15 ms·

"the very foundation of modern academia has been blown to bits"

56 points by telotortium 2mo ago

Woodi 2mo ago
> In the past, the path to a math Ph.D. cultivated resilience, resourcefulness, critical thinking, and a healthy skepticism (…) but suddenly you can produce a passable Ph.D. thesis with the push of a button But actually nothing changed. Or maybe a path to "resilience, resourcefulness and critical thinking". Because human brains still needs to be shaped by years of training on some quality "literature", of some form. We still must/want to human-[re]check important results, right ? And that require years of students time dedicated to memoizing facts and doing exercises in discovering already discovered results - learning and weights tuning, in the brains. Yes, demotivator factor is very high or maybe just more visible then usual. Especially for brain paths forming - an that process is not quite stated in university and other education... I think that when LLMs finish words and sentences shuffling and finds most of low hanging fruits in cutting edge of research ;) then only humans can move things forward, via abstractions, syntesis or old good paradigm abandoning. Hard to imagine LLM on their own "discover" something and then drops all that "literature" it was trained on as obsolote :) In next prompt it will happily return you old texts without any influence of just discovered paradigm shift. In XIX century we got quite stagnation in science - it was belived that everything was already discovered, explained, just some few experiments are needed because some numbers do not adds up... And that proliferated to philophy and culture via some "proofs" for atheists. But in 1905 a paper was published... Too bad politicans do not get implications of that and still was pushing communism decades later... So we realy want humans with brain pathways shaped mostly "old way" - the only one way available for human beings - by that training called "education". As always there is resistance and pain and attempts to find a shortcuts by cheating. Maybe this is time to clearly state that brain workings training is big part of education ? Just like in gym you are repeating to trying to lift weights up to your limit and even little above, with supervisor oversight.
- jonathanstrange 2mo ago
  > some quality "literature", of some form In my opinion, we will continue to need fully educated people who read books and peer-reviewed articles. We need literature, not "'literature', of some form."
  - Woodi 2mo ago
    Still, AI is a new form of a library. Or knowledge presentation. With a lot of usefulness for learning. Sure, who know things do not need to consult talky chatbots. But totaly dismising '"literature", of some form' is not an opion. It already works like simple "consulting manual". Of course as long as texts used for LLMs training start to be outdated and noone will bother to update models. And we always want as much as possible educated peoples but not always can afford everyone higher material expe^W^W^W^Wdemands.
- Ukv 2mo ago
  > But in 1905 a paper was published... Too bad politicans do not get implications of that and still was pushing communism decades later... The photoelectric effect/quanta? I'm not sure I understand the supposed connection to communism.
  - Woodi 2mo ago
    Einstein - definitive end of XIX ilusion and way of thinking that "We know everything. We are the lords of things, we own all of it! And other peoples too! We can engineer societes as we like it!". With strict oposition to old and humbler "God" or natural ways. With aggresive "we" that do not pay attention to rights of other we's. And, IMO, Einstein, Godel and more discoveries should be reason to not continue communism stupidity. Especially to not continue - after year 1905 - social engineering plans of "world-wide GENOCIDE until everybody is good citizen". Of course I'm talking about best-wanting-for-humans but still naive communism and not about a way to destabilize other countries by any means necessary. Such move did almost insta-karma effect on Germany: sponsoring commies in Russia resulted in nazi being sponsored in Germany... Don't think someone want to deny societes, philosophers and politicians are drived by overall science view on reality. And what else could drive atheistic minds ? Not judging here, logic is everyones duty. Also my "too bad politicians..." was obviously expression of a wish. Not only science influents politicians. But discovered facts (counterarguments in this case) about reality could be taken for consideration, right ?
beambot 2mo ago
"...and that's a good thing."
jdw64 2mo ago
Maybe old methodologies will be discarded and new ones will emerge. Thinking back, when I first started teaching myself programming, I didn't know what to learn, so I explored the history of programming and organized it as I went. One of the most striking things I remember is that when Stack Overflow first launched, quite a few people opposed it. Also, I recall that in ancient Greece, Socrates criticized writing, saying it would weaken human memory. When SO first appeared, there were many who insisted that the only proper programmer's way was to RTFM, deeply understand the system's fundamentals, and then write code. I wasn't from that generation—I belonged to the copy-paste-from-SO generation—so I can't say for sure, but I found it quite fascinating. The cost of that friction could only be borne by a very small minority, and that minority could guarantee quality. That's why scholarship was something only the elite could pursue—and to some extent, it still is. In the past, tasks were painful and high-friction. The results were filtered through that process, accessible only to the few who could endure it. But we tend to mistake those inefficient drops of sweat for quality. In reality, just as writing didn't diminish philosophy but rather created systems like law and philosophy, this might just be another turning point I think Mr. Lemire's post is similar in spirit. In other words, when friction increases, the cost of production for producers also rises. So back then, everything produced through that high-friction process was easier to quality-control. But that's no longer the case. And actually, universities were originally about 'holistic education,' but these days, they've become more about training talent for industry and managing human resources for the job market. That shift has caused problems. In that sense, it's only natural that these problems arise at the intersection of academia and industry. Industry usually demands 'people and technologies that can boost productivity right now.' Meanwhile, academia should ideally pursue problems worth exploring over the long term, even if they have no immediate utility. But the current state is a product of compromise. Once university evaluations, student recruitment, research funding, and employment rates become tightly linked to industry demand, the latter starts to pressure the former. And under those conditions, the current outcome is almost inevitable—because industry increasingly wants to churn out degree stickers at lower and lower costs. In the end, a different methodology will be needed, and whoever proposes it will become the game changer. Then new schools of thought and methodologies will emerge based on that person, and they'll gain enormous fame. I'm curious who that will be. New things are always born by laying the past to rest. I'm always waiting for that new methodology.
this_user 2mo ago
I am not sure what point the author is even trying to make here. On the one hand, he seems to complain about how AI has virtually made the traditionally PhD thesis obsolete, but on the other hand, he also states: > Consider that most PhD theses were never good. How often do you rush to read a PhD thesis? The vast majority of them are painful to read. You learn little if anything. So, it sounds like nothing of much value has been lost. I think what he really complains about is that AI is starting to show that the emperor called academia has no clothes. So much of working your way through that system has always been about being able to master largely pointless rituals. Yet, the people on the inside have no interest in making any improvements, because academia has always been institutionally conservative. But now AI is starting to put pressure on them to rethink their way of doing things, and they really don't like it.
- b112 2mo ago
  I think the premise was, before you had to actually do some work to create the thesis. And there was always the concern that yours could be one which was read deeply, so that thesis work had to at least show that you did some work. That there was meat behind the paper. But now, it could simply be all a couple of prompts to an LLM. The bar is just lower for not doing the work, now. But really, that's the fact everywhere.
  - jaybrendansmith 2mo ago
    But it was always about the questions. Physics is difficult because you must formulate the right question to ask, and often once you do, the answer is revealed. Science, I think, it about creating many questions, then many hypotheses and discarding and weeding out the ones that don't work. This is the hard part: The creation of the report SHOULD be the easy part, and why do we care if it becomes even easier? That way we can develop more and more questions and hypotheses. AI cannot really help with the hard parts, it is not creative enough and lacks understanding of the real world.
    - b112 2mo ago
      None of that is relevant without you, the person architecting the questions or the idea, being able to cogently convey this to others. If you cannot understand it enough to transfer the knowledge, or if you are incapable of expressing your inner voice enough to transfer the knowledge, it's all for not. That's one of the concepts this process is supposed to handle. Validation that you can transfer knowledge. Broken or not, that's the point of it, and what you're replying to indicates that at least in the past, you had to "do the work" to express knowledge, and also demonstrate that you could transfer that knowledge.
Chance-Device 2mo ago
We’re at the point of learning that some things that used to matter no longer do, and some things we used to think mattered never did. It’s a going to be a shock to everyone, and this same phenomenon is happening everywhere, not just academia or software engineering. My bet: a lot of the things we used to do were habit, ceremony and gatekeeping much more than being necessities.
- qsera 2mo ago
  >It’s a going to be a shock to everyone.. Not to everyone though...
- goatlover 2mo ago
  When these things no longer matter, who will that benefit and who will be disadvantaged? What will the costs or net benefits to society be? Disruption can be good or bad, or often a mix. It's hard to say now whether social media was a net benefit, but it has definitely been disruptive.
- thom 2mo ago
  You’re probably right, but I’d also bet some things that we’re about to sweep aside will turn out to have been necessities and we’ll find it very difficult to bring them back.
  - Chance-Device 2mo ago
    To be pedantic about it, if something is a necessity it can’t be done without by definition. So if you’re in that position whatever you’re talking about wasn’t a necessity. Is this like Socrates thinking that reading will make people lazy and forgetful?
    - applfanboysbgon 2mo ago
      > If something is a necessity it can’t be done without by definition You fail at being pedantic. If you wanted to be pedantic about this, it would first be necessary to define what it is a necessity for. Are the things being swept aside a necessity for the universe to continue existing? No, definitely not. But perhaps they could be a necessity for the (academic) culture to prosper. Which do you think is more likely that the person you responded to meant, that they were talking about things being necessary for the universe to keep existing or things being necessary for our culture to flourish? There is nothing worse than a half-assed pedant who can't even be sufficiently pedantic to make a point correctly. Really, that's closer to autism, not pedantry. There are inferred clauses when people speak, but you (choose to?) intentionally disregard them and interpret them in the wrong way, thereby arguing against things that weren't said. Even programs can infer unstated clauses by context (eg. can successfully infer from `var x = 2` that x is an int despite it not being said, without explicitly declaring `int x = 2`).
yk 2mo ago
The author is a mathematician and I think to a certain extend the tweet reflects the current panic among (some) mathematicians. So ~~second sentence~~ third paragraph the claim that somehow ai could right now write a phd in physics or sociology is something we don't observe (at the moment). What we observe is, that ai can find counter examples to well established conjectures in mathematics quite well, but the thing is the other fields don't have the kind of well established riddles that currently produce the flashy results in mathematics.
- ehnto 2mo ago
  To show my ignorance in mathematics a bit: do you feel that having such neatly defined riddles gives the AI an advantage in solving them? A lot of Innovations or insights are obvious in hindsight, but no one thought to consider the problem, and put the pieces of the solution together. In this sense a well defined problem is a large portion of the solution as well. I mention this because I feel AI software agents have a huge advantage due the body of prior work available to them and how provable solutions can be. This I feel gives the impression that the agents are more generally intelligent than they actually are. Is this another example of that perhaps?
- tgv 2mo ago
  > something we don't observe That's just lack of observation. Which PhD candidate is going to say "Chat wrote it for me?" We know a lot of academic articles are AI written. And a very, very large part of the student essays. Unless intercepted, they'll end up in the thesis. And in sociology, the texts are so vague, that it becomes even harder to pick out slop. There are good reasons to assume PhD students see an advantage to using AI, so they will.
haritha-j 2mo ago
The largest output of a PhD has always been the training to the student, not the thesis itself, hence why we're called 'students'. Anyone claiming that a thesis can be generated by AI is missing the point. AI can also do everything an undergrad can do, we don't claim that undergrad education has been blown to bits. At best, we say we need better modes of evaluation, and perhaps that's true for PhDs as well. I submitted my thesis this month at a QS top 10 uni after nearly 4 years of work. LLMs were available for most of that time. I don't really feel that it has diminished the value of my thesis by much really.
- Chance-Device 2mo ago
  You’re sort of saying that’s because your thesis had no value to begin with, because it’s mainly a teaching exercise. I’m not saying that it doesn’t have value by the way, I’m sure it was good, that’s just my read of your post. It’s an interesting subject. Makes me want to vibe code a PhD generator just like in the tweet. Maybe I will.
  - eddythompson80 2mo ago
    They are saying that the value of most PhDs was in the learning the student got in the process, not in the PhD itself. Groundbreaking PhDs exist, but they are far, far, from the norm or expectation. Exceptional people doing exceptional work will always exist. > your thesis had no value to begin with, because it’s mainly a teaching exercise And that’s the problem in your understanding. Thinking that a teaching exercise has no value while OP was saying that IS the value. It’s missing the forest for the trees. The point of homework isn’t to solve the problems. I bet you the teacher assigning the homework already knows the answers. Just like the point of a marathon isn’t to travel 26 miles because you could just take a bus.
    - Chance-Device 2mo ago
      Well no, it’s a problem in your understanding of what I’ve written. The thesis and what’s learned along the way are separate objects with separate value, and you’ve decided to misread me in order to have something to be indignant about. However, to expand on a point I didn’t originally raise: learning itself is likely also reduced with AI assistance. That’s a fairly natural consequence of having to do less work yourself, we don’t retain information we don’t need to retain.
hamburgererror 2mo ago
I've seen a student using ChatGPT for almost everything in his PhD (in engineering). You have some data but you don't know what kind of statistical analysis tool to use? Ask ChatGPT. Code for the analysis? ChatGPT. How do you interpret the results? ChatGPT. And so on. I could bet that some of his scientific questions where generated, and that's no surprise to me, it's just SO easy this way and if the PhD advisor just says "ok that's good" and no one ever complain during the PhD defense then for sure this will keep going. But regarding OP's link, when Lemire says I kept my mouth shut. I am never rude on purpose. You can't say that and complain that academia "is blown to bits". It's your responsibility as a scientist to step up and say that some research is garbage when you see it.
- Chance-Device 2mo ago
  Maybe it wasn’t garbage, maybe it’s just gotten significantly easier because the hard parts have gotten less hard. Search is solved, prose is solved, reasoning is… assisted at least. What he wasn’t being rude about was bursting his colleague’s bubble about AI generated work in general.
- piva00 2mo ago
  > It's your responsibility as a scientist to step up and say that some research is garbage when you see it. The only case I personally know of someone doing that during their PhD didn't end well. My friend couldn't replicate the results from a known professor in the field, asked for the data + model to re-run because he assumed his own work was wrong and wanted to benchmark against the known study. Got stonewalled for more than a year, brought it up with supervisors because he started getting the feeling the results were tampered and the professor didn't want to be found out. He pushed it but got ridiculed by the professor's university ethics committee. After a couple of years he could show that the research was at least sketchy and he depended on that model/results for his own work, he lost 2 years of research and completely left academia after finishing the PhD (delayed by almost 2 years).
gcatalfamo 2mo ago
I have a PhD and I completely support AI disrupting the field. If AI disrupts your field, the culprit is most likely not AI.
- hamburgererror 2mo ago
  Could you expand on that?
  - gcatalfamo 2mo ago
    In no way getting a PhD or doing published research is an act of science or human progress, and it's been like that for probably 20 years. It's an act of coordinated methodology in showing respect to previous peers by acknowledging that you read what they wrote when they were acknowledging even more previous peers. Every attempt to do something new is rejected unless you take 99% of something that has been done and try to add your 1% to it. But the thing is that you don't even want to do that, you need to either have a publishable/defensible thesis, or if you already have a PhD, pursue a tenurable track and grants which never collides to productive human progress. So yes, AI could very well run tenure track career more efficiently and with better results. It's not AI the problem: it is the checks and performance indicators that are in place that make it very easy for AI to dominate and very exhausting for a human to follow. A good researcher with good AI knowledge would (and should) dominate their field. * Medicine is luckily saved from this, with some exceptions.
- eddythompson80 2mo ago
  “If algorithmic targeting disrupts your society, the culprit is most likely not algorithmic targeting” Or replace AI/algorithmic targeting with tech in general and the disruption target with whatever it targets and you’d realize the problem with the sentence. Technological advances have disrupted plenty of fields. That doesn’t mean those fields were fundamentally flawed. Every arena has a certain degree of dysfunction. AI has its own massive share of issues already. But that doesn’t negate the whole field. Take the classic example of the Travel Agent. They are all but extinct because of technology. Yet they did serve a legitimate purpose before. Yes, plenty of them were middlemen who didn’t care, but also plenty were passionate about organizing travel plans and helping people arrange their travels and vacations. Plenty of people using AI today are also middlemen between you and Claude who also don’t care
aaron695 2mo ago
[dead]
speak_plainly 2mo ago
PhDs only were adopted universally in 1917 with some resistance and apprehension. The issue here is that academia forgot what it was about a long time ago and is now having to face the consequences for a hundred years of bad decisions.
- AnonymousPlanet 2mo ago
  > PhDs only were adopted universally in 1917 In Oxford. That hardly counts as universal.
  - speak_plainly 2mo ago
    You’re right, maybe roughly circa 1930 across internationally recognized research universities? For some reason I thought Oxford was the holdout.
    - AnonymousPlanet 2mo ago
      In Germany and France it was established in the early 1800s. That was when the degree wasn't just a license to teach but you also had to prove you could contribute to research. Oxford was just late to the game. Whether Oxford participated, however, was more irrelevant than not to those other places I'd guess. The US was apparently also late to it, leading to an influx of American PhD students to Germany mid 19th century.
delis-thumbs-7e 2mo ago
https://xcancel.com/lemire/status/2082851447499088173#m https://xcancel.com/lemire/status/2082851447499088173#m
28304283409234 2mo ago
Socrates hated the written word . It weakens the memory. It does not talk back. Etc...etc... This is not a new problem folks.
OutOfHere 2mo ago
Isn't it easy to adapt? Besides the usual assessment, also do: 1. Use AI to review a thesis for its validity and to obtain candidate concerns for further probing. 2. Require valid proofs for theorems and such. 3. Require open code for software claims. Assess it with AI. 4. Stop issuing PhDs for reviews. Original research must be required. 5. Encourage physical data gathering from the real world rather than just data analysis of existing data.

56 points by telotortium 2mo ago

Woodi 2mo ago

> In the past, the path to a math Ph.D. cultivated resilience, resourcefulness, critical thinking, and a healthy skepticism (…) but suddenly you can produce a passable Ph.D. thesis with the push of a button But actually nothing changed. Or maybe a path to "resilience, resourcefulness and critical thinking". Because human brains still needs to be shaped by years of training on some quality "literature", of some form. We still must/want to human-[re]check important results, right ? And that require years of students time dedicated to memoizing facts and doing exercises in discovering already discovered results - learning and weights tuning, in the brains. Yes, demotivator factor is very high or maybe just more visible then usual. Especially for brain paths forming - an that process is not quite stated in university and other education... I think that when LLMs finish words and sentences shuffling and finds most of low hanging fruits in cutting edge of research ;) then only humans can move things forward, via abstractions, syntesis or old good paradigm abandoning. Hard to imagine LLM on their own "discover" something and then drops all that "literature" it was trained on as obsolote :) In next prompt it will happily return you old texts without any influence of just discovered paradigm shift. In XIX century we got quite stagnation in science - it was belived that everything was already discovered, explained, just some few experiments are needed because some numbers do not adds up... And that proliferated to philophy and culture via some "proofs" for atheists. But in 1905 a paper was published... Too bad politicans do not get implications of that and still was pushing communism decades later... So we realy want humans with brain pathways shaped mostly "old way" - the only one way available for human beings - by that training called "education". As always there is resistance and pain and attempts to find a shortcuts by cheating. Maybe this is time to clearly state that brain workings training is big part of education ? Just like in gym you are repeating to trying to lift weights up to your limit and even little above, with supervisor oversight.

jonathanstrange 2mo ago
> some quality "literature", of some form In my opinion, we will continue to need fully educated people who read books and peer-reviewed articles. We need literature, not "'literature', of some form."
- Woodi 2mo ago
  Still, AI is a new form of a library. Or knowledge presentation. With a lot of usefulness for learning. Sure, who know things do not need to consult talky chatbots. But totaly dismising '"literature", of some form' is not an opion. It already works like simple "consulting manual". Of course as long as texts used for LLMs training start to be outdated and noone will bother to update models. And we always want as much as possible educated peoples but not always can afford everyone higher material expe^W^W^W^Wdemands.
Ukv 2mo ago
> But in 1905 a paper was published... Too bad politicans do not get implications of that and still was pushing communism decades later... The photoelectric effect/quanta? I'm not sure I understand the supposed connection to communism.
- Woodi 2mo ago
  Einstein - definitive end of XIX ilusion and way of thinking that "We know everything. We are the lords of things, we own all of it! And other peoples too! We can engineer societes as we like it!". With strict oposition to old and humbler "God" or natural ways. With aggresive "we" that do not pay attention to rights of other we's. And, IMO, Einstein, Godel and more discoveries should be reason to not continue communism stupidity. Especially to not continue - after year 1905 - social engineering plans of "world-wide GENOCIDE until everybody is good citizen". Of course I'm talking about best-wanting-for-humans but still naive communism and not about a way to destabilize other countries by any means necessary. Such move did almost insta-karma effect on Germany: sponsoring commies in Russia resulted in nazi being sponsored in Germany... Don't think someone want to deny societes, philosophers and politicians are drived by overall science view on reality. And what else could drive atheistic minds ? Not judging here, logic is everyones duty. Also my "too bad politicians..." was obviously expression of a wish. Not only science influents politicians. But discovered facts (counterarguments in this case) about reality could be taken for consideration, right ?

beambot 2mo ago

"...and that's a good thing."

jdw64 2mo ago

Maybe old methodologies will be discarded and new ones will emerge. Thinking back, when I first started teaching myself programming, I didn't know what to learn, so I explored the history of programming and organized it as I went. One of the most striking things I remember is that when Stack Overflow first launched, quite a few people opposed it. Also, I recall that in ancient Greece, Socrates criticized writing, saying it would weaken human memory. When SO first appeared, there were many who insisted that the only proper programmer's way was to RTFM, deeply understand the system's fundamentals, and then write code. I wasn't from that generation—I belonged to the copy-paste-from-SO generation—so I can't say for sure, but I found it quite fascinating. The cost of that friction could only be borne by a very small minority, and that minority could guarantee quality. That's why scholarship was something only the elite could pursue—and to some extent, it still is. In the past, tasks were painful and high-friction. The results were filtered through that process, accessible only to the few who could endure it. But we tend to mistake those inefficient drops of sweat for quality. In reality, just as writing didn't diminish philosophy but rather created systems like law and philosophy, this might just be another turning point I think Mr. Lemire's post is similar in spirit. In other words, when friction increases, the cost of production for producers also rises. So back then, everything produced through that high-friction process was easier to quality-control. But that's no longer the case. And actually, universities were originally about 'holistic education,' but these days, they've become more about training talent for industry and managing human resources for the job market. That shift has caused problems. In that sense, it's only natural that these problems arise at the intersection of academia and industry. Industry usually demands 'people and technologies that can boost productivity right now.' Meanwhile, academia should ideally pursue problems worth exploring over the long term, even if they have no immediate utility. But the current state is a product of compromise. Once university evaluations, student recruitment, research funding, and employment rates become tightly linked to industry demand, the latter starts to pressure the former. And under those conditions, the current outcome is almost inevitable—because industry increasingly wants to churn out degree stickers at lower and lower costs. In the end, a different methodology will be needed, and whoever proposes it will become the game changer. Then new schools of thought and methodologies will emerge based on that person, and they'll gain enormous fame. I'm curious who that will be. New things are always born by laying the past to rest. I'm always waiting for that new methodology.

this_user 2mo ago

I am not sure what point the author is even trying to make here. On the one hand, he seems to complain about how AI has virtually made the traditionally PhD thesis obsolete, but on the other hand, he also states: > Consider that most PhD theses were never good. How often do you rush to read a PhD thesis? The vast majority of them are painful to read. You learn little if anything. So, it sounds like nothing of much value has been lost. I think what he really complains about is that AI is starting to show that the emperor called academia has no clothes. So much of working your way through that system has always been about being able to master largely pointless rituals. Yet, the people on the inside have no interest in making any improvements, because academia has always been institutionally conservative. But now AI is starting to put pressure on them to rethink their way of doing things, and they really don't like it.

b112 2mo ago
I think the premise was, before you had to actually do some work to create the thesis. And there was always the concern that yours could be one which was read deeply, so that thesis work had to at least show that you did some work. That there was meat behind the paper. But now, it could simply be all a couple of prompts to an LLM. The bar is just lower for not doing the work, now. But really, that's the fact everywhere.
- jaybrendansmith 2mo ago
  But it was always about the questions. Physics is difficult because you must formulate the right question to ask, and often once you do, the answer is revealed. Science, I think, it about creating many questions, then many hypotheses and discarding and weeding out the ones that don't work. This is the hard part: The creation of the report SHOULD be the easy part, and why do we care if it becomes even easier? That way we can develop more and more questions and hypotheses. AI cannot really help with the hard parts, it is not creative enough and lacks understanding of the real world.
  - b112 2mo ago
    None of that is relevant without you, the person architecting the questions or the idea, being able to cogently convey this to others. If you cannot understand it enough to transfer the knowledge, or if you are incapable of expressing your inner voice enough to transfer the knowledge, it's all for not. That's one of the concepts this process is supposed to handle. Validation that you can transfer knowledge. Broken or not, that's the point of it, and what you're replying to indicates that at least in the past, you had to "do the work" to express knowledge, and also demonstrate that you could transfer that knowledge.

Chance-Device 2mo ago

We’re at the point of learning that some things that used to matter no longer do, and some things we used to think mattered never did. It’s a going to be a shock to everyone, and this same phenomenon is happening everywhere, not just academia or software engineering. My bet: a lot of the things we used to do were habit, ceremony and gatekeeping much more than being necessities.

qsera 2mo ago
>It’s a going to be a shock to everyone.. Not to everyone though...
goatlover 2mo ago
When these things no longer matter, who will that benefit and who will be disadvantaged? What will the costs or net benefits to society be? Disruption can be good or bad, or often a mix. It's hard to say now whether social media was a net benefit, but it has definitely been disruptive.
thom 2mo ago
You’re probably right, but I’d also bet some things that we’re about to sweep aside will turn out to have been necessities and we’ll find it very difficult to bring them back.
- Chance-Device 2mo ago
  To be pedantic about it, if something is a necessity it can’t be done without by definition. So if you’re in that position whatever you’re talking about wasn’t a necessity. Is this like Socrates thinking that reading will make people lazy and forgetful?
  - applfanboysbgon 2mo ago
    > If something is a necessity it can’t be done without by definition You fail at being pedantic. If you wanted to be pedantic about this, it would first be necessary to define what it is a necessity for. Are the things being swept aside a necessity for the universe to continue existing? No, definitely not. But perhaps they could be a necessity for the (academic) culture to prosper. Which do you think is more likely that the person you responded to meant, that they were talking about things being necessary for the universe to keep existing or things being necessary for our culture to flourish? There is nothing worse than a half-assed pedant who can't even be sufficiently pedantic to make a point correctly. Really, that's closer to autism, not pedantry. There are inferred clauses when people speak, but you (choose to?) intentionally disregard them and interpret them in the wrong way, thereby arguing against things that weren't said. Even programs can infer unstated clauses by context (eg. can successfully infer from `var x = 2` that x is an int despite it not being said, without explicitly declaring `int x = 2`).

yk 2mo ago

The author is a mathematician and I think to a certain extend the tweet reflects the current panic among (some) mathematicians. So ~~second sentence~~ third paragraph the claim that somehow ai could right now write a phd in physics or sociology is something we don't observe (at the moment). What we observe is, that ai can find counter examples to well established conjectures in mathematics quite well, but the thing is the other fields don't have the kind of well established riddles that currently produce the flashy results in mathematics.

ehnto 2mo ago
To show my ignorance in mathematics a bit: do you feel that having such neatly defined riddles gives the AI an advantage in solving them? A lot of Innovations or insights are obvious in hindsight, but no one thought to consider the problem, and put the pieces of the solution together. In this sense a well defined problem is a large portion of the solution as well. I mention this because I feel AI software agents have a huge advantage due the body of prior work available to them and how provable solutions can be. This I feel gives the impression that the agents are more generally intelligent than they actually are. Is this another example of that perhaps?
tgv 2mo ago
> something we don't observe That's just lack of observation. Which PhD candidate is going to say "Chat wrote it for me?" We know a lot of academic articles are AI written. And a very, very large part of the student essays. Unless intercepted, they'll end up in the thesis. And in sociology, the texts are so vague, that it becomes even harder to pick out slop. There are good reasons to assume PhD students see an advantage to using AI, so they will.

haritha-j 2mo ago

The largest output of a PhD has always been the training to the student, not the thesis itself, hence why we're called 'students'. Anyone claiming that a thesis can be generated by AI is missing the point. AI can also do everything an undergrad can do, we don't claim that undergrad education has been blown to bits. At best, we say we need better modes of evaluation, and perhaps that's true for PhDs as well. I submitted my thesis this month at a QS top 10 uni after nearly 4 years of work. LLMs were available for most of that time. I don't really feel that it has diminished the value of my thesis by much really.

Chance-Device 2mo ago
You’re sort of saying that’s because your thesis had no value to begin with, because it’s mainly a teaching exercise. I’m not saying that it doesn’t have value by the way, I’m sure it was good, that’s just my read of your post. It’s an interesting subject. Makes me want to vibe code a PhD generator just like in the tweet. Maybe I will.
- eddythompson80 2mo ago
  They are saying that the value of most PhDs was in the learning the student got in the process, not in the PhD itself. Groundbreaking PhDs exist, but they are far, far, from the norm or expectation. Exceptional people doing exceptional work will always exist. > your thesis had no value to begin with, because it’s mainly a teaching exercise And that’s the problem in your understanding. Thinking that a teaching exercise has no value while OP was saying that IS the value. It’s missing the forest for the trees. The point of homework isn’t to solve the problems. I bet you the teacher assigning the homework already knows the answers. Just like the point of a marathon isn’t to travel 26 miles because you could just take a bus.
  - Chance-Device 2mo ago
    Well no, it’s a problem in your understanding of what I’ve written. The thesis and what’s learned along the way are separate objects with separate value, and you’ve decided to misread me in order to have something to be indignant about. However, to expand on a point I didn’t originally raise: learning itself is likely also reduced with AI assistance. That’s a fairly natural consequence of having to do less work yourself, we don’t retain information we don’t need to retain.

hamburgererror 2mo ago

I've seen a student using ChatGPT for almost everything in his PhD (in engineering). You have some data but you don't know what kind of statistical analysis tool to use? Ask ChatGPT. Code for the analysis? ChatGPT. How do you interpret the results? ChatGPT. And so on. I could bet that some of his scientific questions where generated, and that's no surprise to me, it's just SO easy this way and if the PhD advisor just says "ok that's good" and no one ever complain during the PhD defense then for sure this will keep going. But regarding OP's link, when Lemire says I kept my mouth shut. I am never rude on purpose. You can't say that and complain that academia "is blown to bits". It's your responsibility as a scientist to step up and say that some research is garbage when you see it.

Chance-Device 2mo ago
Maybe it wasn’t garbage, maybe it’s just gotten significantly easier because the hard parts have gotten less hard. Search is solved, prose is solved, reasoning is… assisted at least. What he wasn’t being rude about was bursting his colleague’s bubble about AI generated work in general.
piva00 2mo ago
> It's your responsibility as a scientist to step up and say that some research is garbage when you see it. The only case I personally know of someone doing that during their PhD didn't end well. My friend couldn't replicate the results from a known professor in the field, asked for the data + model to re-run because he assumed his own work was wrong and wanted to benchmark against the known study. Got stonewalled for more than a year, brought it up with supervisors because he started getting the feeling the results were tampered and the professor didn't want to be found out. He pushed it but got ridiculed by the professor's university ethics committee. After a couple of years he could show that the research was at least sketchy and he depended on that model/results for his own work, he lost 2 years of research and completely left academia after finishing the PhD (delayed by almost 2 years).

gcatalfamo 2mo ago

I have a PhD and I completely support AI disrupting the field. If AI disrupts your field, the culprit is most likely not AI.

hamburgererror 2mo ago
Could you expand on that?
- gcatalfamo 2mo ago
  In no way getting a PhD or doing published research is an act of science or human progress, and it's been like that for probably 20 years. It's an act of coordinated methodology in showing respect to previous peers by acknowledging that you read what they wrote when they were acknowledging even more previous peers. Every attempt to do something new is rejected unless you take 99% of something that has been done and try to add your 1% to it. But the thing is that you don't even want to do that, you need to either have a publishable/defensible thesis, or if you already have a PhD, pursue a tenurable track and grants which never collides to productive human progress. So yes, AI could very well run tenure track career more efficiently and with better results. It's not AI the problem: it is the checks and performance indicators that are in place that make it very easy for AI to dominate and very exhausting for a human to follow. A good researcher with good AI knowledge would (and should) dominate their field. * Medicine is luckily saved from this, with some exceptions.
eddythompson80 2mo ago
“If algorithmic targeting disrupts your society, the culprit is most likely not algorithmic targeting” Or replace AI/algorithmic targeting with tech in general and the disruption target with whatever it targets and you’d realize the problem with the sentence. Technological advances have disrupted plenty of fields. That doesn’t mean those fields were fundamentally flawed. Every arena has a certain degree of dysfunction. AI has its own massive share of issues already. But that doesn’t negate the whole field. Take the classic example of the Travel Agent. They are all but extinct because of technology. Yet they did serve a legitimate purpose before. Yes, plenty of them were middlemen who didn’t care, but also plenty were passionate about organizing travel plans and helping people arrange their travels and vacations. Plenty of people using AI today are also middlemen between you and Claude who also don’t care

aaron695 2mo ago

[dead]

speak_plainly 2mo ago

PhDs only were adopted universally in 1917 with some resistance and apprehension. The issue here is that academia forgot what it was about a long time ago and is now having to face the consequences for a hundred years of bad decisions.

AnonymousPlanet 2mo ago
> PhDs only were adopted universally in 1917 In Oxford. That hardly counts as universal.
- speak_plainly 2mo ago
  You’re right, maybe roughly circa 1930 across internationally recognized research universities? For some reason I thought Oxford was the holdout.
  - AnonymousPlanet 2mo ago
    In Germany and France it was established in the early 1800s. That was when the degree wasn't just a license to teach but you also had to prove you could contribute to research. Oxford was just late to the game. Whether Oxford participated, however, was more irrelevant than not to those other places I'd guess. The US was apparently also late to it, leading to an influx of American PhD students to Germany mid 19th century.

delis-thumbs-7e 2mo ago

https://xcancel.com/lemire/status/2082851447499088173#m https://xcancel.com/lemire/status/2082851447499088173#m

28304283409234 2mo ago

Socrates hated the written word . It weakens the memory. It does not talk back. Etc...etc... This is not a new problem folks.

OutOfHere 2mo ago

Isn't it easy to adapt? Besides the usual assessment, also do: 1. Use AI to review a thesis for its validity and to obtain candidate concerns for further probing. 2. Require valid proofs for theorems and such. 3. Require open code for software claims. Assess it with AI. 4. Stop issuing PhDs for reviews. Original research must be required. 5. Encourage physical data gathering from the real world rather than just data analysis of existing data.