101–110 of 181 posts
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It is trivially easy to validate the existence of a cited paper.
I'm sympathetic to the idea: we should have an open, publicly queryable citation graph. Google scholar could very easily offer this at marginal cost near zero, but they won't.
Of course, you do need an API key and it took quite a while to get it last time I needed it, but it's there.
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I feel this is a case of "perfect the enemy of good". Looking at the output (scientific progress in biology, medicine, material physics, etc.) the "something" seems to have worked well. Could it be optimized? Probably. Should we completely destroy it and hope a new system will be better? My read of history is that in many cases the new ideas were worse of what they were replacing and it took a long time for a fix. So…
Look into the replication crisis. It has seriously impacted some fields very negatively. Psychology and Alzheimer’s research in particular have been set back decades.
So with the current system, some things work, some things don't work (ex: psychology/Alzheimer). Yes, the system should be improved. No, I am not convinced that "destroying" the current system will result very easily into something better.
We need to discuss actual solutions for the replication crisis. There are even steps towards improving that, like requiring open data for papers, which makes it harder for people to do some of the manipulations that resulted in the replication crisis. I personally would go even further: you should provide complete documentation (tools, notes, data, raw files, etc.), but then there are some people opposing that due to "privacy" (for medical) or "patents" (for industrial stuff).
"A lot of the content of this blog was initially drafted by an agent of some sort" What? I mean who does this. My voice is my voice and it's literally never occurred to me to have an LLM do a first draft. I thought that was college kid stuff.
Using Pangram to detect AI slop is a very bad idea. I tried it on my own writing which I knew to be written by me and it marked it as AI generated.
I think Pangram is de facto measuring the default Claude voice. It doesn't fire for me on technical GPT writing.
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Look into the replication crisis. It has seriously impacted some fields very negatively. Psychology and Alzheimer’s research in particular have been set back decades.
Look into cancer survival rates : https://www.cancer.org/research/acs-research-news/people-are... , to quote "Decades of cancer research have provided health care professionals with the tools to treat cancer more effectively, so that cancer in general is becoming less of a death sentence and more of a treatable chronic disease," So with the current system, some things work, some things don't work (ex: psychology/Alzh…
The peer review system as we know it today has only really existed for less than a century. It is no how science was traditionally done. It was adopted due to some real problems with the old system, so I'm not saying we should go back. But it's not clear either that unpaid peer-review is the ultimate end-state either.
100% agreement on your last paragraph though.
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But the USA has a social credit score that affects a lot more about your life, doesn't it? Like whether you're allowed to have a house or a car.
Social credit? Or money credit? (Genuine question, I'm not American and don't have any desire to move to the US).
Neither. Above poster is wrong. You don't require anything to own a house or car in the US except your own cash/equiv. If you wish to borrow other people's money or property (in some cases at all when counterparty risk is high enough or buyers competitive enough, in most cases it's more a matter of interest rate), a sufficient credit score is the most standard and easy way to "make the case" that you will repay. But that's truly not at all required. I bought my current truck for $8100 cash on the table, I just showed up at the other guy's place and inspected it and chatted, looked good enough, paid him and we did the title change document, I screwed on a new plate and off I drove with it. Effectively zero dealers will not accept cash upfront. You can buy land and just build your own place.
Obviously, a lot of us find having credit very useful. And it's also both convenient and good for fairness/economic velocity/efficiency not to generally have to explicitly put up any extra collateral to get it or go through some complex old fashioned social dance. Hence "credit scores" that systemize a lot. But claiming they decide "whether you're allowed to have a house or a car" warps things badly.
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Unless someone has discovered some magic sauce for getting AI to write well, I have immense sympathy for anyone trying to wade through these papers. I may generate slop from time to time, but I do my best to keep it to myself.
My 2 cents: AI has improved writing considerably for non-native english speakers (in particular China). Writing feels more standardized/boring but easier to read overall. I hit fewer papers that are a pain to read. The most problematic aspect I see are semi-bogus claims i.e. sentences that aren't false, but don't quite feel right either. YMMV.
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So wrist slap?
I don't know if you know what you're talking about, but in my area, this could easily result in losing your job. You probably don't want to throw someone in jail for one plagiarized paper, so between jail time and losing your job, I don't know what else you have.
[0] https://retractionwatch.com/2026/07/27/cambridge-jason-arday...
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The problem is that everyone imagines some sort of just and fair arbiter of these things, when the reality is all of the social scoring and consequences and reputations rarely actually stem from one’s actions, and far more often stem from how much money someone has put in someone’s pocket, who someone knows, the color of someone’s skin, or what’s between someone’s legs. Until we’re actually serious about treating peo…
I don't understand the desire to argue against this in identity politics terms, which I assume you realize is going to be extremely divisive. There's a far more simple argument that people, independent of ideological framing, would tend to agree upon. And that's what is valuable to one person isn't valuable, to the same degree, to another. For things that are completely illegal, like murder, such a system would be pr…