removed from the_dunk_tank
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is very true. Was just talking to a friend the other day who went back to China after running a lab for nearly a decade in the US.
Some interesting tidbits:
The attitude between American Gen Z and their Chinese counterparts is night and day. He complained about the fact that the quality of his graduate students has gotten significantly worse over time. Even a decade ago, the millennial kids were still rather passionate about science and put in an effort to impress, these days the Gen Z kids straight up showed very little passion about what they’re doing, one of his students literally left the lab during the middle of the day to “go home to play video games”. Incidentally, the best students were foreign students who came from outside of Western countries.
In China it couldn’t have been more different. Young graduate students would work 6-7 days a week, many are full of curiosity, all very keen to learn more about the science they are doing. Some labs in China have their lab meetings held on Sunday! Imagine doing that in the US lol.
There is no way the US can catch up with China over the next 1-2 decades. In fact, it is already falling behind in terms of scientific output. Like, how are you ever going to compete with them?
Yeah, there is very little incentive to do well. Especially for U.S. graduate and doctoral students. Even if you do do very well, the best thing that will happen for most of them if they stay in the U.S. is that they will be taken and paid alot of money to not do research for the competition, because no-one really works on anything interesting anymore. All of the cool chemistry and industrial technologies stuff comes from China and Europe.
The problem is that the assumption is that if you had to go do a doctorate, you weren't smart (or connected) enough to dropout and become an entrepreneur. It's a really really bad system that creates huge disincentives from learning about things and pushing the boundaries of what is possible. Instead it the incentive is to learn how to do marketing and graft better.
They can still work in weapons development!