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  • Hacker News
  • Well, he sure met his papper publishing quota for the year.
  • More discussion on the related Anthropic post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49933386
  • I once read the criticism that science is already moving too fast and that wrong results get published and accepted as true because nobody reaps any laurels for verifying or reproducing results, even if that's an indispensable part of the scientific method.

    Now in the age of AI this problem will be heavily accentuated. Who's going to review the quality and validity of dozens and dozens of papers being generated by a researcher who used to publish sporadically?

    It's not hard to see science going through a "slop crisis" in the next few years, in the same way that now projects are getting inundated with PRs.

  • A very high number of Redditors think they know more/better than a Harvard professor and dismiss him out of hand. May someone grant us all a measure of their confidence.
  • Schwartz explains what he did in an Anthropic post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49933386
  • If AI is so good at research then maybe instead of people researching comparatively easy problems which only get you a publication, they will research problems that matter. (I'm not dismissing here problems just because they are "easy" or "not practical", I am sure that there are a ton of worthwile ones among those, I am dismissing just those which are artificial and only researched out of publication incentives.)
  • Reminds me of this - https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/08/27/258/ - which I think was on HN at some point in the last week. The fact that (according to another comment here) these papers were in areas outside his specialism, and therefore things he doesn't have the domain knowledge to critique, makes me think we're going to see more of this special kind of madness that seems to have some kind of grandiosity at its heart. It really does feel like some people are falling hard for plausibility rather than rigour.

    Edit: the papers do seem to have other names on them, and he says that all papers "were reviewed by humans for accuracy", but I still think there's a very serious risk of people being gulled into okaying something that's plausible rather than rigorously checking everything. There's enough human-generated slop in science already!

  • Did he drop them because they were hallucinated, or did he millennial-drop them? I still can't tell.
    by kps

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