Agreed. This short target piece is an amusing Luddite rant. No true content other than to bemoan our first stumbling steps toward using AI to write and think.
I am a reasonably good (but sloppy) writer and use Claude to help improve my text, my ideas, and the flow of sentences and paragraphs. A huge help once I have a good first draft. I treat Claude like a junior editor who is useful but requires a tight leash and sharp advice.
This thoughtless piece is like complaining about getting help from professional human editors: a profession nearly killed off over the last three decades.
Who can afford $50/hr human editorial services? Not me. Claude is a great “second best” and way faster and cheaper.
No, nothing to do withPenrose’s idea. No quantum effects just the traditional use of microtubules for transport of cargo — in this case between adjacent dendrites.
Could be helpful. I often edit scientific papers and grant applications. Orienting Claude on the frontend of each project works but an “Editing Skill” set could be more general and make interactions with Claude more clued in to goals instead of starting stateless.
Yes, I share some of your concerns about groupthink and research cliques. The best and balanced critique is Karl Herrup’s book at MIT Press: “How Not To Study a Disease”.
Your comment is over the top with respect to NIH-funded researchers doing Alzheimer’s research. The emotion would be entirely appropriate if directed at RJ Reynolds Inc. and other cigarette companies or Purdue Pharma. Those are evil companies that many governments have tolerated killing for profit—Purdue Pharma and the OxyContin disaster alone about 500,000 Americans over 20 years; and US tobacco companies contribute to about as many excess deaths per year.
The systematic image manipulation by a postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Sylvain Lesné, was egregious and worthy of jail time but he was a truly exceptional case and polluted 20 or more papers that did distract the entire field. You can read all about it here.
PMID: 35862524
Piller C. Blots on a field? Science. 2022 377:358-363.
doi: 10.1126/science.add9993
Worth drawing a distinction between governmental support for science and for the humanities.
The first does a lot of relative low mark-up contract work requested by governmental agencies. Governments and all of us would like to see cancer and Alzheimer disease cured.
The request for “bids” (aka grant applications) from NIH, DoD (now DoW) and NSF is what has greatly expanded research-focused universities and msde the USA the greatest source if cutting-edge science since WW2 (now relative success is shifting rapidly to China).
The recipients of these small but numerous contract to big medical schools usually are totally agnostic about politics—at least at work.
Turns out even autocratic-leaning politicians and the public are almost universally interested in learning how to live a long healthy life.
In contrast, the humanities are not a bread winners for universities. These faculty are ultimately paid by tuition or red or blue state support. These much more socially saavy and interested faculty mainly teach, and if they are lucky, have some modest time to think, read, and write. They are not beholding to government funds. They can speak truth to power.
So if a university like Columbia is brought to heel by the administration it is mainly due to the addiction of university administrators for the relative modest overhead they receive for NIH compared to that any corporation would accept for the same work.
And the ultimate source and cause of that addiction of administrators now willing to bend the knee to retain their federal funding overheads is the hard and intense work of their research scientists.
It’s my understanding that the humanities doesn’t get much in government grants to begin with, but when the sciences have a finance problem, they cut the humanities for some reason.
I'm not aware of humanities getting get to fund the sciences, at least in the UC system. But in many places with highly complicated accounting, the sciences can sometimes indirectly fund humanities through the overhead rate that universities charge. These are highly negotiated rates between the government and the universities, so there has to be a bit of confusion on what money keeps which buildings going.
The problems at the University of Chicago seem especially bad and I don’t entirely trust this article, but for what it’s worth:
> The reason today’s Dean of Humanities wants to send students to other universities to learn subjects that she would like to cancel, or use ChatGPT to teach subjects tomorrow that humans teach today, is to drive the “marginal cost” of teaching students from 20 percent of their tuition down to 10 percent. Future applicants should know that the University plans a further expansion from around 7,400 students to 9,000 ... and has simultaneously announced an intent to hold the number of research faculty constant. Perhaps we can drive the cost of educating students below 10 percent? Perhaps that is what the president and provost and dean of humanities mean when they say that we need to position ourselves as leaders in the field.
By "UC" I was referring to the University of California system, which is massive, and generally what UC means in the scientific world is travel in.
The University of Chicago is a very prestigious institution due to its historical reputation, but the administration in recent years seems to have both ruined its future with terrible financial decisions, even before the pressures of Trump.
> Governments and all of us would like to see cancer and Alzheimer disease cured.
i think an important question is "who is this "all of us" you speak of and who made you god to pronounce it"
you are making an arbitrary distinction because vibes, because it's a cause you care about. it's irrelevant. if you take money for Alzheimer's research, you owe the government one (because that money is extracted from the people in a way you could never have done yourself). if you take money from, say a 501c3, it's a completed transaction of services.
Small sample size of about 1500 Amish men divided across 4 cohorts, all exposed to the great depression. Entry age minimum of 25 years.
Sorry, but this is really marginal science. There are much stronger demographic and statistical studies of aging and mortality in humans. Here are some alternative examples of stronger studies to explore from PubMed. I keyed my search using the surnames of two well respected longevity demographers (Vaupel and Christensen):
HN is a good model. There is philosophically no credible way to enforce balance—-no common reference points of truth with capital T. But accepting a plurality of views that are shared dispassionately may be achieved. Hacker News usually succeeds.
Yeah, I agree. And I'm not sure balance is the desired goal. It may turn out that way, but I am more interested in lots of various viewpoints and reasoned discourse.
I am also interested to see how behaviour changes once your cred is online. I always think about how people behave behind the wheel of their car versus in-person.
This! Today I asked Claude Sonnet to read the Wikipedia article on “inference” and answer a few of my questions.
Sonnet responded: “Sorry, I have no access.” Then I asked it why and it was flummoxed and confused. I asked why Anthropic did not simply maintain mirrors of Wikipedia in XX different languages and run a cron job every week.
Still no cogent answer. Pathetic. Very much an Anthropic blindspot—to the point of being at least amoral and even immoral.
Do the big AI corporation that have profited greatly from Wikimedia Foundation give anything back? Or are they just large internet blood suckers without ethics?
Dario and Sam et al.: Contribute to the welfare of your own blood donors.
> Sonnet responded: “Sorry, I have no access.” Then I asked it why and it was flummoxed and confused. I asked why Anthropic did not simply maintain mirrors of Wikipedia in XX different languages and run a cron job every week.
Even worse when you consider that you can download all of Wikipedia for offline use...
I'm still learning the landscape of LLMs, but do we expect an LLM to be able to answer that? I didn't think they had meta information about their own operation.
The jump to 1 million token length context for Sonnet 4 plus access to internet has been a game-changer for me.
And somebody should remind Anthropic leadership to at least mirror Wikipedia; better yet support Wikipedia actively.
All of the big AI players have profited from Wikipedia, but have they given anything back, or are they just parasites on FOSS and free data?
I am a reasonably good (but sloppy) writer and use Claude to help improve my text, my ideas, and the flow of sentences and paragraphs. A huge help once I have a good first draft. I treat Claude like a junior editor who is useful but requires a tight leash and sharp advice.
This thoughtless piece is like complaining about getting help from professional human editors: a profession nearly killed off over the last three decades.
Who can afford $50/hr human editorial services? Not me. Claude is a great “second best” and way faster and cheaper.