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Comment by agnishom | Hacker News Reader

The LLMs does assist the adept researchers in crafting their manuscript, but I do not think it makes the quality much better.

My objection is not that they are the "wrong people". They are just regular people with excellent tools but not necessarily great scientific ideas.

Yes, it was easier to trash the crank's work before based on their unLaTeXed diagrams. Now, they might have a very professional looking diagram, but their work is still not great mathematics. Except that now the editor has a much harder time finding out who submitted a worthwhile paper

In what way do you think the feature of "LaTeXing a whiteboard diagram" is democritizing mathematics? I do not think there are many people who have exceptional mathematical insights but are not able to publish them because they are not able to typeset their work properly.

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The democratization is mostly in allowing people from outside the field with mediocre mathematical ideas to finally put them to paper and submit them to mediocre journals. And occasionally it might help a modern day Ramanujan with "exceptional mathematical insights" and a highly unconventional background to not have his work dismissed as that of a crank. Yes, most people with exceptional mathematical insights can typeset quite well. Democratization as I understand the term has quite a higher bar though.

Being against this is essentially to be in favor of a form of discrimination by proxy- if you can't typeset, then likely you can't do research either. And wouldn't it be really annoying if those people who can't research could magically typeset. It's a fundamentally undemocratic impulse: Since those who cannot typeset well are unlikely to produce quality mathematics, we can (and should) use this as an effective barrier to entry. If you replace ability to typeset with a number of other traits, they would be rather controversial positions.

It would indeed be nice if there were a mechanism to find people like Ramanujan who have excellent insights but cannot communicate them effectively.

But LLMs are not really helping. With all the beautifully typeset papers with immaculate prose, Ramanujan's papers are going to be buried deeper!

To some extent, I agree with you that it is a "discrimination by proxy", especially with the typesetting example. But you could think of examples where cranks could very easily fool themselves into thinking that they understand the essence of the material without understanding the details. E.g, [I understand fluid dynamics very well. No, I don't need to work out the differential equations. AI can do the bean counting for me.]

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