Lucia Lorenzi (she/they)

This is a Tweet for everyone missing @Arley_McNeney, who maybe feels very alone in that missing because social media grief is weird and odd in its transience but I really miss her today and I know many of you do too. <3

my degree is in cognitive science and artificial intelligence. i live in the bay area. i don’t think people realize how obsessed tech bros are right now with creating a “permanent underclass” defined by ppl who’s jobs are replaced by AI, and are personally dependency on AI

The AI slop summaries that make people think they have "read" books when they get two quotes is wild. But then again, the "read this nonfiction book in 15 minutes" summary services have existed for years.

This post is about Magic the Gathering and it is also about books.

READING is important. I simply don't know how else to explain it other than one must do it. It's like they say in #MagicTheGathering: "reading the card explains the card." AI summaries do not explain the card because WORDS MEAN THINGS. Specific words mean specific things.

Nothing in this article convinced me that AI does anything but harm graduate students. No, it does not help you read 50 papers in a month rather than a year. If you actually 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥 those papers, it will take a year, & that's part of the training. nature.com/articles/d4158…

Reviewing yet another academic paper full of hallucinated references, odd citation practices, and improperly attributed material. To all academic colleagues out there, literally ruining our profession: thanks for nothing.

chatgpt, please journal in my diary for me. the entry should reflect my rich inner life and lead to some clarity about my relationships. the tone should be relatable but deep. for context, i am a shy genius. chatgpt, please come out of the computer and give me a little smooch,

The ease with which some #neurologists love to put “organic disease” in quotes when they can’t be bothered to find the answer (I already had been diagnosed with #POTS and #EDS) or don’t like the answer is just so full of fucking hubris.

YEARS. Things that have familial repercussions (as does the disorder I am being currently tested for) have significant implications for other family members. Individual health care is never just individual. I am enraged.

I ordered my medical records from an appointment I had six years ago. On Zoom of course, a few months into the pandemic. My brain hurt and it was hazy but I had remembered her saying she thought I might have a rare disease. It pinged for me over a month ago. What was it?

I hate everything about genAI but what gets me the most is the sheer lack of respect for my time. Ive researched and taught for a decade. In sheer dollar amounts its not worth my time to review speed run AI drivel. I waste time editing, and the person does not learn anything. 1/2

"Governments..want universities to tailor their offerings to..the labour market.. Bulk offerings are preferred, hundreds of students..in courses that rely heavily on..automated marking..while ‘experiential learning’, privileging links with employers again, is likewise a buzzword"

#LongCovidAwarenessDay My thoughts below: In the first week of April 2020, a medical resident called me to ask for an urgent appointment: he had #COVID in March and didn't recover and, as a result, could not return to his hospital duties. He said some of his attendings also didn't recover and were experiencing palpitations, tachycardia, fatigue and brain fog. They thought it could be #dysautonomia. Unsurprisingly to me, COVID infection was causing a myriad of lingering disabling symptoms that were strikingly similar to #POTS and #MECFS. There was no term #LongCOVID back then, but clearly, there was a post-acute infectious syndrome that left millions of patients with #chronicillness and disability. As I was busy seeing patients, I enlisted the help of @serawhitelaw to write a case series of patients with post-COVID dysautonomia FAST. A few neurology journals rejected the paper -- again unsurprisingly, because dysautonomia has not been a popular topic in #Neurology unfortunately. One reviewer, probably unfamiliar with #POTS, said in a review: "How do you know these patients have POTS? Healthy people too can have postural tachycardia." Thankfully, an immunology journal was interested and did publish our paper. It became the first largest case series of patients with POTS and other autonomic disorders after COVID. Shortly after, a term #LongCOVID was coined, and many large studies confirmed post-#COVID dysautonomia as one of the major mechanisms of Long COVID. Unfortunately, 6 years later, we are still in limbo regarding treatment and still utilizing pre-pandemic therapies that we've used for dysautonomia and other conditions. Many interesting studies on pathophysiology have been done, we know a lot more than we did, but millions of patients have not benefited from this knowledge because TREATMENT is the only thing that matters to people suffering from this highly disabling syndrome. I am also disappointed about therapies... I didn't talk about it publicly, but I was a PI and on the executive committee on a great full-of-hope trial of subcutaneous immunoglobulin for post-COVID POTS. We recruited and randomized patients when the trial was stopped abruptly without good explanation. Some patients, who didn't know whether they received the drug or placebo, called us begging for "whatever they got" in the trial because for the first time since getting sick, they were feeling better. Medicine is a science, but also an art: while we must follow evidence-based and data-driven science, we must not forget that at the end of the day, it's PEOPLE that we're serving, not the high-impact journals or scientific establishment. link.springer.com/article/10.100…

“You’re not just becoming disabled,” said Elle Seibert, 31, who has dealt with debilitating fatigue and cardiac symptoms since 2020. “You’re realizing how easily society at large and people in your life will abandon you when you cannot offer them things.” latimes.com/science/story/…

If genAI can "write a paper for you" then at baseline you had nothing to say in the first place. LLMs cannot create new knowledge. They poorly synthesize whats fed into them. Good luck passing peer review with plagiarized work that adds nothing to the discipline.

I agree that AI can "read" papers faster than me. But the only way I acquire any knowledge is if I read them myself, so I'm not sure what good is supposed to be accomplished by that.