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Comment on In the race to attract the world’s smartest minds, China is gaining on the US | CNN

I think of it slightly differently; the US used to attract bright minds because it was a bastion of free speech where people could make a name for themselves on the merits of their ideas and the popularity of their personalities.

China, by comparison, has always had a case of sinosuperiority coupled with NIH syndrome. However, China also values intelligence and hard work, funds the sciences well, and above all, is stable.

So, people who are suddenly finding themselves personally non grata in the US because of their viewws, real or perceived, see China willing to offer them more money and better status and equipment in the short term to study in the manner to which they are accustomed.

Everyone knows that in the long term, China will keep the knowledge and eject the foreigners, but that doesn’t matter right now.

So it’s not really a case of China overtaking the US, but the US deciding that it doesn’t care about its lead, and veering off the racetrack to experiment with hitting itself with a rock.

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Tollana1234567@lemmy.today ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
i think its mostly because it was lucrative, aka more income. now even that in jeoparday, with anti-science, anti-intellectual growing in the us.

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floofloof@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
I’m not even sure it’s about the scentists’ views, in the first place, for many scientists. It’s more about unpredictable, politically targeted defunding, and the ignorance of the decision makers. The Trump regime has an ideology that is fundamentally hostile to science itself, and t will defund research into Earth and climate science, medical science, space science, and anything it deems either inconvenient or not immediately profitable, or that falls foul of some irrational conspiracy theory. And these decisions are made by the most ignorant people with no clue about how science can benefit a country. If China isn’t so insane and whimsical about how it decides funding, it will appeal to scientists even if they can’t speak their minds politically there.

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- Tollana1234567@lemmy.today ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  its safer to be in canada, or the UK at the least, or france.
  
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