For-Profit Academic Publishers Love LLM Garbage

by Kevin Munger on November 8, 2024

One of my favorite metasciences lines is: “Does anyone look around and say…things are going great, I just think we need MORE PAPERS?”

Obviously, we all want more scientific progress, better evidence, broader scope — but I don’t think that this is best accomplished by churning out more of these fancy peer-reviewed pdfs. Indeed, our systems of peer review and knowledge evaluation are breaking down under the strain. Everyone is under pressure to produce more and more papers earlier and earlier in their careers.

The situation is accelerating with LLMs. The cost of producing these pdfs continues to decline, and as long as the demand for the pdfs stays strong, we should expect the supply to increase. Everyone agrees that this is a problem.

Well, almost everyone.

[click to continue…]

The problem is the nation-state

by Chris Bertram on November 8, 2024

Obviously people are shocked, and particularly shocked at the rejection of normal sensible politics by the rubes who have elected an oaf, a criminal and a rapist to the White House, again. But the trouble is that this kind of thing keeps happening, or nearly happening, and not just in the United States. And it turns out that the policies pursued by the MAGA extremists, by Le Pen, Meloni or Farage, aren’t really all that different from the ones followed by the normal sensible people, albeit that the rhetoric from the sensibles is less crude and laced with sweeteners about “compassion”.

The underlying problem is nationalism and the organization of the world into nation states, a form of organization that fosters and promotes nationalist sentiment and attachment and downplays transnational concern and solidarity, which is “all very well” but shouldn’t come “at our expense”. This has been the problem since well before 1914, but was particularly in evidence then as the greatest movement of international solidarity that had ever been built largely collapsed in favour of supporting “our boys” against theirs. It was there in the 1930s, not only in the rise of particularly agressive nationalisms but in the failure of normal sensible states to come to the assistance of those threatened by it, such as Jews fleeing across borders. All very well, but not at our expense. And it is, rather obviously, in evidence now as countries struggle with people moving and with climate change. All very well, but not at our expense.
[click to continue…]