3 ms·
What's the point of this? To waste the time of foreign scientists? Would we call this science warfare?
by jokoon 5y ago
What's the point of this? To waste the time of foreign scientists? Would we call this science warfare?
- wmf 5y agoIt's resume inflation.
- riedel 5y agoIt is the result of a misguided science system that relies mostly on external quality checks (peer reviewed publication) and flooding the world with so much "novelty" that there is no way to digest it. At least you can use the output to train language models up to now: will machines now have to train themselves...
- native_samples 5y agoThe people in question are paid for writing papers, not the discovery of true knowledge. The root cause is government funding of research, hence this specific paper talking at the end about the "publish or perish" culture. Governments give researchers money to write papers but then don't read the results, only check that it got published somewhere, meaning anyone who can game the publication system has in effect a license to print (taxpayer) money. That's why there's no real fix for this problem beyond defunding government science budgets. Any quick hacks you can come up with like running GPT-2 detectors over science papers are just treating the symptoms of the problem, not the cause. The root cause is that when governments eliminate the free market by subsidizing research they lose reliable signals of genuine utility that come from polling the market, so they have to use proxies that boil down to quantity-over-quality. The fix is for them to stop subsidizing research. The people who apply research to create new technologies aren't reading it anyway.