wakawaka28

I think you must consider geology and the economic health of each area together.

Is everyone here so afraid of downvotes or out of touch that they don't remember "10% for the big guy" Biden? I know the US doesn't exactly get "Foreign Aid" but our politicians sure do, and it's a broad spectrum problem.

I'm confused. How does this disagree with me? You can do the same process with the same model, and that is what I was talking about doing.

You can have the same LLM check itself, especially if you start over with slightly different prompts or context. They sometimes get things right and sometimes don't. Although, if you genuinely have no way to know whether the answer is right or wrong, or the errors are severe, then these checks will not accomplish much. This checking can be better than nothing.

"Becoming"? Lol it's been a reality for a long time. It's just ramping up now.

>>When their business is crucial to society and can't function without the workers at the given price

>Yes, absolutely, if by "given price" you mean "the price Americans should reasonably be paid". But this particular combination of two things is probably nonexistent.

That isn't really what I meant. It is conceivable that there could be a critical business for which there are simply not enough workers to meet demand at the price customers can afford. I think there is an underlying assumption that if the money is there, the workers will be too. Generally, that is how things work in the long run, but in the case of skilled vocations there can be a long lag before qualified people step in.

What I'm describing here is just acknowledging the demand curve for labor and its implications. It's very basic economics. If the input costs for a product go up too high, it will necessarily reduce the consumption regardless of how badly wanted the product happens to be. I don't think it is tenable in the long term to have have a majority of people in society clamoring for something that is too expensive because of labor, especially to the benefit of a cartel of workers who these people also regard as overpaid. I think the immigration of medical doctors is one of these in the extreme. Most people think doctors are paid well, and do not care if doctors don't like immigration because they perceive the prices to be too high. There may be many reasons that healthcare is expensive, but a tight supply of qualified labor is obviously one of these.

>> [Who's to say that] a business should fail because of a politically imposed scarcity of labor?

>Again, probably not what would actually happen. If businesses are forced to hire Americans, they would not "fail". Rather, investors/leadership may choose to go do some other more-profitable business, but not because the business can't survive.

I think you are forgetting that businesses can and do lose money all the time. Most businesses fail, in fact. The point of investing is to make a profit. If that cannot be attained after a reasonable ramp up period, then investors will eat their losses and go away. That is the definition of a business not surviving. If you can't show that your expenses (including labor) will eventually result in a profit, then you don't have a viable business idea and no investor would sink money into it.

The classic case of this happening is all the factories that closed due to competition in China and elsewhere. Those factories indeed had to hire Americans for their physical proximity, if nothing else, and at that price point they could not sustain themselves. Even having higher quality did not save most of them. Consumers didn't care enough about quality or patriotism to sustain those factories.

>We are talking about the lack of socially normal humans in US leadership, not economic constraints. I.e. the kind of person you have to compel to be a non-negative force in society via legislation.

It is totally an economic problem: oversupply of labor driven by market dynamics. The solution that helps American workers is to slow down immigration by a lot. It has knock-on effects though, such as higher prices and potentially lower quality for a lot of things. It would also shift people around within the domestic economy.

>Yes, there have always been unscrupulous Scrooges among those running things, but often their goals happen to benefit society as a whole enough that we don't have to step in this dramatically.

Profit-seeking behavior lowers prices for everyone in the long run. If I were to summarize the problem I would say: Extreme exchange ratios and rapid/easy movement of resources internationally are causing threats to certain sectors of the workforce, including national security threats and impoverishment of skilled workers in wealthy nations (especially the US).

I'm surprised you can't find something to agree with in the first paragraph. I feel compelled to restate and clarify points I glossed over, to see which one you disagree with:

1. Foreign researchers can communicate with colleagues fairly well over the internet (in real time, even). Physical presence is not required to do academic research, at least in mathematics or CS.

2. Degree mills, fake credentials, paper mills, etc. exist to get names on stuff for a fee. This is used to game the immigration system.

3. Many US degree programs are used as a vector for immigration more than education, and people who immigrate this way usually try to meet the minimum requirements to stay in the US and do little beyond that.

4. Even when it comes to research, most research just isn't that good and doesn't contribute that much to society.

5. Getting jobs in academia is difficult.

6. Immigration lowers wages due to the basic laws of economics.

7. Given the fact that we have mediocre researchers in abundance, such that they can't find work in academia, there is negligible societal benefit to importing mediocre foreign researchers en masse. Additionally, this is devastating to the local labor market.

8. All other things equal (to the extent it is reasonable to determine), a country should try to ensure that native citizens get priority in hiring, rather than importing replacements.

If you disagree with #8, perhaps you should consider who is going to be willing to spill their blood and give up their treasure to defend a country that undermines them at every turn.

We are mostly in agreement. I'm pretty sure we need to sympathize with employers in situations like this, at times, though. It doesn't help anyone to reduce every shortage to a supposed moral fault in the employers lol. At what point do we become sympathetic to them? When their business is crucial to society and can't function without the workers at the given price? Or is it when the market rate for a job is offensive to other kinds of workers at jobs of similar difficulty? I think the societal need is a plausible reason, but it leads to this slippery slope we started off complaining about. It boils down to: who's to say how expensive is too expensive, or that a business should fail because of a politically imposed scarcity of labor?

I'm not making any political statement here, or at least that was not my intention. Life is short and there are infinite things we could be learning about. The advanced math I'm talking about avoiding here is not recreational math, but you could potentially apply the same logic to recreational math. Personally I see a big difference between "routine" abstract/advanced math and recreational math, though there can be some overlap. People have written books about what makes a pleasant puzzle, for example. Some puzzles are deceptively simple to state and impossible to solve without elite level theories. I think one of the characteristics of a good puzzle is that it can be solved with reasonable effort and not consume your whole life. Another is that it not be so contrived and abstract, that you need to be heavily initiated to even understand it. The worst are the ones that require a ton of mechanical computations even after you figure out the key insight. I don't think those are very fun either. But then again, there are people who don't get tired of Sudoku lol...

>They can't prove themselves abroad. Consider the example of "Attention is all you need" paper. That paper came into existence thanks to talented people from around the world coming together in one place and then collaborating. It would not have happened if the contributors stayed in their own countries.

I think this is a stretch, especially now that we have the internet. I also wouldn't be opposed to non-immigrant research visas, perhaps a specialized type of H1-B visa (since most of these people are not independently wealthy). But what I don't want is any random foreigner who has their name on some academic papers to be considered top talent. There are paper mills that crank these people out (putting their names on papers without any involvement), and besides that most research is just not that good. Why would we want a bunch of mediocre foreign researchers to come and take jobs away from mediocre American researchers? As we know, getting jobs in academia is very difficult as-is.

You got me on China trying to stop talent from leaving. It's an authoritarian country though. You can't even travel around freely inside the country lol! I threw China in there because a lot of H1-Bs and students are actually Chinese, but China is not where most of them come from.

You also got me on China allegedly trying to get talent to move to China. Their people seem to have had a predictable reaction. That's really something, considering that they can get in trouble for criticizing their government. I guess they thought it was worth the risk, because doing nothing would screw them even harder.

It's funny how the loyalties of imported "talent" are not front and center in any discussion of how their presence is "strategically important." I think we are getting strategically shafted by lax immigration laws.

That isn't what it means to have a shortage. In many cases Americans are discouraged from applying for these jobs. They can overspecify the criteria or be overly skeptical about your resume, write the job listing poorly, or hide the job listing entirely. What a shortage really means from their perspective is that they can't find enough workers for the price they want to pay (as opposed to what they can afford). However, I don't find that satisfying. I might have a legitimate business idea that would work only if I could find 100 great engineers willing to work for far below average. That would be considered insane in isolation, but if several large companies get together and issue the same complaint like "We can't move ahead because there are not enough engineers in our price range" then they call it a shortage. But I don't think American workers should have to tolerate these people flooding the market just because they can make money by doing so lol...

I think everyone (or virtually everyone) is OK with actual world-leading researchers coming to the US. But what we don't want is the labor market flooded with foreign "talent". The system is designed to try to get the researchers and noteworthy people, but corrupt people have found ways around all of it. There are paper mills, degree mills, cheating rings, etc. Plus firms that exist solely to funnel foreigners into the US for a fee.

There is always an economic argument to be made for importing the cheapest or allegedly "best" labor, but it's mostly about saving money even if it means destroying domestic workers. It sounds better when we're talking about a scientist instead of a construction worker or meat packer, but it's kind of the same problem. There are many cases of American workers being forced to train H1-B replacements, or being blatantly discriminated against for being, shall we say, obviously American.

If foreign researchers are able to prove themselves abroad and contribute as you say, I assume they can continue doing that in most cases without coming to the US to take jobs. If immigrants are such a great resource, why are poor countries not trying harder to keep those people from leaving? Why doesn't China import a bunch of Indians for IT work, or vice versa?

It wouldn't be 95%. The US is like 5% of the world, but it disproportionately contains the most qualified workers in many fields. Also, in many cases, even if a worker was somehow qualified, they would be lacking some basic skill like English proficiency or basic cultural compatibility, that would make them actually unqualified on net. But your overall sentiment is right. There are hundreds of millions of people who want to come to the US and make less than you.

It is also a fact that "most qualified" is fuzzy. It comes down to something more like, performance per dollar, or "culture fit", or some other thing. Unless you are trying to absolutely have the most advanced shit in the world at any price, "qualifications" or "talent" are not the ultimate factors. Having been in this industry for a while, most foreign workers obviously aren't "the best" like that. They're not even more talented or hard-working than the average American worker. But they usually work for less and the job gets done (roughly speaking), and their mere presence drives down everyone's wages.