Slop.

This is the kind of stuff that convinces me that Western academia is about to slam into a brick wall and die

We're witnessing the death of academia in real time. Knowledge acquisition will cease and we will descend into a pit of regurgitated slurry until this system collapses

spent so much time trying to make the computer learn things they forgot how humans learn things

this is part of "everyone is twelve". very serious academics going "this is fantastic. I can skip eight weeks of school!"

I'm coming up with 500 theses every hour and they're all wrong

There is something very funny about sociology research being written by the stolen words of m/billions of people being smashed together. It's almost avant garde.

I recently tried using an LLM to find out whether a niche issue in my thesis had already been discussed in the literature. I fed the LLM extremely specific prompts, specific enough, in fact, that it could actually cough up a result that looked similar enough to my problem that I first thought that it had actually found literature on my question. The problem: the literature either did not exist, even though the authors it was attributed to are contributors to my field, or it does exist but does not contain the answer the LLM gave. I know because I had read literally every paper the LLM spat out that actually exists. These machines are ok at some simple tasks like giving a general overview over the current literature in a field, but miserably fail anything more specific than that.

Looking forward to the coming retraction because it turns out your interview coding was nondeterministic and your results are not reproducible.

...somebody's out there trying to see if research is reproducible, right?

...papers will get pulled from LLM training sets when they get retracted, right?

...there isn't a massive number of social sciences papers already published that are basically useless because their results aren't meaningful outside of a narrow set of subjectively specified predictor variables, right?

Ah yes, why bother learning all that pesky "medical knowledge" when training to become a doctor, when you can just get an AI to do all the work for you! I'm sure this sort of attitude will have no real world repercussions!

I work in an environment where persuasion and synthesis of vast amounts of information gives a major edge. I see 2 types of people. There's those who are actually really good at what they do without help of LLM's who can benefit by making their output even better by use of AI, by honing and optimizing their work, and there's those who are absolutely shit without use of LLM's who're even worse once they start using it.

Unfortunately the latter group is the vast majority.

The first group already has strong ideas, and then the LLM can accelerate and elevate their thinking. They use it as a brainstorm helper. They validate the output. They don't necesarrily work faster.

The second group doesn't know what to do, will ask the LLM, trust the output with little to no scrutiny. They use it as a means of production. They deliver fast.

I think this pattern we see in most fields. Software development for example. A true senior developer might be able to create better output, or produce things a bit faster even. But a bad programmer will still have bad output, and probably exponentially so when they lean more into the tool.

The second group is dangerous. They're as delusional as the output the LLM's tend to generate. They feel empowered, and see the increase in output as a personal victory, as if it unlocked some lingering quality in them that was always there. Qualities that highly capable people had to work for years for to attain. Look how productive I am, look at what I did, they'll think. They create the noise that capable people have to now deal with, it's all the slop we see, and it's everywhere.

That's what I hate about it.

Anyway

I don’t give a shit if it’s qualitative. If its data you need directly recorded please don’t use the hallucination chat service.

At this point, the only way to save higher learning is to go back to exclusively oral teaching.

Turns out Socrates was right all along.

Tech bros (and all those who repeat their talking points) are dangerous people and should be treated as such

“Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.”

“Children must not be taught what to think, but how to not think.”

Sociology students and cheating

Fork found in kitchen

The 9 prompts are just 9 videos of me loudly farting into a jar.

Sorry.

I'm gonna prooompt

LetterLikian Jihad against the thinking machines and its pathetic acolytes.

All you need is prompt*