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Comment by lo_zamoyski | Hacker News Reader

I don’t like how we speak of science and knowledge in terms of production. This is not a factory. We are not in the business of churning out units.

But what I might expect is not a worse case of publish or perish, but the collapse of this pathology. If churning out crap is cheap, it will render publishing worthless. What I might expect is greater decentralization. Researchers might share reports and articles with colleagues directly. Networks of trust vs. broadcasting.

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I don't like how we talk about humans as factories either. That we re all here to be a "productive" as possible. That are life is measured in how much crap we produced.

I would love for this same ethos to spread to other domains. Why DO we hoard things so much? Why don't we just share more? Is it fear? Is it game -theory?

How many households have thousands of dollars worth of equipment to maintain that very household that each is used maybe ~30 minutes a week.

Why do we keep churning out more plastic crap that just sits in our spaces. Unused

Some parts of science can be automated and scaled immensely. Like, look at the science that went into building modern large language models. Massive numbers of theory driven empirical experiments. Ironically, not many papers being written about much of it.

In many domains, human ego is the bottleneck— or maybe organizational incentives. Most scientists work largely alone—a lot more could be done with the right leadership.

we wish it wasn't, but it totally is — in microbiology at least if you don't find anything meaningful to publish even students/post docs in the best unis like Stanford will still put out tons of review papers and microbial resource announcements

The discipline of writing for sharing knowledge is immense - not only for the sharing part, but to look at yourself (or your research) in the mirror with a critical eye and revise it multiple times. If you don't have that discipline, sharing knowledge even with colleagues / networks becomes harder. It's not only LLM churning out slop, but it's also without that discipline, the researcher putting out half finished work.

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