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Comment by wqtz | Hacker News Reader

Ahhh, epistemology... Does any academic researcher even care about these things anymore?

If you're in academia, you've probably noticed a major shift recently. Research production at an industrial scale through AI.

Grants have "always" been awarded to professors based on quantity multiplied by quality. Now, some professors are churning out 1–3 papers a month with the same group of co-authors. All the grant money goes to them. Grant givers are just only counting the numbers of papers being published.

The Industrial Revolution has hit academia, and some academics are busy arguing for the artisanal value of research while some are creating factories for research.

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Yes, true scientists do care about epistemology.

The problem is the systemic disincentivation of true science, the pursuit of truth and knowledge unencumbered by greed.

When you speak favorably of "factories for research", you adopt the position of a mindless consumer, relishing the prospect of "abundant" products of science.

You fail to notice, livestock lives in abundance as well.

Nobody will speak favourably about the factorization of anything.

The "publish or perish" culture is going through what is essentially the same transformation brought by the invention of the assembly line. Academia, "as an industry", is experiencing what the automobile industry went through a century ago.

Grant approvals are public. Just go through them, and you will see a pattern emerge.

The argument I keep hearing is, "AI is good in the hands of a good researcher."

5–7 papers based on the same dataset? 5–7 papers on the same core topic, published within a six-month period?

They tell me that this is their core specialization and that I simply don't understand how science works.

Science is a self-governed, self-serving, and artificially defined concept.

You conflate a host of different issues and ultimately miss the point.

Science is an ideal, the pursuit for knowledge for its own sake. Science is a boon for humanity because it provides an unparalleled degree of prediction and control of the natural world.

But it doesn't tell you what to do with that.

A "capitalist" will seek personal, short-sighted gain from it, socializing repercussions, no matter how devastating. They will gladly poison society and the planet and sell it to you as "your own fault". Their life-span is limited still, so what do they care?

Technological capability exceeding human wisdom is the core issue here.

You need scientific understanding on your own side in order to know and judge the alternatives beyond what vested interests feel obliged to tell you.

As you said, "Science is an ideal." I think you and I have fundamentally different views of science. You are an idealist, whereas I am a practical person who has seen how the sausage of science is actually made.

Still there's something to the notion of people who prefer Academia to Industry. As much as I tend to agree with your broader points that it's a game and people love the prestige game and they now can pull levers to accelerate their winning in that Prestige game.. still they chose a path that is less about money and more about ideals than industry. It may be less and less ideal driven and less and less of a cloistered monastery but it's still a place for people who chose against industry. I say that as an industry guy who can just feel when I speak to academics that they are driven by something different than those of us industry. And to be clear those resident industry are not only driven by money we're also driven by building and changing the world but it's still different

You're talking about academia, society's attempt to gain economic utility from science. You assume, I didn't know about it based on what?

Exploiting science for economic utility alone misses the incurred second order effects, as I posited above. You completely ignore that crucial part, despite of it being the whole (very much practical) point here.

A practical person would be off doing something else. You have an axe to grind.

Don't you think your comment applies better to your behavior than GP's? At least they are actually contributing to the conversation.

I think the actual truth may be more important than we give it credit for. For instance I've noticed that most propaganda consists of lying about factual information, rather than what to do with the information.

The decision about what to do only becomes relevant if the underlying information is true.

Well, what to do and why it will accomplish what you (and everybody else) want and nothing else is the point. The facts being actually true is a necessity to pull that off.

Think of AI as a magic wand or a genie that makes your wishes come true.

While that sounds great at first, actually thinking it through reverses that mirage completely.

Whom would you want to have one? Who should get to decide? How do you control the whole matter and prevent it from going horribly wrong?

Being irresponsible doesn't work already when you're a grown-up human with only your bare hands.

True Scotsman fallacy. No meaningful argument was made above due to taking the stance of "true".

If "false" scientists end up getting all the money, resources, and social status from spamming LLM-generated papers, and the "true" scientists are shunned as slow idealists with 0 value, the first one is more of a scientist in the eyes of society than the latter.

I've seen a modest increase in productivity in bioinformatics. While the field is computational, it's ultimately about analyzing physical processes. The biggest bottlenecks have always been figuring out what makes sense to do and getting the data you need.

You can of course try new ideas and make software tools much faster now, but software is much like meetings. They can be productive if properly motivated, but they can also be a way to pretend you are working without contributing anything of real value.

Theoretical computer science and mathematics have changed. I'm not sure if they will remain active fields of research in the future. If they will, I would guess that theorems and proofs will eventually become things you include as supplementary data rather than in the main paper. Outside some rare exceptions, people may not consider them publishable results anymore.

Which is why there is this disorientating feeling. We are all facing now with an ongoing challenge to epistemological trust, like Someone suffering a mental disorder.

Yes we care! People are having intense debates about this stuff!

Factories for research have existed since Edison. The scale is the only difference.

The disdain for human intelligence is dripping off your comment "some academics are busy arguing for the artisanal value of research "

When AI can blast out major results that humans missed for decades, I think some appreciation for the limitations of human intellect is warranted.

I've noticed a cooling down of the human chauvinism arguments since the QRH results.

"human chauvinism" eye roll.

What should I call the excess self-regard of some of these mathematicians?

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