[ghostwriter]

> but there is an obvious filter that the ones left behind are on average less risk taking

Where’s that clarity come from? The opposite could be argued as well: those who’ve left are seeking safety and safety isn’t associated with risk taking. There are fewer risks in leaving Russia than in staying in.

> breakthrough is much more likely to come out of the young risk taking ones now living in a functional country and not from the aging engineers living in a dictatorship and working at a bureaucratic rosatom making "up to $720 a month" (actual number, I looked up their open engineering vacancies).

Here, you did it again: “those who work at <this company> are less likely to make a breakthrough, because I don’t align with them, and therefore I assume that only aging engineers uncapable of breakthroughs would consider staying and working there. Look, even salaries prove that they are less likely to have it.”

[asats]

>Where’s that clarity come from? The opposite could be argued as well: those who’ve left are seeking safety and safety isn’t associated with risk taking. There are fewer risks in leaving Russia than in stayin in.

It's not about safety, it's about agency. Because action > inaction. Staying put does not require anything, just making excuses why nothing can be done to either change things or move.

The ones that stayed and are trying to change things might be the brightest and bravest of all, but they are few and might not even survive that decision. Most other ones simply lack any agency and float down towards some not very bright future they have no control over, making excuses why nothing can be done and hoping to lay low and "авось пронесет". Those are less likely to accomplish much.

[ghostwriter]

It’s the second time you’re deliberately avoiding answering where else is your clarity about the second group come from, except from your imagining things.

> It's not about safety, it's about agency. Because action > inaction. Staying put does not require anything, just making excuses why nothing can be done to either change things or move.

When a person has an option to leave but decides otherwise, they exercise their agency and the action is described as a conscious decision based on an act of volition. You are free to attribute it to - as you said - “making excuses” or “actually lacking agency”, but that would be the same biased simplification of reality that you’ve already done a few times in other comments.

[asats]

I did not IQ test the million people on the border and I have no objective way to evaluate and compare the brightness of the people that have left vs the rosatom engineers, if that's what you're asking for.

"Biased simplification of reality" sounds like a description of essentially any opinion, we are all biased and reality is too complex to argue about without simplifications, so that's not a great argument. Anything outside of a few math formulas is a "biased simplification of reality".

I'm curious, what exactly are you arguing for? Do you really think that a loss of that million is insignificant and that the roskosmos/rosatom/rostech/etc will accomplish more than all the people that have left? If so, could you explain why you think that?

[ghostwriter]

> we are all biased and reality is too complex to argue about without simplifications, so that's not a great argument.

However it's a good argument for distinguishing between simplifications introduced by feelings and the ones introduced by omission while trying impartial judgement, as these simplification premises would have different value to your listeners.

> Do you really think that a loss of that million is insignificant and that the roskosmos/rosatom/rostech/etc will accomplish more than all the people that have left? If so, could you explain why you think that?

We must first establish and agree on the dimension by which you're willing to evaluate that significance. What would be a unit of measurement of the significance that you're mentioning in your comments?

[asats]

>However it's a good argument for distinguishing between simplifications introduced by feelings

It's not based on my feelings but on the personal experience and some research I did. All the smartest people I personally know and worked with have left the country. I also looked up the top 10 AI researchers at Yandex, and out of the ten I looked at only one was is still in Russia, that's a 90% loss for the top talent in the hottest industry at the (arguably) most innovative company in the country.

>We must first establish and agree on the dimension by which you're willing to evaluate that significance

Sure thing, let's take two, scientists and entrepreneurs as their accomplishments are the easiest to quantify. The unit of measurement would be the influential papers written for scientists (measured by the number of citations) and for the entrepreneurs the market cap of the companies they started, obviously both of those are not perfect metrics but they generally track with the value created.

Do you think the million people like the "MIPT, MSU and HSE graduates" that have left the country that the other guys are mentioning will do better on those dimensions versus the ones staying at rosatom/roskosmos/etc?

[ghostwriter]

> It's not based on my feelings > All the smartest people I personally know > I also looked up the top 10 AI researchers at Yandex > in the hottest industry at the (arguably) most innovative company in the country.

All of that is actually based on your feelings that (1) the people you know are smart enough to be qualified and counted among the brightest, (2) the AI software research and the researchers you personally know are more relevant to the points you make, than other research and the researchers you haven't met in other industries that Russia is excelling in.

> Sure thing, let's take two, scientists and entrepreneurs as their accomplishments are the easiest to quantify. The unit of measurement would be the influential papers written for scientists (measured by the number of citations) and for the entrepreneurs the market cap of the companies they started.

I disagree with the market cap metric because it's useless to compare without other constraints on the kind of businesses we're allowed to compare directly. For starters, a hypothetical company involved in the derivatives market may easily be evaluated higher than a profitable energy-producing company purely because of a higher speculative capacity of the former, since the markets allow for derivatives to exist as assets in the books. I disagree with that premise purely on a basis of the 2008 crisis that showed that those had never been assets manifested in reality.

I disagree with the influential papers' citation count too, because that measure would be subject to interpretation of influence. Are AI papers influential? Are all AI papers influential? You could get thousands of meaningless citations for a parroting AI architecture for every single meaningful citation of Perelman's proof of the Poincare conjecture. Which one of those would you value as more influential? I assume no one could seriously suggest that citations for AI software papers would have the same nominal value as citations of the fundamental proofs in mathematics or physics.

> Do you think the million people like the "MIPT, MSU and HSE graduates" that have left the country that the other guys are mentioning will do better on those dimensions versus the ones staying at rosatom/roskosmos/etc?

You are conflating two groups again: the million people left aren't all the kind of "MIPT, MSU and HSE graduates". Not all of them are the Techies in the first place. The right question to ask would be if I think that those who left have better chances to excel at science and business (regardless of their qualifications) than those who stayed. My answer to that question is no, I don't think so, because there's no hard evidence for that. There only is a hint that they might be better off financially if they dedicate their lives to making money in the industries that are known for generating loads of cash, like finance and tech. That's about it. Switch the roles and try comparing artists and less technical folks in their respective places at home and abroad, and the odds are suddenly opposite.

[ymolodtsov]

How many emigrations have you done? Because if the answer is "zero" I'm not sure your opinion counts. Taking your entire life, your family, kids, urgently moving to another country at a time when your bank card don't work internationally, you can't reliably wire money out, and there are visa restriction placed on you even when you have a visa. Then learning how to live in a different country, where you understand nothing: from how to pay taxes to using their version of self-checkout kiosks.

Emigration is the ultimate risk-taking.

I now have friends who have a position ready for them in the US, in business and academia, yet they were put on administrative check and have spent almost a year just waiting for their visa. They put most people with technical education on this check.