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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33194 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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I have a good number of friends who had pretty good results in programming competitions like Google Code Jam (think, top 5 scorers). They come from an Eastern European country, and, most probably, they are more intelligent than basically anyone you have ever personally met. Among them, they boast dozens of IOI/IMO/ICPC medals etc. Top tiers of sheer brainpower, by quote objective standards.

Here is something to understand about them: based on their individual background, those international competitions were some of the best options to gain success and status available to them at the time. After these competitions, they went on to become grad students at Harvard, Columbia, CMU and the like, and/or got a job at top FAANGs, making $500k today (roughly a decade after their competition successes). These options simply weren’t open (or even, for that matter, conceivable) to many of them when they were honing their competition skills way back in high school, or freshmen years at university, purely because your options are much more limited in second or third tier countries.

Now compare this to the options available to a highly intelligent and driven American young adult. Is try-harding at these objective merit-based competitions worth it? Not really: you will be competing against literally billions of people across the world, and your inborn advantage of being born in US, the land of many opportunities, will help you very little.

The more typical way of succeeding in current day America, which is getting to an elite college, are in fact conflicting with tryharding at competitions: practicing for those will take a lot of your time, which could be more effectively spent on honing items that will look better on your college applications. Quite simply, foundational Americans have better ways of enjoying success and status than these competition.

This is even better seen in those gaming competitions, which are dominated by lower class people from poor countries, as for them, spending 12+ hours a day playing video games have lowest opportunity cost. I would never allow my son to even try to get into that “career”.

This is also why Soviet science was such high quality: for the top people, there was little way to achieve success “in the industry”, and so the position of university professor was relatively really good compared to potential earnings and responsibilities you’d have at a high level position in some state owned enterprise. The wage and status differential was not huge. Compare this to today’s enormous differential between what you can make in US academia, vs the industry, and note also the incentives of US immigration system on foreign researchers (I can expand on this at some other occasion).

Is this a falsifiable hypothesis?

those international competitions were some of the best options to gain success and status available to them at the time

Korotkevich from Belarus dominates programming competitions — ostensibly he has already attained maximum status and opportunity many times over as he has been the winner for years for Google Code. This is weak evidence against the motivational theory, because he seems to just want to dominate the competition. And indeed, chess players too generally just like dominating the competition, as a reward in its own fight. The second and third math Olympiad winners are Chinese and immigrant Canadian, so they’re in the top 2% of world opportunity. If “desiring opportunity” were the motivator we would see more winners from India, Malaysia, Bangladesh. The only non-Asian American winner, Reid Barton, came from a wealthy well-connected family.

Sure, some indeed actually dedicate their lives to these kind of competitions, but this is not big fraction of the people partaking, and even their career is not that long. They usually move on from there to more typical places of status. I also think it's not instructive to focus on the actual winners, instead consider people in top 10, or even top 50.

note also the incentives of US immigration system on foreign researchers (I can expand on this at some other occasion).

I'd appreciate reading this if you do end up writing it. I presume you're in math/CS?

I am working in tech industry, and don't have much personal experience in US academia, so this will be mostly based on experiences of my friends and family, and my knowledge of intricacies of US immigration system (the legal one, that is).

The typical wage of US postdoc researcher (and these are the ones who do most of the actual work) is something like $50-60k. Entry level positions are often in low-to-mid $40k, and salaries below that are not unheard of. These are all people with PhDs, not necessarily extremely smart (like my friends I mention above), but nevertheless significantly more intelligent than an average person earning six figures, and at least as driven and conscientious. How is that possible?

The answer is quite simple: these position are filled with mostly foreign researchers. They come here on J1 or H1B visas (occasionally on O1, but that's less common among junior researchers), and are tied to their PI and their lab to a very high degree. On J1, they literally cannot change they job, and on H1B, they can only switch to another research job, they cannot leave and go writing ad targeting code for FAANG. Even if they want to switch lab, that's usually not very easy. The job market is much smaller, based on recommendations, so their PI can completely torpedo their career if they so choose, making them beholden to their whims. And I haven't even mentioned the two body problem, affecting the scientists very acutely.

This means that the foreign researchers are, to a large degree, indentured servants of the labs they work for. This is not to say that they are exploited: no, they are typically rather fine with the arrangement, given that they can always go back to their home country, but nevertheless chose it, being mostly aware of its realities, and stay here. This is rather similar to the original indentured servants back in the day. The point is that the realities of what awaits them back home, along with the incentives that the immigration temporary work authorization system (H1B and most other employment visas were not meant result in immigration, indeed, before the invention of the legal fiction of "dual intent" policy, applying for a green card while on H1B resulted in not being to return to US if you leave it before you obtain the GC) highly reduce the pool of options available to them once they're here, and make foreign researchers being highly attractive, captive workforce for the research organizations.

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