Eric/et-al -
Another excellent self-aware satire. I feel as if you have channeled
Johnathan Swift in several ways, but particularly in his "A Modest
Proposal" with your Vibe Science Journal conception and it's implications.
I would also like to nod toward Jon's astute reference to Nolan's
reference in this context as:
“We have broke Zeus’ law and now are plunged into a world without
trust.”
And the remainder of the thread is also quite fertile and astute, but I
haven't the focus to do even the slightest justice to addressing most of
the points made by Marcus/Glen/others.
I've been noodling hard (and broadly) on what has condensed into a
cogitation on how sympoiesis (Dempster followed by Haraway) relates to
AI/LLMs/ML in this current bifurcation/phase-shift moment ...
In the spirit of Crowley:
/Bring forth nothing that exhausts the world’s ability to bring
forth otherwise./
and
/Make no world so completely in the image of your competence that it
loses the power to disclose your incompetence./
On 8/1/26 7:27 pm, Santafe wrote:
It can take me anywhere from weeks to forever to understand a single paper. If
review is supposed to mean notarizing that the contents of a paper are correct,
and I get three new requests a week, clearly those times don’t scale. So
inevitably, getting as close as I can, and admitting where I am still stumped,
I give writers the benefit of the doubt, that some very costly figure that I
have no possible way to reproduce (outcome of years of work in some specialist
lab) is what they claim. In the age of slop, I don’t give anybody the benefit
of the doubt. But that means the review timescale expands back to its
authentic self, which is weeks to years (or maybe forever) for each paper.
The number of things we will have lost, in a society where trust is no longer
possible, toward anybody in regard to anything, is so large that I don’t think
anybody is seriously reckoning with it.
3. But then, what to do? My thought was that we (what “we”?) should create a
new journal. ONE new journal only. It’s called “Vibe Science”. All the
submissions will be auto-generated by LLMs. If people want to serve them by
feeding prompts, that’s fine too. Kind of Matrix-like (or 3rd-world
porn-flagging exploitation-like) jobs people already take. A new
gig-subeconomy. Maybe they can be fed a meal a day in payment. Then LLMs can
also do all the reviewing, and can send messages to each other (or maybe there
is only one LLM at the end; does it even use messages any more?). They/it can
decide what is good and should be accepted, and what should not be accepted.
Why not? There’s no reason to have more than one journal, since internally the
LLMs can sort what is “in” or “across” any discipline or disciplines, and to
invent new typologies as needed for their internal indexing. People can’t read
it anyway, so there is no reason to make it human-indexing-friendly (or maybe
even tractable).
Then the accepted stuff can all be archived somewhere, on more Mongolian rare
earths with fossil- or nuclear-powered cooling towers and fans.
What will we do with it? I guess people with no other survival work, like the
e-waste-recyclers in India or the Philippines, can trawl through the lists of
claims, and see if there is anything the human world would like to regard as
“true” or “potentially useful” or (here, for the unemployed artists)
“interesting”. Maybe that will become what PhD training aims toward. Now of
course, there isn’t any reason the data-trove can’t just be made
self-activating in the world of physical robots, so I’m not sure what the
vetting by the recyclers would unpack to. But maybe some decision-maker
somewhere uses that.
Something along this line is my guess at the set of things that will have to be
chosen and decided, in a quite near term, but quite a number of people. Or
maybe decided by 10 people, and everybody else can scramble and see if there is
a survival trajectory through the new wreckage.
At the end of all this, though, I think it pushes us to front something we
should always have been thinking about, but have had the luxury of not thinking
much about before now. There were good uses for calculators, and even though
it deprived some people of the ability to do fast addition in-head, we continue
to do math, with new frontiers possible. There will be some version of that
for the LLMs as interface, and much more general AI tools for empirical results
and their representations. But then what is a system for thinking through what
a person can want, or might want, as a participant in the order that results?
The sort of emotive tropes that seem popular now, or the online gurus of
everything, kind of leave me unimpressed. All this common-language and lore
and culture that we have as hand-me-down from time immemorial is what came
through the filters of people’s needs to reason out these things, in the
circumstances of the times. To the extent that those circumstances are going
to be different — not clear to me, since ecological collapse and mobs of the
dispossessed could just thump it all into rubble — a different version of
something similarly filtered will need to come about somehow.
Back to the opening question: For myself, I would not have wanted to be one of
the people prompting the LLM to invent a question and write a bunch of junk
that I could send to a Springer journal. I certainly do not envy her life as a
junior Chinese expat in a cordoned-off sub-institute in Moscow. Less dangerous
and demanding of wits to try to become a gang leader. Even though I suspect
some of those people have talent, and many of them I would like and appreciate
if I knew them. I still take weeks or months fiddling with some annoying thing
to see if a certain kind of field theory can be coherently defined into
existence, and whether it gets the answer to some empirical question about rare
statistics right. I guess, the fact that that is what I want to do, and that
it sometimes might also get something empirically right, is why the society
increasingly wants to dump the academics. But it still is what I have accepted
paycuts and spontaneous/episodic unemployment, and various other nuisances, to
somehow put aside time to continue doing.
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