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AI boosts research careers but narrow the span of ideas explored: study

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Re: AI boosts research careers but narrow the span of ideas explored: study

#101

Post by Jtarii »

spongebobstoes wrote: post #97
rznicolet wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small counterpoint to your analogy, as someone who studied astrophysics: I actually did have a requirement to understand general relativity! Deriving all of it independently from scratch wasn't something we did, but there _were_ derivations involved. And it was definitely worth working through -- it _is_ a good tool for understanding. (I've long since left the field, but I don't regret the work I did.)

that's exactly what I'm saying. understanding is good you didn't re-invent it, you learned it from a teacher and then practiced until you understood it to the required degree

What you cannot build you do not understand.

If you can't derive a result in mathematics or physics from first principles you fundamentally do not understand it.

Re: AI boosts research careers but narrow the span of ideas explored: study

#102

Post by nathan_compton »

onraglanroad wrote: post #83
nathan_compton wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Einstein's discoveries were based (to a large degree) on negating very specific parts of scientific orthodoxy and then taking the steps forward to carefully derive results with those rejections in place. LLMs are aggressively trained to reproduce facts and consequently struggle to reject orthodoxy. There isn't any reason they can't, in principal, make big new discoveries just by getting lucky, which is sort of also h…

I was under the impression that it was more accepting the othodoxy of Galilean/Newtonian relativety and joining it up with Maxwell's discovery about electromagnetism. So if the speed of propogation of EM waves is the same no matter your frame of reference (along with all the rest of physics) then the speed of light can't be relative (a conclusion that was aided by the Michaelson-Morley experiment) and what are the lo…

Well, sure, but if you want to accept those things you have to revoke the idea that distances and times are observer independent quantities. Even physicists fail to understand this after years of studying relativity. It is very difficult to really understand that relativity says: distances and durations that you measure in your frame of reference are not physically meaningful quantities.

Re: AI boosts research careers but narrow the span of ideas explored: study

#103

Post by et1337 »

koe123 wrote: post #64

I enjoy using AI loads. Yet I would be keen to see numbers on actual productivity increases. This reads as yet another datapoint similar to what I’ve experienced: maybe code was the bottleneck at some point, maybe now it isn’t but in my lived experience the bottleneck has simply shifted. Its easy to create “more” but to actually hit the business goals… I don’t see a 2x TRUE productivity boost in anyone in my company.…

This is the most interesting study I’ve seen: https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap

Funny enough, it basically says the exact same thing about software engineering that TFA says about science:

  First - developer level productivity has improved
  …
  Second - overall system flow has slowed down at every step

Re: AI boosts research careers but narrow the span of ideas explored: study

#105

Post by koe123 »

et1337 wrote: post #103
koe123 wrote: post #64

I enjoy using AI loads. Yet I would be keen to see numbers on actual productivity increases. This reads as yet another datapoint similar to what I’ve experienced: maybe code was the bottleneck at some point, maybe now it isn’t but in my lived experience the bottleneck has simply shifted. Its easy to create “more” but to actually hit the business goals… I don’t see a 2x TRUE productivity boost in anyone in my company.…

This is the most interesting study I’ve seen: https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap Funny enough, it basically says the exact same thing about software engineering that TFA says about science: First - developer level productivity has improved … Second - overall system flow has slowed down at every step

Interesting! Thanks for sharing.

Re: AI boosts research careers but narrow the span of ideas explored: study

#106

Post by gwern »

jdw64 wrote: post #69
pocksuppet wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And honestly, ... [emdash] AI-written comment?

Sometimes I wish I were an AI, but sorry, I'm not. English is the lingua franca for properly accessing programming and science, but since I'm a non-native speaker, I end up relying on machine translation for some difficult words, or I just speak using only the limited vocabulary I know. It's really hard as a non-native speaker. Every time I do something, people call it AI. Honestly, it feels a bit racist. If you just…

A "yes" would have sufficed.

Re: AI boosts research careers but narrow the span of ideas explored: study

#107

Post by jdw64 »

gwern wrote: post #106
jdw64 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I wish I were an AI, but sorry, I'm not. English is the lingua franca for properly accessing programming and science, but since I'm a non-native speaker, I end up relying on machine translation for some difficult words, or I just speak using only the limited vocabulary I know. It's really hard as a non-native speaker. Every time I do something, people call it AI. Honestly, it feels a bit racist. If you just…

A "yes" would have sufficed.

So what, do I have to prove that I'm human or something?

There are really a lot of people like you who don't respect non-native speakers. You seem to enjoy mocking native English speakers around you, don't you?

You saying it's "You're AI", but I'm genuinely not an AI—I don't understand why you won't accept that.

'To be honest' just maps directly from '솔직하게 말해서','솔직히','까놓고','그리고 사실','명확히하자면','사실' etc in Korean, my native language. There are many phrases that map directly like that. There aren't many connecting words. There just aren't that many direct mappings.

You must ask every foreigner who asks you for directions if they're an AI.Now that I'm reacting this aggressively, are you happy because you think I'm not an AI

Re: AI boosts research careers but narrow the span of ideas explored: study

#108

Post by m4xp »

dahart wrote: post #32

> Scientists who adopt AI gain productivity and visibility: On average, they publish three times as many papers, receive nearly five times as many citations, and become team leaders a year or two earlier than those who do not. To me this effect doesn’t seem to reflect on AI very much, it seems to reflect on humans. Like maybe this is more evidence of the Babble Hypothesis and the incentives in research than AI, no? h…

I've always thought the bigger dangerous of ai is drowning the actual talented people in a sea of slop.

Re: AI boosts research careers but narrow the span of ideas explored: study

#109

Post by DrewADesign »

skeledrew wrote: post #79
DrewADesign wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So am I. I worked in academia for a couple of decades.

OK cool so you have a far larger sample size than I to generalize from. Can you explain then what're the root cause(s) of the findings in that article?

Believe it or not, people are complex, academia is complex, and this probably can’t be boiled down into a glib supposition! Anything can have a nice digestible explanation if you’re willing to ignore enough pertinent factors.

Re: AI boosts research careers but narrow the span of ideas explored: study

#110

Post by dinfinity »

dahart wrote: post #32

> Scientists who adopt AI gain productivity and visibility: On average, they publish three times as many papers, receive nearly five times as many citations, and become team leaders a year or two earlier than those who do not. To me this effect doesn’t seem to reflect on AI very much, it seems to reflect on humans. Like maybe this is more evidence of the Babble Hypothesis and the incentives in research than AI, no? h…

It amplifies "publish or perish", which inherently causes scientists to rehash earlier findings just to be able to meet publishing quota.

Given the way in which AI is currently used in publishing, it is altogether way too early to label it counterproductive in the research creativity department.

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