it was right in front of you :)
Sin: A Slop Colon!
If one were inclined, they could shorten the title to "AI Synthesis Across Economics, Psychology, Biology, Philosophy, Game Theory, and Spiritual Tradition." Maybe that's an Easter egg.
AI submissions, soon AI reviewers, and shortly after only AI readers.
The guy's name is "nosloP" spelled backwards. Maybe spelled normally it's supposed to signify the opposite.
I mean it's everywhere now. I complained already at my workplace multiple times, we get huge Claude generated documents, which people then ask Claude to summarize. I don't mind some of it in principle but people are too lazy now to input all the details so you get a bunch of fantasies that were explicitly ruled out already. It's tiring.
Most insightful comment
It isn't even partially human written, it's just an LLM's output.
He was supposed to present a topic he learned about at the conference. Instead, he gave a cheeky talk which introduced the very concept of written language to the audience, as if we had never heard of it. Starting from the history of writing on tablets and so on, and ending in practical advice like, "when words are written down, you don't have to remember what they were exactly; you can just read the words again." I loved the chutzpah and could barely hold myself from chortling out loudly at some of his slides.
For condensed knowledge on highly specific topics (i.e. more specific than is economical in book form) I often know nothing better.
Most recently I did sort of a self-taught crash course in ground-penetrating radar and applications for an archeological endeavour I write software for, and a number of papers have been really invaluable.
That is not realistic, but I suppose where things are heading is that you have some indicator of the strength of evidence -- see Fig. 13 in the following insightful take:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49407226
Though, "strength" should probably be "reliability" and "validity", and I suppose those indicators are more for picking signals from the noise; i.e., what is even worth clicking and reading. That would be increasingly valuable already today due to the volume (and, yes, slop and other related stuff).
Can’t imagine the utter garbage that Claude will produce when you give it a simple prompt and let it write thousand of pages.
Kind of makes me wonder about all that AGI talk if these models can’t even the work of a good PhD or postdoctoral student.
The Everest effect.
George Mallory: "The first question you will ask, and the one I have to answer is, 'What's the point of climbing Mount Everest?' And my answer should be, 'It's no use.' There is not the slightest prospect of any gain. Oh, maybe we can learn a little about the behavior of the human body at height, and medicine can change our observations for aviation purposes. But nothing else could come of it. We will not bring back a little gold or silver or gemstones or coal or iron. We will not find soil or earth that we can grow crops that produce food. There is no point. So if you can't understand that there's something in humans that responds to the challenges of this mountain and goes to meet those challenges, then the struggle that ensues is a struggle from life itself upwards, and you won't see why we're leaving. What we get from this adventure is just joy. We don't live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to enjoy life. That is the meaning of life and the purpose of living."
Why generate all of these papers? Because, for the first time, he can.
Doesn't have to be for the money or fame or potential for speaking engagements. It could simply be that he wants to test the limits of what's possible.
0. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=170...
1. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=228...
2. https://www.chicagobooth.edu/faculty/directory/p/nicholas-po...
For some weird reason in the last few years people forgot the differences and now any PDF is an "academic paper" [3]. (I'd be more annoyed, if the internal system of the university also forgot the difference. I'm afraid to ask.)
[1] Whatever "serious" means, that's a juge can of worms.
[2] They get an doi and a version number in case of a change.
[3] A few years ago they were call "whitepapers".
(For instance, 58 pages, 80 pages ... I don't think of these as normal academic length if this is the main body content ...)
I really don't like AI for document writing as a whole, especially within organizations. Code can be a form of communication, but for the most part it's an engineered thing that can be re-run, tested, verified and so on. But documents drive decision-making, and decision making is often one-time. Decisions should be studied and understood, and depriving authors of much of both is not having any good effects.
Polson is just pushing the knob to 11 because it's louder.
We've been in the dark ages of science for so many decades...
If the papers were of a uniformly high standard then I might not have a problem with it.
If they are hoping some of them are good and the review process will filter out the bad then it seems like they are not doing research, they are writing hypotheses and at pushing the work of testing them onto the reviewers.
I could also see that being done to make some sort of statement about the review process, but it's not clear if that is their goal.
He's wasting people's time, which is already the resource that many people lack any to spare. I'm not sure if he realises this part.
coderintherye•44m ago
Perhaps this will help bring more scrutiny to the metric of publishing quantity not being as valuable as it has been treated.
canjobear•42m ago
guywithahat•20m ago
jruohonen•7m ago
If you only knew.