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Being embodied is not the important barrier to running experiments. It's having access to a body of resources (i.e. funding and infrastructure).
by combobyte 1mo ago
Being embodied is not the important barrier to running experiments. It's having access to a body of resources (i.e. funding and infrastructure).
- ForHackernews 1mo agoyeah but LLMs might be even cheaper than grad students
- rowanG077 1mo agoFor some research funding is mostly the salaries of the people doing the research.
- EA-3167 1mo agoWhat research works that way?
- rowanG077 1mo agolarge parts of Computer science, mathematics, theoretical physics, economics, some humanities research and I'm probably missing a ton.
- EA-3167 1mo agoSo applied math, math, applied math, applied math, and maybe some others. That makes sense, although I'd argue that at least in the realm of HEP theoretical physics has extraordinarily expensive kit compared to what scientists make. See: The LHC.
- rowanG077 1mo agoReducing all these fields to mathematics is incredibly reductive. I don't think it's in good faith.
- EA-3167 1mo agoI think it's telling that "Researchers cost more than any other aspect of research" seems to involve primarily math as inputs and outputs. Like I said the obvious outlier is theoretical physics because that tends to involve significant resources both to explore (supercomputers) and verify (colliders, telescopes, interferometers, etc). Most people involved in research in any number of fields do not find that their collective salaries are the majority of the cost required; math is an outlier in many cases.