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Comment by mturmon | Hacker News Reader

Note:

> criminally charged with making "false, fictitious and fraudulent statements"...

> In interviews with Defense Department investigators in 2018 and 2019, Lieber said that while he had heard of the Thousand Talents Plan, he had never been asked to be part of it...

The charge is not promiscuous collaboration, it's lying about it when asked.

If he indeed lied to DoD investigators following up on a possible conflict of interest, that would be a huge problem, on top of (we could guess) an original failure to disclose.

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The underlying assumption here is that he was conducting research funded by the DoD and replicating it at his lab in China.

So.... espionage.

As I said, he should have been clear with his funding sources. But that's not where the outrage in this thread is coming from -- everybody here is pissed off at the very idea of scientific collaboration crossing national borders. There are comparisons being drawn between doing science and waging war. This is saddening.

On balance, your comment did gloss over the "taking money from two sources" issue, which is the point of the arrest.

If you wanted to have a conversation about maintaining scientific collaboration in the midst of great power competition, this seems like the wrong case to build off of.

Finally, I do agree that conversations about China on HN often do go south due to US nationalism.

No, my point is that it is extremely common to take money from two sources, or even more! Nobody batted an eye at this, and in fact even today nobody bats an eye, unless one of the sources is in China. In that case it becomes "luring talent" and "IP theft", with all the trappings of selectively applied moral principle.

Real IP theft would look like, say, abducting thousands of German scientists at gunpoint [0], not giving scientists grants to set up labs.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

OK, I realize in using the shorthand "take money from two sources", I have clouded the issue. Sorry about that.

As always, the actual issue is the failure to disclose the possible CoI -- as in the present case.

It sucks, BTW. Turns out the guy was the PhD advisor of my neighbor up the street.

I don't disagree with this, but what I don't understand is the nationalist outrage.

Suppose a professor slacked off on their job by taking a long vacation in France. That would be wrong and deserving of punishment -- but it wouldn't have set off panic over him "selling out" the country. Yet that is what is happening.

It's also good to suspend judgement until the case works its way through the courts.

The Wen Ho Lee case is a point of reference here - he was accused of the worst kind of espionage and "convicted" after leaks in the NYT - but then the case dissolved and Lee got a big settlement.

Can you link to some comments showing this nationalist outrage?

All I see is people going "he was dumb to lie about it".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22177621

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22176877

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22176830

Of course I found them at the bottom where they belong, so I think knzhou is misreading the prevailing sentiment.

They are all pretty low-value comments, but only one of them seems to be a nationalist criticism (or two if you count "paid millions to to assist a foreign government - which I think is political but barely nationalist).

I don't think it's "nationalist outrage". The outrage is over violating the rules, as many developers and scientists on HN have done work for the government, and followed the rules. I believe you are seeing a connection (given US government and US commenters) that simply isn't there. Correlation doesn't equal causation; that's a first rule of science.

Sometimes correlation implies causation though: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B077YGFJ8N/ref=dp-kindle-redirec...

Not common (and acceptable) if you are taking grants from ONR, DARPA or Air Force grants.

While being literally abducted is definitely a conflict of interest that might concern a grantor, I do believe many grantors may have legitimate concerns below that threshold.

I'm not sure what this thread looked like an hour ago, but I don't see very many comments outraged at the point you indicate.

All this guy had to do was email the department chair and fill out a form, no big deal. It's common to have international affiliations.

> There are comparisons being drawn between doing science and waging war.

Why do you think the DoD funds grants?

I'm a little outraged that he was making more, per month and from his ostensible "side-gig", than the postdocs in his lab make in a year.

Yeah, per month alone it's more than I make in a year. That's sadly how big science works, China has nothing to do with that.

The sheer scale of it--and the fact that a lot of it was done in cash, behind the university's back--certainly make it look suspect.

I believe you are misinterpreting the sentiment. Everyone is pissed off at his dishonesty, not where and who he worked for. Rather than openly disclose his collaborations, as you and your many colleagues do, he was actively trying to cover them up, putting greed ahead of science.

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