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Comment by Cardinal7167 | Hacker News Reader

This is what social media’s real damage is. It turned academic progress into arguable points. Your research degree and countless lab hours is equally valid to my two-second no-research hot take, and if you’re not on board with it then you’re swarmed.

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> This is what social media’s real damage is. It turned academic progress into arguable points.

If that is "damage", the problem must surely lie with academia, not with social media.

Academia's only raison d'être is to facilitate formal discourse. Wherever it doesn't do that, it loses its legitimacy. "I'm a researcher and you are not" is not an argument. In fact, I'd go so far as to claim that anyone who makes such an "argument" should be excluded from any future discourse.

I think you may be misunderstanding the GP (though it's possible I am); my reading of that was not that it actually changed what "academic progress" is, but rather that it changed the public perception of it, as it gets discussed publicly on social media, where (particularly on Twitter) it's much more important who can draw the most views/shares/etc than who actually has the better science.

> my two-second no-research hot take

This is more like watching an argument between Feynman and Oppenheimer. They look like hot takes on twitter, but these guys have spent plenty of time thinking about it.

Yudkowsky is an AI ethics and safety researcher, also founder of LessWrong, an HN favorite – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliezer_Yudkowsky

And Chalmers is a philosopher focusing on consciousness and cognitive science – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers

I wouldn’t put their replies in exactly the same category as your typical social media reply guys.

I didn’t mean my comment about this tweet exchange as an example, I was only trying to speak to the comment I replied to about a general trend. This particular exchange is not the problem; it’s the inability for the public to gauge when it’s not like this, though, if that makes sense.

Yudkowsky and LessWrong was regarded as kooky for ages and, after the Roko's Basilisk affair (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk and read Yudkowsky's hilariously deranged all-caps response), a laughingstock as well. Suggesting that he's on the same plane as serious researchers is inappropriate.

> Your research degree and countless lab hours is equally valid to my two-second no-research hot take,

But you don't understand, I did my own research

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