this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2025
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Science Memes

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[โ€“] [email protected] 26 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)
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[โ€“] [email protected] 13 points 3 weeks ago

Thank you for highlighting the important part ๐Ÿ™

[โ€“] [email protected] 56 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (3 children)

It is worthwhile to note that the enzyme did not attack Norris of Leeds university, that would be tragic.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

At least they've obtained exosporium in Clos. I know they've been working hard at it.

[โ€“] [email protected] 15 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

It is by no spores and examined!

[โ€“] [email protected] 10 points 3 weeks ago

This early draft for The Last of Us just gets weirder and weirder.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 72 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

I recently reviewed a paper, for a prestigious journal. Paper was clearly from the academic mill. It was horrible. They had a small experimental engine, and they wrote 10 papers about it. Results were all normalized and relative, key test conditions not even mentioned, all described in general terms.. and I couldn't even be sure if the authors were real (korean authors, names are all Park, Kim and Lee). I hate where we arrived in scientific publishing.

[โ€“] [email protected] 16 points 3 weeks ago (12 children)

People shit on Hossenfelder but she has a point. Academia partially brought this on themselves.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 27 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

To be fair, scientific publishing has been terrible for years, a deeply flawed system at multiple levels. Maybe this is the push it needs to reevaluate itself into something better.

[โ€“] [email protected] 19 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

And to be even fairer, scientific reviewing hasn't been better. Back in my PhD days, I got a paper rejected from a prestigious conference for being too simple and too complex from two different reviewers. The reviewer that argue "too simple" also gave a an example of a task that couldn't be achieved which was clearly achievable.

Goes without saying, I'm not in academia anymore.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 93 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Scientists who write their papers with an LLM should get a lifetime ban from publishing papers.

[โ€“] [email protected] 34 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (13 children)

I played around with ChatGTP to see if it could actually improve my writing. (I've been writing for decades.)

I was immediately impressed by how "personable" the things are and able to interpret your writing and it's able to detect subtle things you are trying to convey, so that part was interesting. I also was impressed by how good it is at improving grammar and helping "join" passages, themes and plot-points, it has advantages that it can see the entire writing piece simultaneously and can make broad edits to the story-flow and that could potentially save a writers days or weeks of re-writing.

Now that the good is out of the way, I also tried to see how well it could just write. Using my prompts and writing style, scenes that I arranged for it to describe. And I can safely say that we have created the ultimate "Averaging Machine."

By definition LLM's are designed to always find the most probable answers to queries, so this makes sense. It has consumed and distilled vast sums of human knowledge and writing but doesn't use that material to synthesize or find inspiration, or what humans do which is take existing ideas and build upon them. No, what it does is always finds the most average path. And as a result, the writing is supremely average. It's so plain and unexciting to read it's actually impressive.

All of this is fine, it's still something new we didn't have a few years ago, neat, right? Well my worry is that as more and more people use this, more and more people are going to be exposed to this "averaging" tool and it will influence their writing, and we are going to see a whole generation of writers who write the most cardboard, stilted, generic works we've ever seen.

And I am saying this from experience. I was there when people started first using the internet to roleplay, making characters and scenes and free-form writing as groups. It was wildly fun, but most of the people involved were not writers, but many discovered literation for the first time there, it's what led to a sharp increase in book-reading and suddenly there were giant bookstores like Barns & Noble popping up on every corner. They were kids just doing their best, but that charming, terrible narration became a social standard. It's why there are so many atrocious dialogue scenes in shows and movies lately, I can draw a straight line to where kids learned to write in the 90's. And what's coming next is going to harm human creativity and inspiration in ways I can't even predict.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 36 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

BuT tHE HuMAn BrAin Is A cOmpUteEr.

Edit: people who say this are vegetative lifeforms.

[โ€“] [email protected] 32 points 3 weeks ago

Vegetative electron microscopes!

[โ€“] [email protected] 28 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

It immediately demonstrates a lack of both care and understanding of the scientific process.

[โ€“] [email protected] 10 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

As someone within that community: it demonstrates the "publish or perish" mindset. Without enough publications it becomes impossible to get funding to do your research. Thus, the incentives are there for producing more publications and not better research.

Unsurprisingly, encouraging greater throughput results in greater throughput. And without proper support quality suffers. For example, a large portion of research is done by underpaid graduate students.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

...but then they should perish (not literally).

If you've got nothing to publish, is your work valuable?

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

You might need more time to get good quality results. You might want to sleep more than 5h a day. You might even want to enjoy life.

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