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> 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, this is significantly more permanent. LLMs are autocomplete generators based off current context, and training generations of people to always ask the planet burners instead of learning to think for themselves - and never having the experience of having to slowly think over the same thing for an extended period - may well mean a permanent cap to human knowledge and a dramatic slowdown or end to new knowledge.
You act like humanity doesn't exist in a competitive environment. If you think AI codegen is a mistake? Just relax, keep writing code by hand and wait for the pendulum to prove you right while showering you in wealth. There are plenty of people making this bet, and I wish the best of luck to you because I'm 99% certain you're on the losing end of it.
Should be interesting to see what happens to the programming profession when there isn't anyone around anymore who actually knows programming.
I agree with some parts, but not all. I see it as an overfitting problem. Fundamentally, the topic here seems to be that citation indices and similar metrics are actually flawed indicators, and obsessing over them is just Goodhart's law in action. Ultimately, the argument is that the entire design of those metrics is wrong. To be precise, it was a good metric at first, but now that the scale has changed, it's become…
AI-written comment?
Please feel free to disagree with me! I am keen to hear more anecdotes to get more datapoints.
> 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’s not about the architecture per se,' Evans says. 'It’s about the incentives.'"
it would be funny if by accelerating the enterprise it actually forced an effort to correct the trajectory.
As with other fields touched, AI is merely amplifying what was already there. The aim of many scientists isn't discovery in and of itself. Discovery is a side effect of their primary drive to publish and - hopefully - become well known. And establishments only make things worse, because it's the things that are most likely to produce tangible results (the papers, or economically valuable products) that get the most f…
Do you know any scientists? Disclosure: Physicist.
I was also in academics myself up to the Master's level (research track), and personally had to deal with the politics of getting support for what I wanted to work on; that experience helped to discourage me from going on to a PhD, as I'd rather have proper leeway to work on what I really prefer and take avenues I find interesting.
We are headed towards the “trough of disillusion” of this particular cycle.
I agree with some parts, but not all. I see it as an overfitting problem. Fundamentally, the topic here seems to be that citation indices and similar metrics are actually flawed indicators, and obsessing over them is just Goodhart's law in action. Ultimately, the argument is that the entire design of those metrics is wrong. To be precise, it was a good metric at first, but now that the scale has changed, it's become…
> And honestly, ... [emdash] AI-written comment?
Honestly, it feels a bit racist. If you just look at the content, it's clearly not a comment that AI could have written—but just because I used a few em-dashes and have limited vocabulary and formal phrasing, I get called AI and downvoted. It feels like they're saying non-native speakers should just go away. And the downvotes come without any counterargument to the actual content. Does this feel a bit more human now?
As with other fields touched, AI is merely amplifying what was already there. The aim of many scientists isn't discovery in and of itself. Discovery is a side effect of their primary drive to publish and - hopefully - become well known. And establishments only make things worse, because it's the things that are most likely to produce tangible results (the papers, or economically valuable products) that get the most f…
You’re overgeneralizing a smidgeon.