STEM PhD students do not pay for their education
True, but I would say a large fraction of foreign nationals who do PhDs in the US were undergrad educated at least partially in the US.
Readit Newsneuah commented on A quarter of US-trained scientists eventually leave arxiv.org/abs/2512.11146... · Posted by u/bikenaga
neuah commented on A quarter of US-trained scientists eventually leave arxiv.org/abs/2512.11146... · Posted by u/bikenaga
It happens at scale. UK universities are also heavily subsidised by Chinese students. I also, where I am, I don't really see these students working in part-time jobs to pay the bills.
I assume the underpaid labor they were talking about was the PhD.
neuah commented on A quarter of US-trained scientists eventually leave arxiv.org/abs/2512.11146... · Posted by u/bikenaga
“40% move to China”
This is the plan not a coincidence. China pays huge “grants” to their citizens to come to the US, get educated, work in big tech/science, then bring it all home.
The US could retain a lot of that talent if it put the same level of funding into science that China is, and remained welcoming to foreign nationals. The US has been brain-draining the rest of the world for decades with enormous benefits to us. We then led in most fields and the flywheel kept spinning. Now we are cutting research spending and closing the door, while China continues to increase its science funding year over year. The sclaes are tipping and talent will be drawn to the leading edge, wherever that is.
neuah commented on A quarter of US-trained scientists eventually leave arxiv.org/abs/2512.11146... · Posted by u/bikenaga
The more important question is: what is the rate of scientists coming in vs going out?
If they are in balance, then it looks a lot less of a problem. It may even be the case that because of the desirability of working in the US for US institutions the US is gaining the best from all around the world and shipping out a more mixed ability set.
"Using new data which tracks US-trained STEM PhDs through 2024, we show that despite foreign nationals comprising nearly 50% of trainees, only 10% leave the US within five years of graduating, and only 25% within 15 years."
That sounds like net benefit for the US. Foreign nationals come, the US sells them (overpriced) education, they do relatively low-paid but high-value PhD research, and then most of them stay and continue to contribute to US research endeavors and the economy. This is such an enviable position, and this administration wants to close the doors? This is the secret sauce. This is what has made america great.
I appreciate that you feel this way, but the mechanisms behind exactly which neural circuits are activated by TMS are simply not yet fully understood.
From 2024:
> Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a non-invasive, FDA-cleared treatment for neuropsychiatric disorders with broad potential for new applications, but the neural circuits that are engaged during TMS are still poorly understood.
[0]https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371%2F...
Again, different question. We know, fundamentally, how TMS causes stimulation/suppression of neural activity, and it does not require magnetoreception. Look at it this way: we don't fully understand how SSRI's cure depression, but we do know their primary target and that their mechanism of action is mediated through that primary target.
Of course!
But also:
> Although the biology of why TMS works isn't completely understood, the stimulation appears to affect how the brain is working.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/transcranial-mag...
I think it's reasonable to assume there's room to sharpen our understanding of it quite a bit.
I think you're conflating one question with another. The "why" in question is why altering neural activity in that way results in clinical effects. It is not the "why" TMS alters neural activity.
Not necessarily - I think it works like Daniel Kahneman's System 1 and System 2. Your conscious system is System 2 - when it's not working correctly, you just fall back to System 1.
Independently, since the whole idea relies on resonance, it may be the case that an fMRI doesn't actually interfere with the "stochastic resonance" mechanic quite like TMS (transcranial magnetic simulation) seems to.
If you model the brain this way, dementia looks like a clear breakdown of System 2, which is an interesting thought experiment even if the mechanics aren't perfect: https://1393.xyz/writing/alzheimers-is-the-symptom-not-the-p...
You know the mechanism of TMS is not mysterious. It requires no magnetoreception or "stochastic resonance". It is simply inducing electrical currents to modulate neural activity. Its effects are consistent with the known laws of physics, known properties of neurons, and decades of neuroscience research.
I don't want to be mean but this honestly reads like an AI-fueled delusion.
Did you notice much improvement going from Gemini 2.5 to 3? I didn't
I just think they're all struggling to provide real world improvements
Using it in a specialized subfield of neuroscience, Gemini 3 w/ thinking is a huge leap forward in terms of knowledge and intelligence (with minimal hallucinations). I take it that the majority of people on here are software engineers. If you're evaluating it on writing boilerplate code, you probably have to squint to see differences between the (excellent) raw model performances. whereas in more niche edge cases there is more daylight between them.
As another person that cancelled my Claude and switched to Gemini, I agree that Claude Code is very nice, but beyond some initial exploration I never felt comfortable using it for real work because Claude 3.7 is far too eager to overengineer half-baked solutions that extend far beyond what you asked it to do in the first place.
Paying real API money for Claude to jump the gun on solutions invalidated the advantage of having a tool as nice as Claude Code, at least for me, I admit everyone's mileage will vary.
Exactly my experience as well. Started out loving it but it almost moves too fast - building in functionality that i might want eventually but isn't yet appropriate for where the project is in terms of testing, or is just in completely the wrong place in the architecture. I try to give very direct and specific prompts but it still has the tendency to overreach. Of course it's likely that with more use i will learn better how to rein it in.